As you enter Kadia Sansi village in Rajgarh, a backward district in Madhya Pradesh, the last thing you expect is to be greeted by a solid, concrete house with picket fences. And it's not the only one. There are many such modern houses in the village, besides a cricket ground and a canteen that can pass off as a pub. Equally impressive is the sizeable number of Yamaha and Honda motorcycles zooming down the streets.

ON ROAD TO REFORM: The Sansis have come a long way from their notorious past

Is it the same village, you wonder, that had been stigmatised because of the native community's involvement in prostitution, bootlegging and other crimes? It is, but a transformed one. The Sansis have now taken up more respectable vocations. While many have taken to farming, growing soya and wheat on huge tracts of land, others are also profitably employed. Kadia Sansi boasts of at least a dozen schoolteachers, several government clerks and even a local doctor and a deputy superintendent of police. Says Vikram Singh Sisodia, former sarpanch of the born-again village: "Our men have consciously moved away from a life of crime. The things said about us were true some generations ago. But today all that has changed."

The transformation came about after the villagers realised the importance of education. In sharp contrast to their earlier lifestyle, some Sansi children even travel to the neighbouring urban centres of Narsinghgarh and Bhopal to attend schools and colleges.

And no, there is no NGO at work in the village of 3,000 inhabitants. Nor has the state Government adopted it as a model village. In fact, Kadia Sansi did not have a school building, panchayat bhavan or even a police post till recently. Given the notoriety of the Sansi community, it seemed the authorities had given up on the village, categorising it as a hopeless case.

Ironically, it was their dubious past that helped put the villagers on track. The turning point came when some years ago, six women from the village were spotted on a flight to Dubai. A local newspaper carried a report in 1988 on how the flesh trade was flourishing in the village and even identified the women involved.

The report initially evoked howls of protest from the Sansi community. Agitated villagers blocked the Agra-Mumbai highway for days to protest against the news item. Although many villagers did live off crime, the publicity was difficult to digest. Most of the robberies committed by the Sansis were in distant places like Delhi, Punjab and Haryana. "The standard practice was that the men would 'earn' in far off cities for about eight months in a year and then come home with the booty," says Rajababu Singh, former superintendent of police, Rajgarh.

But the notoriety that the news report brought was too much for those who claim to be the descendants of the warriors in the army of Rana Pratap Sisodia. The ousted Rana of Mewar was waging a war against the Mughals from his various hideouts in the jungles of neighbouring Rajasthan. It is believed that some of his soldiers settled in Narsinghgarh from where they migrated to Kadia. Once the army was disbanded, the community had no means of livelihood. Some men resorted to highway robberies to make ends meet while a few women turned to prostitution for survival. This continued for generations till it became a sort of tradition.

After Independence, the Sansis were granted Scheduled Caste status. More recently, in the 1980s, the Madhya Pradesh government allotted them agricultural land and organised mass marriages in an effort to wean them away from a life of crime. These provided the wherewithal for development, but there was no motivation. Only when the Sansis began to send their children to schools and colleges did the dawn arrive. It has taken nearly two decades for the villagers to profit from these measures. Now there are few signs of the past. Education and awareness, it seems, have cured centuries of degeneration.

Though some say that money still rolls in from criminal activities, the village elders staunchly deny this. They insist that the Sansis have mended their ways and that it is the soya fields and commodity trading that has created wealth for the village. They even dismiss the betting on cricket-sometimes involving more than Rs 75,000 for a one-dayer-as "normal practice". After all, at stake here is not just the betting amount but also their reputation.