INTERVIEW/RAJENDRA SINGH |
Rajendra Singh was 28, and
married for a year and a half when he packed his bags. His wife
was visiting her parents who like his own father and mother
called him nalayak, good for nothing. Not that he had failed
school or not found a job. He was a post-graduate in Hindi from
Allahabad University and a qualified Ayurvedic physician from the
Rishikul Ayurvedic Mahavidyalaya, UP. And he had a government job
as project coordinator for youth education in Jaipur.
Nalayak wasn't even an endearing pet name carried over from
childhood; the label stuck after he started talking of going into
the real India to "do something". Then he quit his job,
and drew a line on a map of Rajasthan to mark a 50-km stretch
between Thanagazi and Ajabgarh in the foothills of the Aravallis.
He wanted to be somewhere there.
Selling off all the furniture, TV and fridge in his house in
Jaipur when his wife went to her parents, he boarded a battered
bus at the Ghat Gate and asked for five tickets "to the last
stop". Four tickets were for his companions, nalayaks to
their families! All they carried was a few utensils, a change of
clothes and bedding.
Sitting in the bus, Rajendra Singh harked back to a Gandhi Peace
Foundation worker called Ramesh who had lived in his house in
Meerut, UP, when he was in class 11. Ramesh had worked quietly,
cleaning the village, resolving disputes and setting up a
vachanalay, a place for debate.
It was Ramesh who had lit a spark in the zamindar's son, who
called on Jayaprakash Narayan before the Emergency and joined the
Taruna Dal, a brigade of adolescents for Total Revolution. Later,
as a youth coordinator in Jaipur, Rajendra was drawn to a similar
sounding forum, Tarun Bharat Sangh, which a few intellectuals had
formed after a devastating fire on the Rajasthan University
campus in 1975. Three years after he joined it Rajendra had
become its general secretary and was travelling to the first
destination in his mission.
The bus dropped them at the dry and barren Kishori village, the
last stop 20 km past Thanagazi town, on the evening of October 2,
1985. The date had not been chosen as casually as the village
which would become the headquarters of Tarun Bharat Sangh.
The villagers watched them warily, mistaking the bearded young
men for terrorists from Punjab, till an elderly man admonished
them with the authority of his grey hair: "Fools, why would
terrorists choose this village and carry bedding."
As no one would still give them shelter he took them to a room at
a Hanuman temple where they could spread two sheets. Rajendra,
Narendra, Satendra, Kedar and Drighpal spent the next seven
nights in that tiny room.
Not that they were
particularly active during day. Wherever they went they faced
huge boulders of resistance from distrusting villagers, who asked
searching questions. "The questions crushed my intellectual
arrogance," says Rajendra, "and I decided to learn from
them."
More water: Women have
more time for work and kids-no more long treks for water
Distrust began dissolving after Sumer Singh, a teacher from the
nearby Suratgarh, discovered a living link with the strangers
from the city: a relative of his, Mal Singh, was Rajendra's
colleague at the youth education project. That strand of trust
made the teacher get them a trader's vacant house free of rent,
but the trader threw them out in no time.
Then, out of the blue, a landlord called Seth Badri Prasad opened
the doors of two big havelis in the adjoining Bhikampura. The
strangers from Jaipur had finally got a roof over their heads and
a small corner in the hearts of a couple of villagers.
Rajendra started his Ayurvedic practice at Bhikampura while his
friends went around motivating people to send their daughters to
school. Trying to understand the social dynamics over the next
few months, he wondered why those intelligent villagers did
little to improve their lot. Why was the land arid and
unproductive? Where had the forests of the Aravallis gone? Why
was there no groundwater despite an annual rainfall of 600 mm?
Jogging memory, wizened village elders told him about the plunder
of the Aravallis which shielded northeastern Rajasthan from the
blazing heat of the Thar desert. They still remembered a greedy
local prince auctioning off blocks of forests when he sniffed the
death of monarchy in an independent India. As the axe hit the
woods, rain waters ran down the hills and valleys, eroding the
fertile topsoil instead of seeping into the loins of the earth.
The land became infertile over the years.
It was then that Rajendra realised the object of his mission,
water. Gopalpura, a village near by, was in the fifth straight
year of drought; there was not a drop of water, and able-bodied
men had trickled out into towns in Gujarat in search of work.
The Arvari rivulet was wet only in the monsoons, the old
check-dams having worn away. The government would neither repair
them nor help the strangers from Jaipur do it. Unwilling to back
out, Rajendra Singh mobilised the villagers into shramdan,
volunteer service, to desilt and deepen a pond. After the
monsoon, their hearts were filled with joy: the water level in
the pond was the highest they could remember, and it had
recharged the wells in the vicinity.
