Chhattisgarh’s renewed focus on villages and women deserves to be complimented

It has been a very pleasant surprise for me to see Raipur after a long time. It looks clean and green and I wish Chhattisgarh remains as green and as clean.

Another attraction of Raipur is the opportunity to meet, howsoever briefly, your chief minister Bhupesh Baghel Ji. He always seems to be bubbling with new energy and new ideas. And he has been very clear from the beginning that his government’s priority is rural development. Talking of rural development in these days of ‘market economics’ is like sailing against the current but I would like to compliment him for getting his priorities right.

These days the word ‘politics’ has become a dirty word but you have to deal with it at every level from panchayats to districts and in the state capital. Struggle for political power and balance is a work in progress; it is a stream which sometimes gets dirty, sometimes gets stuck but then finds its own way forward. That is why it is heartening to find people in Chhattisgarh at the very pinnacle of power shifting the focus back to people’s home, hearth, forests and livestock.

It is remarkable that this was the focus and priorities of Mahatma Gandhi when he returned to India a century ago. He relentlessly promoted his idea of ‘Suraaj’ through the vernacular media, going to the extent of launching Gujarati and Hindi newspapers to convey his message to the masses.

I would also draw your attention to the role of women, half of our population. In newspaper offices whenever we seek a graphic representation of a ‘farmer’, the designers are quick to draw a man in a pugree ploughing. Women are never shown as farmers. On those rare occasions when a woman is represented in graphic designs, she is usually in a veil or a ghunghat hiding her face or with a child in her lap. If we talk of women’s empowerment, people react as if women are aliens from a different planet.

But think for a moment. Who draws water from wells? Who are the ones thronging the tube wells in the morning with buckets? In most Indian homes it is the woman’s job to arrange for water, even if she has to fetch it from a distance. If you look at photographs on water conservation and storage, 90 per cent of the photographs would have women in them. I am sure the dynamic chief minister will empower the women and make life easier for them.

Getting back to farming, Chhattisgarh is a rice bowl and most of you would be familiar that women play an equal role in sowing the seeds, in ploughing the fields and in harvesting. Women again are the ones mostly responsible for maintaining the kitchen gardens.

But the harvested crop is transported to the mandis in the market by men. This is true across the country, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. So, the men sell the crop and pocket the money. They thus get to decide how to spend the money as well. I am not being a feminist but I am pointing this out purely from a practical standpoint.

A report we had prepared in the 80s had clearly indicated that 90% of the women work in the unorganised sector, which has no law, no regulation. The women have no access to the Labour Commissioner. They are exploited, paid less than minimum wage and rarely or never get any compensation if they sustain injuries while working. You can see the women engaged in construction in the urban areas as well as in the rural areas. But ironically, whenever we meet a group of rural women and ask them if they ‘work’, not one of them raises her hand.

But when we ask how many of them milk the cow, fetch water, work in fields, grow vegetables, add to the family income or arrange fodder for the animals, all the arms shoot up at once. This situation must change. With the growing penetration of smartphones in rural areas, it should now be possible or the government to reach out to the women even in rural areas with information.

Our priorities have always been or should have been the farmer and the workers. No, I am not saying this from any leftist point of view. Communism has been turned into an abusive word. But practically if you see, neither politics nor journalism can survive without turning the focus back to the villages.

Since ‘animal wealth’ is an intrinsic part of rural development, I would draw your attention to a particular variety of buffalo which had become almost extinct in your state. I happen to be a member of the Wild Life Trust of India, which discovered that the ‘Arna’ variety of the buffalo was on the verge of extinction in Chhattisgarh. The Trust has succeeded to a great extent in reversing the trend and the government needs to focus on preserving and promoting the indigenous varieties.

As an aside, even buffaloes are tended to by women. I remember seeing a painting in which the wife of Man Singh, queen Gujri, was shown holding the horn of a buffalo. Women are not weak and wherever women have prospered, people, in general, have witnessed prosperity.

There is a surge of women striding forward and breaking glass ceilings. Every year if you see closely the results declared by school boards and universities, you will find girls outperforming the boys. The girls hog the major part of the merit list.

Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of development was centred around the village and women. He knew how to enlist women in development work and empower them. Since then the village gradually faded from the centre of politics and so did women. It is heartening to see Chhattisgarh bringing the focus back on them and talking of Gandhian preoccupations of ‘ Naruwa, Garuwa, Ghurwa and Baari’.

I compliment the chief minister for taking this bold step. At a time when everything is becoming urban-centric, when English is becoming the gateway to success and when most consumer goods are gradually going out of the reach of the common man, he has taken this risk as Gandhi Ji did.

I wish him and the state and people of Chhattisgarh success in this endeavour.

(Translated excerpts from the address delivered at the function to commemorate the 8th anniversary of Hindi newspaper Nav Pradesh at Raipur. The author is the Group Editorial Advisor of National Herald, Navjeevan and Qaumi Awaz)