A Field Worker’s Diary – Part 64
One of the responsibilities given to us in my early days as a community coordinator in Andhra Pradesh Rural Poverty Reduction Project (APRPRP) in 2003 was facilitating the people in our project villages in identifying the poor through the Participatory Identification of Poor (PIP) program. It was not something that can be done by two or three coordinators. Being a work that needed to be done by bringing all the people of a village together for a meeting and with their complete involvement, we used to go to each village as a team of 5-6 people. One of the first villages that I did PIP in was Nemalipuri in Guntur district. It was a village that falls in the way between Piduguralla and Addanki, and has a population of nearly 6000 and 1500 households.
As part of the PIP, we had to get all the villagers together for a meeting and had to draw a picture of the whole village on the ground with muggu (rangoli). Starting our drawing from the first house that we saw in the village, we had to draw everything in the village including houses, schools, temples, Gram Panchayat offices, and everything in the village in the drawings. The real identification process of the poor will start after the map is completed. We make everyone sit together and ask them what according to them are the characteristics of the poorest of the poor (POP). The people gathered there give us different answers based on their thinking. We used to compile the list of answers on a chart and then ask the villagers to identify the houses of people who fit the bill in the map. Following the identification of the POP, we then used to ask them as to what according to them means being poor. Based on their answers, we used to ask them to identify poor households on the map. In this fashion, we used to identify and categories all the households in the map as POP household, poor household, middle class household, rich household. We also used to make the people identify which household had disabled people, single women, etc. Generally, it would be around midnight by the time this program finished.
After sending all the people back to their homes, we made an exact copy of the map on the road on our charts and get the social map of the village ready and make a list of the poor in the village. It would usually be early morning by the time we finished. It used to be quite fun to lie down on the road in the middle of the night and copy the map on to the chart. But, Nemalipuri was quite a big village. It was not an easy task to bring all the households together at a time for a meeting and begin the process of identification of the poor. Therefore, we thought of dividing the village into blocks and doing PIP. It took us around 5 days to complete the process in the village. On the last day, we had to stick the list of the poor that we had identified on the walls of the gram panchayat building, call all the people there to let them know which category they fall under, and find out if they agree with it. Since our Project was meant for POP and the poor, this identification process that is approved by the village itself becomes quite crucial.
To make our list of POP and the poor suitable for display on the walls of Panchayati, we noted down the list on a chart paper on the previous night. Usually, we, community coordinators, used to divide all the villages and their lanes among us by proclaiming quite pompously that the next four villages are mine or the next two lanes are mine. In the same way, each one of us selected a few lanes and prepared lists for those lanes only.
At around 7 or 8 that night, our then-Project Director Murali garu (he had worked in various posts as an IAS officer and now retired) came out of the blue to check on how we were and how our work was proceeding. While we were working on the charts, he sat on the ground beside us and ask various questions such as— how much of our work did we complete? Was the village comfortable for us? Did we face any issues? When will we complete our process? etc. He then started taking some charts from each one of us to see how we had documented. One of our team members called Ramesh was preparing lists related to lanes of Yādava community. In that chart, we had to write down the owner’s name of each household, their caste, number of family numbers, and indicate the category they fall under according to PIP process: POP, poor, middle class, etc.
Ramesh, “instead of writing Yādava or యాదవ in the caste column, had mistakenly written Yadava or యదవ, which is a slur in Telugu, all across the chart”. Observing that error, Murali garu jokingly said, “What is this, Ramesh? all the girls in the team are saying that the villagers are good people and that they took good care of them. How come you had written swear words to describe them?” We had until that time sincerely been preparing our charts and didn’t peek into each other’s charts. But looking at that chart, we all laughed and began correcting the mistakes with a marker.
Murali garu observed our work for a while and asked about our well-being. He told us to come back after doing our work carefully. He asked us to call him if we face any issues after displaying the names in the Panchayati, and left. Until then, we had been suppressing our laughter, but once sir left, we all started teasing Ramesh about what the consequences would have been if we hadn’t spotted and corrected the mistake before putting the list on display in the Panchayat office, and laughed out loud.
Bharathi Kode