Some danced in celebration, some others went to meet Rajendra:
could they do some masonry work and repair a check-dam that was
1,400 feet long, 20 feet high and 50 feet wide? Rajendra roped in
an engineer friend called Yogendra, but the dam was too big to be
rebuilt by the 350 families of Gopalpura on their own. So they
hired people from other villages, and paid them from donations.
At the end of 10,000 mandays they could irrigate 600 bighas of
land. Now the hired workers and visitors to Gopalpura insisted
that Rajendra help them build similar water harvesting systems in
their villages. Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) had taken off.
The next halt was
Govindpura, and within a decade hundreds of ponds and check-dams
were built along the course of the Arvari, almost miraculously
transforming it into a perennial rivulet. Four other streams
would come alive in the next few years.
More Love: Men have come
back. "When water comes, another things come
automatically," says Prabha
Hamirpur, once a desert-like village near the Arvari, now has the
sparkling Jabbar Sagar, rich with aquatic life, amid thick
vegetation. The water flows down a big check-dam round the year,
and the 2.5-km-long reservoir which looks a like a virgin bird
sanctuary forms part of Roormal Meena's 25 bighas. He did not
seek any compensation for the land: he is happy that there is a
tenfold increase in productivity, and a steep drop in the cost of
farming, because of the abundance of water.
The reservoir cost Rs 3.5 lakh, of which TBS bore only 5 per
cent. "It benefits five big villages," says Rajendra,
"and every beneficiary paid a proportionate amount."
Two years ago the villagers launched a 100-day-long satyagraha
forcing the government to cancel fishing contracts for the
reservoir they had built. It is so ecologically precious that the
village sabha slaps fines up to Rs 1,100 if even a single fish is
caught. And it has thus collected a little over Rs 5,000.
If the Jabbar Sagar is a people's bird sanctuary, there is a
people's wildlife sanctuary as well: the Bhairudev Lok Vanjeev
Abhayaranya has 12 sq. km of dense trees planted and protected by
the people of Bhavta. It can be reached only through goat tracks:
there is no forest guard, log book, or honking of tourist jeeps.
A huge percolation tank for collecting rain water from an 8-km
area has raised the water level in dozens of villages around.
The story of the rebirth of the 90-km-long Ruparel river, which
had dried up, began with two women of Mala Tolawas, a village
high up on a ridge in the Sariska Hills. This is where the first
tributary of the river starts trickling down. The women, Gyarsi
and Phoola, were the only human beings left in the village, the
others having died or fled. A TBS volunteer who climbed up the
ridge some time in 1987 suggested that they dig a pond: the two
women did it in four months, with help from the volunteer who
visited them every ten days.
That year the pond had water only for three months,
but within two years it was rippling all year along. By then
villagers downstream had also adopted water harvesting
techniques. Eventually 350 ponds and check-dams were built on the
Ruparel basin, turning the river perennial.
More schools: Brij Mohan's
roof-top school at Kyara is just one of them. Many women want to
be literate so that they can at least write letters to husbnand
who have deserted them
Help had meanwhile come from some European agencies, encouraging
TBS to extend its area of work. At the last count it had
facilitated the building of 2,500 ponds and check-dams in 650
villages spread over 7 districts, Alwar, Jaipur, Dausa, Karoli,
Sawai Madhopur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer.
Apart from providing work and irrigation, the water harvesting
projects reunited families. Men who had fled to the towns began
returning home to farm their once barren lands. The villages were
no longer inhabited only by old men, women and children.
"When water comes, other things come automatically,"
says Prabha of Kolyali village grazing her cattle.
Water made life more meaningful for the women. They did not have
to walk miles with half a dozen pots delicately balanced on their
heads: water was now a stone's throw from their homes. Earlier
they were condemned to spend their days fetching water; now they
had time to take care of their children and send them to school.
There was future.
The villagers registered a general improvement in health, for
they were eating well, having reaped a good crop for the first
time in many years. Mohan Singh of Nangal Bani dug a pond in a
relative's field all by himself, and then two small check-dams
came up. He now cultivates three crops a year.
The cattle, too, looked healthier and yielded more. "We sell
ghee and drink the chach (whey)," says a farmer. Thanks to
the quiet food revolution, cases of malnutrition and
night-blindness can rarely be sighted.
The transformation did not come all that easy. Not all
villages had readily embraced change, and even where most people
were ready, there was delay. TBS was very clear that it would not
start work until everyone in the village was willing to
contribute labour or money. That was why it took five years to
build a small dam in Bhanwla.
