What Could Development meant to My Village?

Ngamtinlun Touthang *

The past couple of months have been a great turning point in this great nation called India, also Bharat, especially in relation to sanitation and rural development. My interest in this regard began with the Hon'ble Prime Minister's maiden Independence Day speech on 15th August this year when he talked about separate toilet for girls in schools. He was widely praise for his bold steps towards basic issues.

In tune with the commitments made in this I-Day speech, the PM launched a number of schemes including the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan (SBA) to achieve the target of "Clean India" by 2019, and the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY). Along with this, news has been flooded with the words like 'open defecation' and issues related with 'latrine' among slum dwellers and rural poor.

This reminds me of my childhood days how we used to defecate in the open, of course in the jungle or river, a tradition still kept alive by our younger brothers there. It is so odd to say now that we enjoyed most when we answer our needs from the branch of fruit trees (we called 'theichang-phung'), the fruits of which we eat a lot, and in the rivers, the water of which we also used for all our daily activities including drinking, to see the 'faeces' falling or being carried away by river.

When a person like the stature of Hon'ble PM talks about open defecation, many people were startled with the choice of the issue. These people may think that as the Head of 1.2 billion people, the PM should speak in a more civilized manner. But, for people like me, open defecation or used of open space for one's need is something still considered normal in the village.

To be precise, I lived in a village about 35 km from Imphal, the capital city of Manipur. The village was established about 50 years ago and now there are around 300 people. Though it is not very far from Imphal, the village still lacks almost all the basic facilities meant for present generation. This is simply because the arms of government hardly stretched till this corner.

In terms of education, majority of the villagers are illiterate (Though they could, somehow, read the Bible in our own dialect). Many of the literate persons are also jobless probably for being brought up from a 'copy and paste' type examination system, the only education system available there. The number of graduates (all of them in Social Science, which we famously called Tribal Science) is still less than the two digit number.

No doubt, we have a UJB school in which some jobless literate villagers are appointed as teacher to replace the government servants who hardly visited the school. For your information, the school is being run in a village Community Hall. Funds coming for construction of school building never materialized.

In terms of economy, all the villagers lived below poverty line (BPL) with none possessing BPL card. Most of them lived 'hand-to-mouth'. The main occupation of the villagers is 'jhum' and 'wet' cultivation. Some of them also survive with forest products like wild flowers, vegetables, burning of charcoal, etc. global issues like Climate Change and Global Warming, Human Rights and Women Empowerment, etc. are totally alien to them. There are no white-color (or any other color) employee except some petty Postman and Rifleman.

In a village where newspaper is hardly seen and radio news is listened to by some older-men just to know whether the next day would have bandh or not, 'information' is sure to be poor. And where the people are not aware of what is happening around them, nothing good must be expected from them. However, most of the adult population used mobile phones mainly to listen music. Using mobile phones, one may call or text sms if he is able to climb-up a tree or move towards some raised place to find network connection.

Sometimes, network may also be found inside the house itself in very rare case. Young girls from other villages often called our boys with the 'no network' tag.

While social networking sites like Facebook are very popular in almost every nook and corner of the world, the youths of this village could used this facilities only when they are in the state capital or in other places where proper network facility is available.

Almost every month, new schemes are launched by either state or central government. But MGNREGS, which is infamously dubbed by our Hon'ble Chief Minister as Job Car, is the only government scheme known by each and every villager. The initial stage of the implementation of this scheme was quite encouraging. Villagers have the opportunity to work lesser than they did in someone else work-place with fixed wages. Things changes later on and now villagers get roughly half the amount without going for the work at all whereas the remaining are appropriated by the 'village level elites'.

One other important facility from the government could be electricity which was provided about 20 years back. However, the Transformer exploded recently and the villagers are now without power connection again. Since there is none to lead the people to knock the door of the Babus for replacement, our village is likely to stay without electricity in the near future.

Another interesting thing about Manipur today is the existence of a good number of organizations, both NGO and Civil Society. But our village is a little bit aloof of such organizations too. There are area level organizations but most of them are not as effective as they ought to be. The only platforms available are those of the Church. I could recall an only occasion when a Student organization came and conducted a Career Counseling workshop about five years ago. Alas! No one continue such good initiative. No doubt, UG organizations are more or less active.

In terms of active politics, the people are awakened only during elections. Since the 2009 Lok Sabha election, a polling station was opened in the name of the lone UJB School. But our Babus seem to forget this village as soon as polling came to an end. The only exception, as far as my knowledge is concerned, is the present MLA who visited the village a year after the Tenth Assembly Election of Manipur held in 2012. He had also attended a function nearby our village along with a Cabinet Minister later on. These are the only occasions, atleast in the recent past, when our elected MLAs visited us after the election.

Whenever I try to reason out all this conditions, I simply failed to understand. Outside the state, men have already landed on the moon 45 years ago and are trying to land on the surface of Mars and Sun too. The so called landline telephone is becoming outdated and Telegraph had become History. But the village out there still refused to read newspapers!

Even in a state like ours, people talk about various issues from economic development to universalisation of primary education to human rights, etc. But people in my village still struggle to find their daily square meal (In fact, this is a reality to many others also).

Being the only person to see the light of University education from that remote village (though with the same kind of poor educational background), I feel a great burden if I could do something. This thought compelled me to reflect on what is there back home.

However, this is not meant to draw the attention of the government or any other authority for help for which we honestly don't have the capacity to move the hearts of our Babus. Rather, it is meant to inform the general public that: first, to our brethren in valley, whenever you talk about 'Ching-Tam Amatani, please know that there are still people like us who survive only for the sake of survival; and second, to our brothers in the hills, whenever you blame the valley people for concentrating all the developmental programs in the capital city, please remember that there are also people whom even the tribal elites are yet to reach.

To one and all, if a village situated about 35 km away from the capital city still lived in such poor state, what will be the condition of those villages 80 km away. Just imagined!