It is not the fault in our stars..

Views in this article are personal and have nothing to do with the government.

A couple of days back I could not help but notice a facebook post featuring a Punjab farmer using his Mitsubishi Montero to till his fields because his tractor does not have an air conditioner. This sounds like a faking-news article at first instance but it was not, and howsoever unbelievable it may seem, it is possible in Punjab. When I compare the plight of farmers in Uttar Pradesh, who can’t even afford a tractor in this age of modern farm technology and still struggle to make their ends meet, to that of the farmers in Punjab, I am forced to think and look for the reasons for such stark differences. Punjab and Uttar Pradesh have been blessed with one of the most fertile lands and have been primarily agricultural economies. While Uttar Pradesh or the erstwhile United Provinces inherited a dwindling economy due to excessive exploitation during British Raj, marred by famines and droughts; Punjab also faced the brunt of various cross border invasions and the partition. Yet today Punjab is one of the most prosperous states of India and UP struggles almost in every aspect be it housing, electricity, literacy, health or public infrastructure. Per capita income of Punjab is almost thrice of Uttar Pradesh’s, and the growth rates in UP are not very promising either. It is only coincidental that I belong to Punjab and have spent my initial years of life there without ever realizing how Punjab is in any way different to Uttar Pradesh, and now that I am a civil servant borne to the state of Uttar Pradesh for rest of my service, a comparison does make some sense.

But without really delving much into comparison part of it, I am strongly urged to write this article on what is it that the state of Uttar Pradesh really lacks and perhaps needs, that it always bags the dernier ranks in most of the lists that are prepared to compare states of our country, whether the lists are made on the basis of general perception of how good or bad things are, or whether they are academic and statistical in nature. I am not the most qualified person to make any judgment but still I will risk making an attempt based on my limited experience of last couple of years in the state working at the cutting edge level in this state of Uttar Pradesh.

I can try dealing with the question from many fronts, but the one that comes up most conspicuously in my analysis is ‘lack of a visionary approach’, not of the government, but of the people. People in Uttar Pradesh are like metaphorical frogs in a well that have not seen anything beyond their limited experiences for generations. In a recent series of meetings that I called with the Pradhans or the elected headmen of various villages in my subdivision I was shocked to know that almost 50% of them had never ever stepped out of the district, around 20% of them had gone up to Delhi and only 5% had actually visited other states. For a context, these are the people who are responsible under our much celebrated Panchayati Raj System for the overall development of our villages, where almost 80% of UP’s population resides. Gandhiji believed that future of the country lies in its villages. During one of the constituent assembly debates Ambedkar ji had on the other hand remarked, “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.” I can not agree more with both of them, as the future of that time frame that Gandhiji envisaged is the present today and it definitely still lies in the villages, which are nothing but epitome of poverty, hunger and corruption, sinks of localism and communalism.

Coming back to the previous point, when most of the Pradhans that I interacted with had no idea where rest of the world and India stands today, how can we expect them to think progressively about the development of their villages. It is a sad truth that Panchayat System in Uttar Pradesh has only led to politicization of village life in UP, where there are factions fighting against each other for power, and the power is also not formidable and is as petty as getting an upper hand in the decision of building a brick tiled road which anyways is going to get broken in a year or two, or for choosing the Fair Price Shop owner of PDS which is going to become a small log in the most corrupt machinery that theatres the pilferage of huge amount of government funds every year. Are we seriously looking forward to such a future? Every year lots of funds are allocated to Gram Panchayats for developmental works such as roads, drainage, street lighting, water supply etc. But these funds are used in most careless manners to construct Nalis (drains) and Khadanjas (brick-tiled roads) which not only lead to unscientific development, but also cause many more social and law and order issues in the village, as the choice of the beneficiaries is often politically motivated. Even if some Pradhan works with a good will, an illiterate and ignorant co-villager who won’t feel happy about the fact that his house will get connected to a drain, but will be angered to know that his neighbor’s dirty water will now flow in front of his courtyard resists him. What a thought process!! And there is no one to put a better sense into the fellow person that in absence of any drain, the water shall anyways stay stagnant in front of everyone’s house causing spread of diseases and what not. The den of ignorance and narrow-mindedness it is indeed.

Even our functionaries in the development machinery from the Village level development officer to the Block Development Officers who are supposed to train the village Panchayat about efficient and effective use of funds are tongue tied when they are asked about various ways in which the funds can be better utilized. They have already formed deep seated interests in the poorly functioning Panchayats and ill planned projects proposed by unqualified engineers as it not only saves them from any extra effort but also benefits them in ways known to all but better not mentioned. It took me more than a couple of hours to convince them that they could think of more innovative initiatives like better infrastructure for their village children in government schools, or solar power lighting systems and water pump sets. It is only an assumption that they were convinced as results are yet to be seen.