"This principle helped us," says Rajendra. "The
netagiri type of people left us, and the genuine ones were left
with us. We never decided things for them, we only trained them
to take decisions." Rajendra and his friends worked without
deadlines or chalking territories, never showing the intellectual
arrogance of social activists. They were simply people come to
work.
Nor did the villagers look upon the work as TBS
projects; they considered it their own because of their
involvement at every level, identifying the need and the
location, designing the project, starting the work, buying
materials, keeping accounts, making payments. They were
meticulous, for it was a matter of life and death.
More pride: Rajendra Singh
has a quenching glass from Roormal Meena, the man who boasts a
2.5-km-long reservoir at Hamirpur
Maintenance, too, was left to the villagers. "Whenever they
consult us on a problem, we find the solutions from the villagers
themselves," says Rajendra. That built confidence along with
dams.
Some villages managed even without consultation. The Gujars
(shepherds) of Tijara, for instance, brought Meos of the Mewat
region to replicate the projects that had changed the lives of
the Meos.
"Such work is enduring," says Rajendra. "It is
knitted, stitch by stitch, by the people themselves, so it will
stay, and spread. If TBS builds it, the villagers will not be
able to manage. They may take some time to build, but they'll do
it, they have the inner strength."
Rajendra had taken some time to reach out to rural Rajasthani
women; they still giggle behind their colourful veils as he
passes by. But the women boldly came forward to dig ponds.
Initially it was because of the food for work, a gift from an
organisation called CASA; the mothers were dying to feed their
children and they never missed a day's work. Soon they were
earning more than the men.
Then came the idea of Mahila Mandals, which drove the local
shylocks out of business. They were charging 20 per cent per
month. The women set up a cooperative bank, each member
contributing 10 rupees a month, and the borrower paying a small
interest.
Rajni Bhatt, 55, of Suratgarh recently got a hand-woven lohi
(shawl) in recognition of her initiative. She was the first woman
in the village to start digging, and now Suratgarh has nine
ponds. The Brahmin housewife who farms her own land freely
mingles with the lower castes and was the first to come out of
the veil. "Earlier I was housebound," she says.
"Now I address crowds of women and men though my heart beats
faster then." In October she addressed a large conference on
environment in faraway Nagpur.
Sariska was tougher terrain. Dangerous, too. When Rajendra
started work in a village in the national park he found all the
rainwaters disappearing into the marble mines. The mines had also
swallowed life.
The villagers, a happy lot farming or rearing cattle in the
forest just 20 years earlier, were denied their livelihood when
Sariska was declared a national park in 1978. Most men moved to
the cities as migrant labour, leaving the women and children to
work in the mines owned by people like filmmaker Subhash Ghai and
politicians Balram Jakhar and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. Many women
fell victim to glad-eyed miners from West Bengal and Bihar.
Families broke.
The cattle were worse off, the mines having eaten up the grazing
grounds. The mines were also death traps in this tiger sanctuary.
In 1990 TBS moved the Supreme Court against mining in Sariska and
got an order in its favour the next year. The Rajasthan
government wanted to run the mines nevertheless, and filed false
affidavits. The mine owners attacked protesting TBS volunteers
and made three attempts on Rajendra's life.
One attempt was made on November 26, 1991 while he was
accompanying Justice M.C. Jain, who had come for an on-the-spot
study. The mine owners smashed a car, knowing Rajendra was its
only passenger. The judge noted it all and the court punished a
mine owner whom Rajendra could identify.
The court also made the Union government declare the Aravallis a
fragile ecosystem and ban mining. But the mine owners got the
notification watered down: only the districts of Alwar and
Gurgaon and the Ridge area in Delhi were declared fragile. A
crucial clause banning mining in 25 kilometres around the forest
boundary was scrapped.
TBS launched a three-month satyagraha in January 1993, blocking
the roads to the mines and forcing their closure. Lawyer Dr Rajiv
Dhawan, an observer from the Supreme Court, was among those who
got roughed up as the mine owners pounced on the villagers. They
also slapped 42 cases on TBS, including three rape charges
against Rajendra Singh. None of them could hold water.
Coming to the aid of TBS, the Supreme Court ordered that Rajendra
should not be arrested without its permission. The Rajasthan
government still would not stop harassing TBS, but after three
years an all-party legislative committee told the Supreme Court
that it had found nothing worth reporting.
The next battle was to win back the right of villagers in the
wildlife sanctuary to farm their lands. They ostracised the
forest officials, denying them food and water and forcing them to
seek transfer. A new forest officer, Fateh Singh Rathore, who
understood the symbiosis between the villagers and wildlife,
befriended them. The villagers then framed rules to protect the
forests and started water harvesting works, and soon the bald
forests were dotted with seedlings.
