Mind over matter

THOUGH the world focuses only on one form of poverty that is financial there are two other forms - ecological poverty and povert of the mind or mental poverty - that are even more relevant for the rural poor for they areclosely associated with the state of the environment.

When I had first visited Jhabua in 1984, it was a degraded moonscape. Itstransformation into a green village came as a pleasant surprise to me. After thetransformation of Jhabua, I had another pleasant surprise last fortnight. It wasseeing the changing face of Alwar.

Rajendra Singh, who had foundedTarun Bharat Sangh in the mid-1980s,has been working with the villagers ofAlwar district to restore their traditionalwater harvesting structures, check damscalled johads. In these 14-15 years, hiswork has spread from one village -Gopalpura - to about 500 villages andthrough the relatives of these villagers,has even extended the work to nearbydistricts of Jaipur and Sawai Madhopur.Some 5,000 johads have been builttill now.

The change in the mindset ofthe rural people and in the ecologyis extraordinary. Firstly, the mentalpoverty has gone and secondly theecological poverty is slowly disappearing. With villagers encouraged andemboldened to take their life and theirdestiny into their own hands, they havegone out and undertaken efforts toharness the one critical ecological element that was missing from their lives,namely water. By catching the waterthat falls regularly from the heavens,they have ensured so much ground-water recharge that wells are now full ofwater round the year. So much so thatseveral streams that were dead fordecades now flow round the year.

What is the biggest change that hastaken place in your lives, I asked one ofthe villagers. "Oh, our women can nowbathe everyday," he replied with asmirk.

But that is not all. Building waterharvesting structures has slowly butinevitably linked the people to theirenvironment. All over the hills wherethe mental poverty has gone, newecological wealth is emerging. The hillsare no longer barren. Three to five-year-old trees can be seen growing allover. In one village the forest hasbecome so good that the village hasdeclared it a peoples' sanctuary in thename of the local goddess, with a wholeset of rules proudly displayed on itsvillage dam.

The mental wealth and the ecological wealth is now bringing in financialand economic wealth. Sixty five-year-old Dhanua remembers his longyears as a labourer in Delhi. Longbefore independence, the local Rajahad sold of the forest to contractorswho wanted to make charcoal. Theforests had rapidly disappeared andso had water. Dhanua never rememberstilling his fields. "I was in Delhi movinggunny bags around when MahatmaGandhi was killed. I was doing thesame in Delhi the day Indira Gandhiwas married." But this year for thefirst time in his life he has tined his landand his sons are working with him.Dhanua and his fellow villager, Arjan,happily remember the days when theyused their lath (not a bamboo stick tobeat people with, but their moral insistence) on the other villagers to con-tribute their labour (shramdan) to makethe village dam.

In another village downstreamvillagers again said that for the first timethey had enough to eat and even someproduce to sell. So I asked "What next?Will you now build your own schooland health centre?"

"We already have these," theyanswered.

A lot of villages are rich in hardwarelike buildings for schools and heath carecentres. They normally lack softwarelike trained personnel and qualifiedteachers. So I was tempted to put forward another question.

"But does the school teacher comeregularly?" I asked.

Rajendra Singh took up the conversation from here. "Yes he does," heexplained because these villagers areso organised they will immediatelycomplain." Well then I thoughtthese villagers have got everythingthey want and I voiced my opinion."No," said an old man, "we wouldlike Tarun Bharat Sangh to start eveningclasses to teach old people like me."The earlier desperation is clearly deadin these villagers. There is a newconfidence and a new zeal. They arelooking for help but with an internalstrength. And they are beginning torespect themselves and their environment and manage it.

Atornisation is being replaced withcooperation. They are on the road toprogress not like the elite flowers of amanicured garden but like the thousands of tiny flowers that make a mountain pasture come alive.

Mental wealth, ecological wealth and economic wealth are all slowlyrolling into one. And the Tarun BharatSangh is now even becoming a beneficiary. Several villagers are coming forward to work with the organisation tospread the message of love, respect,pride and confidence: love and respectfor nature and pride and confidence inthemselves. None of this will appear inthe GDP calculations of the government.But true economic growth has begun inthese villages.