While in states like Punjab and Haryana, people are prosperous enough to take care of their basic needs like good food, housing, basic health, vaccination and education, it is the tier two developmental needs that government needs to focus upon, like the better public services and infrastructure. These are the areas where government has to deal with more interested players and has to act only as enabler. On the other hand people in UP still do not have access to basic amenities like housing and food. A lot of issues that branch out of these are poor health, poor awareness, crime and law and order. The task then becomes to administer welfare schemes and the beneficiaries of these schemes are larger in number, more vulnerable to influences and ignorant. This leads to incessant corruption at both government as well as societal level. It is not uncommon to hear people becoming victims of frauds such as a group or an organization distributing forms printed under heading of a popular government scheme like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, or Swachch Bharat Abhiyan promising enrollment for free toilets or free loans for girl education and taking some fifty or hundred rupees for registration. People, who are always up for freebies in a state where freebies have become a culture, don’t mind paying those few hundreds in return of bigger gains in future (which are never going to come) and the fraudulent group earns lakhs and crores much easily. The under staffed government machinery is already overworked and hence is unable to act against miscreants. The question however remains that how can we come out of this seemingly simple but a situation of grave consequences. We need to make sure that people are not dependent on freebies and are economically more strengthened. Their income needs to rise. They must be given employment.

This is even a bigger and tougher task which governments after governments and Niti Ayog after Planning Commissions are finding difficult to find an answer to. But I personally find that even our efforts are lacking. We are trying to bring green revolutions by testing soils and providing better seeds and fertilizers etc. But how much can increase in productivity help the farmer when his net holding is less than even a hectare. What we perhaps need is to consolidate the holdings and move people out of agriculture into more profitable service sector. It is easier said (written) than done, true. But our efforts till now have not borne any fruits at all. The consolidation department of UP has been functioning, but the consolidation efforts have led to even bigger problems at village level, leading to many law and order issues and many documentary frauds, making few lives more miserable, few lives richer and the social fabric invariably torn by the culture of apathy and cynicism. Perhaps we need to try more out of the box solutions like making land transactions leading to consolidations lucrative say by freeing them of stamp duty, and raising the land ceiling. This will not only ensure better productivity and hence add to national food security, but also usher in the trends in latest farm technologies and boost agricultural goods and services sector. Those who will be selling out their small pieces of lands must however be taken into folds of entrepreneurial livelihoods by teaching them to use their sale fortune in a useful manner. And the land costs in Uttar Pradesh are no longer too low and even small farmers can earn enough by selling his land to make an urban living, only if he is given appropriate hand holding. Now an economist or financial expert may not agree with my propositions, but I think that something of that sort is worth a try. On an average plot holdings in villages of UP are only as big as a hectare and as SDM I daily decide more and more partition cases leading to even smaller land size. In Punjab, one of the biggest reason of farmer’s prosperity is that the farmer is smart enough to ensure that his holding never gets divided. This he ensures either by limiting number of heirs he has or by ensuring that all but one of his children get educated and get into services or business.

Education in general and English education in particular is another area where much focus is required, education for obvious reasons and English education to open portals into the outer world. As I mentioned earlier, most people in rural UP are aloof from the developments in the world. They perceive their world only through vernacular media, which only highlights the corruption scams, the law and order issues and the negativity prevailing around. There is no way youth can know where the rest of the world has reached, how in Kerala the Panchayats function more professionally than Tehsildar’s office in UP, how farmers of Punjab are using best of the implements, and of course Monteros, to till their farms and orchards, how women are writing their own future through Self Help Groups in Andhra Pradesh, how people of Rajasthan are taking lead in making their humble deserts into tourist centres, how Haryana is developing into an service industry hub, how people of Maharashtra have become leaders in Solar and Wind Energy. Even in all India competitive examinations and in job markets, people of UP lag behind due to their poor communication skills, despite being the most smart ones. And it is indeed a sad truth, that the youth of UP is employing his smartness into either unproductive or destructive activities on the lines of caste and religion. The so called political liberation that has happened with consecutive waves of caste and religion based politics in every successive elections has disillusioned the UP youth into forgetting the importance of economic and social liberation through hard work and education. A UP lad relies more on sifarish and ghoos than his hard work and merit. He finds it easier to flout the rules and being dabang than to respect and follow the rules. This worked as far as a few were dabang, but now that being rowdy and of criminal mindset is becoming common, deepened anarchy is setting in. Bashing of government officers is considered fashionable. Now the officer breed also is finding solution in being equally dabang. God knows where shall this all lead the state to.

I find myself getting cynic while writing this post, but that is not my job and hence I must not. Before concluding this serpentine post, I will touch upon one last point, i.e. the role of government in all this. Now as a government, we are dealing with a host of issues, which do not have textbook solutions as the problems have intertwined threads of historical and socio-cultural nature along with the politico-economical ones. Most of the efforts are getting diluted in their effectiveness because of the sheer weight of denominator, the population. We are dealing with 20 crores poorest of the people here. But what we are doing is even funnier. In a way we are trying to sweeten a lake of water by throing buckets of sugar into it, hoping for a day to come when the water turns sweet. Am I wrong? What else are we doing when we open a number of government schools and Health Centres in every village, when we are not able to ensure quality even in one of them. The funds that go into these utilities are huge by any standard, yet are we really able to educate our children to deal with the challenges being offered, or are we able to make our people immune to the diseases that we fight against? No we are not. It would have been much better to take out some of the water from the lake and then sweeten it with whatever sugar we have, at least that would have helped quench the thirst of a few. Why not put concentrated efforts on creating some top-class schools, colleges, hospitals, clusters and cities, which at least provide best of the facilities and produce a class of people who are meritorious, healthy and highly competent and shall add to the man power that we then would need to take care of the rest too. It sounds obnoxious for a second, but this is Darwinian evolution, survival of the fittest theory. We can’t keep them all satisfied by keeping every one equal at ground, but we have to show a few that skies can be touched and let that inspire the rest to themselves take a leap too.