When five officer trainees were sent to a remote Telangana village as part of their training, they had high hopes of making an impact in the allotted one week’s time. What happened instead might shock you.
For what could these educated wide-eyed urban youngsters really teach the people of a remote village? All households already sent their children to the village English medium high school. They had their babies immunised and would drop them off at the local anganwadi centre before working in the fields. They had been, at a slow but steady pace, setting up toilets in their homes using government funds. They also had been availing the benefits of the Rythu Bandhu scheme to get direct cash payments for agricultural inputs.
So the trainees did the next best thing. They tried to learn from this visit. They learnt that broken English has little to do with the self-confidence of bright young minds. They saw how the warm smiles of teachers can control school dropout rates. They learnt that contentment only requires the bare minimum amenities. They also realised that the language barrier does not matter while communicating with enthusiastic locals. They saw, from close quarters, how the best cooks can do wonders with a limited set of ingredients (provided they are told not to add spices).
This might have given an impression of romanticising poverty. However, is it really poverty, if homes with thatched roofs have a TV set and mobile phones? Or if shortage of clean water is accompanied by continuous electricity supply?
Are we supposed to applaud the efforts of the nurse who has duty in four villages a day or lament the existence of innumerable vacancies? Is it only irony that dies when the veterinary hospital is situated in a government building and the subsidiary health centre is inside a claustrophobic rented accommodation? Lastly, is the happiness of those who live in this proverbial well even real, given their ignorance of what they are missing out on? If not, is widening their horizons to worldly pursuits worth the resulting discontentment?
The officer trainees might still require at least a few more weeks of village life to attune their idea of development to people’s idea of happiness. Some learning and unlearning later though, they realise that it’s better to return with questions than with incomplete answers. The rest can always be left to life after training.
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