There was the buzz and roar of life all round. Tigers, leopards
and panthers roamed thanks to the new watering-holes. The
Jahjajwali Nadi, a rivulet in Deori, became perennial, and fish
flourished in it. The cattle got enough fodder in the forest, so
they did not gobble up every plant they sniffed.
The epic revival of the forests turned an illiterate man, Nanak
Ram Gujar of Haripura, into a chronicler. He gets his
observations recorded in a yellowed notebook every day. A sample
entry, made after the people marched from Himmat Nagar in Gujarat
to Delhi along the Aravallis to document the flora and fauna:
"In many jungles there is not a single animal because there
is no food for them." An early bird to nest in TBS, he was
aghast at the rape of the forests as he had grown up tying rakhee
on trees, pledging to protect them.
Finally, the government came alive, too. It ordered an impact
assessment of TBS work in Sariska and acknowledged that the work
had regenerated the forests. The irrigation department had
earlier declared the water harvesting structures illegal; in
Gopalpura and Bhavta, it had even threatened to demolish the
check-dams. Now it started collaborating.
It launched a Rs 16-crore project called PAWDI, People's Action
Watershed Development Initiative, to replicate the TBS efforts.
TBS got grants for the project convincing a Swiss agency that the
government could work like an NGO. Now the government has sought
TBS help to hand over all the defunct minor irrigation dams,
2,800 of them, to the people to rebuild and maintain.
"The government has finally conceded that people's
cooperation alone will make such work sustainable and
permanent," says Rajendra with a touch of joy. Though
modest, he is a human dynamo with a burning desire to act, to
motivate, and transform.
When you drive from Kishori towards Bhavta, the Aravallis on one
side are green with forests, and bare and brown on the other. The
green speaks for TBS, which has planted forest trees along 390 km
of the 2,400-km stretch of the mountain ranges from Delhi to
Himmat Nagar. Rajendra's dream is to green the entire range.
The four nalayaks who started out with him are helping him
realise it. Narendra and Satendra live with him, and Kedar and
Drighpal have promised to green 20 km each. Kedar started the
Gramoday Sansthan at Chaksu village three years ago and Drighpal
heads the Gramin Seva Vigyan Sansthan at Dausa.
The five friends have multiplied into 42 full-time workers, 120
part-timers and 2,000 volunteers for TBS alone. Its
office-ashram, which was built at the driest spot in Kishori, is
today hidden by dense greenery. Clean, spacious and spartan, the
ashram virtually reacharges the body and soul. The aroma of
Ayurvedic medicines permeates the air, the nights are full of
sounds of birds and animals.
Rajendra had also started an allopathic hospital but wound it up
five years ago since it was too expensive and quite useless for
the villagers. Besides, the villagers with a strong oral
tradition knew how to make medicines from local herbs.
Some of the knowledge was lost with the shorn forests, and it was
to educate the young that the villagers collected herbs during
the annual pani yatra, a 45-day march to popularise water
harvesting. The TBS vaids have documented 225 types of medicinal
plants, and the Ayurvedic hospital coordinates work at 45
dispensaries. The idea, says Rajendra, is to make the villages
self-sufficient.
Everywhere it is a new experience in learning. One of the TBS
schools is run by Brij Mohan on a roof-top in Kyara village, with
the gong hung on a tree. The gong resonates through the village
in the morning and evening summoning his students, mainly women
and children. There are classes up to the fifth standard but no
exams. "The idea is to educate them, not examine them,"
explains the master.
The women are eager learners in most villages. Quite a few of
them were married in childhood and abandoned years later because
of illiteracy. Now they can at least write to their truant
husbands to come back home.
There was a quiet family reunion for Rajendra, too. Two years
after he sat in that battered bus to Kishori, he went back to
Jaipur to appease his wife Neena and brought her home, to
Bhikampura where she realised that she wasn't married to a
nalayak after all. It was only when she was big with a child that
she returned to Jaipur, where she operates as a one-woman
communication centre for TBS. "I am happy," says the
mother of two. Rajendra Singh has abundantly regenerated the
wellsprings of her heart as well.
INTERVIEW/RAJENDRA
SINGH Mountains are mothers' breasts Aportrait
of Mahatma Gandhi has a hallowed place amid the pictures
of Hindu divinities on a podium in the Tarun Bharat Sangh
ashram at Kishori. Gandhian thought has influenced
Rajendra Singh, who is passionate about village
self-sufficiency and has mobilised a hundred peaceful
satyagrahas. Yet he does not see his mission in the
Gandhian mould. |