Supporting Rural Employment – My First Trips to the Field
Four months ago, before I began working in Delhi, the innovation team at OneWorld designed an ICT development program to support the effective and efficient functioning of India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGS). MGNREGS offers 100 days of work per year per household to all willing to perform unskilled labor for a minimum wage - it is now considered the largest public employment scheme in the world.
OneWorld’s innovation project has three major components. First and central to the program is an Info Kiosk (Soochna Seva Kendra) where villagers use an audio-enabled, touchscreen computer to access their job card information – wage history, number of days worked, job availability etc. The audio allows for the inclusion of the illiterate, and the touchscreen makes it accessible to those who are computer illiterate. Villagers access their work information through a single swipe across a biometric device hooked up to the computer.
The second component of the project is a biometric device along with GPS stationed at every worksite in order to record the attendance of workers. The gps/biometric atttendance mitigates the possibility of a corrupt 'mate', or leader of a worksite, signing in for absent workers.
Lastly, the program includes a community radio program that airs once a month and features villagers’ thoughts on local development issues.
Currently, our program is in two districts in the state of Rajasthan – Bhilwara and Udaipur and during this past month, I traveled to Bhilwara twice. The first trip surrounded preparations for a visit by the head of the UNDP, Helen Clark, and the Indian Minister of Rural Development, C.P. Joshi. The second trip was spent interviewing and surveying village workers, local leaders, and local civil servants for a documentation of best practice report that I am currently writing. The trips to the field proved to be extremely worthwhile – I familiarized myself with our innovation project, interacted with villagers (although through translators since the local language is Rajasthani), and met many UN and local governments officials.
The beginning of the first trip, however, was difficult for me for a few reasons. First, I initially felt that the preparations we were carrying out – training the villagers to answer questions about the project for the upcoming UN visit – troubling because it seemed like we were putting on a show. Secondly, I felt a bit helpless – I wanted to do more, but was hindered by my language handicap. Lastly, I am so new to the working culture in India that I felt frustrated with some of the cultural differences in work expectations.
On March 6th Helen Clark was to arrive with C.P. Joshi, quickly visit the info-kiosk and then spend an hour at the worksite where I was stationed. In reality, Helen Clark ended up spending two minutes at the worksite because of a two hour delay created by a welcoming ceremony in the district office. This created a lot of internal turmoil for me because I felt as though we had prepared, although not to my liking, the villagers for 3 days for a long visit that in fact became such a short visit that it was almost laughable. I felt guilty because I knew if I were one of the villagers, I would have felt used – put on display for the big boss to come and stare at me. Unfortunately, I couldn't do much after the event to fix the past, so I did the best I could to get help from my coworker to explain to the villagers what had happened and why.
The next morning, a local newspaper wrote a critical article about our work, claiming that we staged the whole visit and even mentioned my involvement, ‘an American named Nicki was a team member’. Thanks to this article, I have since come to a couple of important conclusions. First, although I didn’t feel completely right about ‘training’ the villagers, in hindsight, I realized that training was not at all what we were doing. Our program has only been in place for four months so the visit, as decided by the Government of India, was premature in terms of seeing results. Also, many of the women involved in our program are Dalits (backwards castes), very poor, and illiterate, therefore they are quite shy when it comes to sharing their experiences. The purpose of our so-called training was to get the women who have used the program to speak about it – so saying that we told them what to say is actually quite untrue.
My second conclusion comes from the saying: when you face resistance, you know you are doing something right. It is now very clear to me that we have entered the political resistance phase of our project. Through the increased transparency that our attendance system provides, local deeply ingrained political structures are being challenged. As such, resistance to our efforts and acts to try and delegitimize our work – such as painting it as an ‘outsider imposed- American and UN project'- are inevitable outcomes. During my second visit to Bhilwara, these assumptions were confirmed when my colleagues and I connected to dots, concluding that a known corrupt local civil servant was the one to tell the local newspaper to write that critical article.
Check out the articles I wrote for the the OneWorld portal on our ICT innovation program and Helen Clark's visit to India:
http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/undp-supports-indias-historical-fight-for-gender-equality
http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/undp-head-lauds-indias-job-scheme-for-nurturing-rural-livelihoods
Below are some of the pictures that I took while in Bhilwara, Rajasthan:
