V.S. Pandey
The next step will be to remodel or redevelop the villages to ensure availability of all kinds of civic amenities to our rural population to bring them at par with those residing in urban areas, writes Vijay Shankar Pandey.
“The real India lies in 7,00,000 villages. If Indian civilization is to make its full contribution to the building up of stable world order, it is this vast mass of humanity that has to be made to live again. We have to tackle the triple malady which holds our villages fast in its grip: (I) want of corporate sanitation ; (ii) deficient diet; (iii) inertia.”
This is what our father of the nation wrote nearly a century ago. The irony is that even after independence, these problems still plague our villages to a large extent. All the efforts made in the name of village development could not bring about any radical change in the abysmal way people live in villages deprived of even basic civic amenities, be it proper drainage/sewerage system, waste disposal arrangements, tap running water supply, proper street lighting etc. Due to all these deficiencies, open defecation practice was the way of life in rural areas. The sanitation programme launched by the central government in 2014 did create mass scale awareness about cleanliness and led to the construction of crores of toilets in villages across the country. It is surprising that in our villages, where still more than 60% of our population resides, no appropriate system was put in place to provide proper civic amenities to our rural population. The question is why institutions like municipality or development authorities were not set up for rural areas? Do we think that people residing in villages do not deserve civic amenities like the urban population? Are villagers inferior citizens compared to their urban brethren? This distinction needs to be corrected.
In Mahatma Gandhi Ji's words, “Villages have suffered long from neglect by those who have had the benefit of education. They have chosen the city life. A divorce between intelligence and labour has resulted in criminal negligence of the villages. And so, instead of having graceful hamlets dotting the land, we have dung-heaps. The approach to many villages is not a refreshing experience. Often one would like to shut one's eyes and stuff one's nose; such is the surrounding dirt and offending smell. Tomorrow they will be like tiny gardens of Eden where dwell highly intelligent folk whom no one can deceive or exploit. The reconstruction of the villages along these lines should begin right now. The reconstruction of the villages should not be organized on a temporary but permanent basis.”
For improving the lives of our rural population our country needed to take an important step towards solving a very serious problem that made our rural population suffer acutely all these years. Unfortunately, in our villages across the country, beginning from British raj, whereas ownership of the cultivated land and their measurement maps were prepared, no effort to measure the “ village abadi “area was ever made neither any step ever taken to try to determine the ownership records of residents inside the abadi land. Clearly, Britishers did not do so because there was no land revenue to be collected from the abadi area. Unfortunately, even after Independence, no effort was made to either demarcate the abadi land or create ownership rights there. Abadi land measurement and creation of ownership rights therein are necessary for the creation of proper civic amenities in our villages. This is why the recently launched scheme by Panchayati Raj Department of Government of India “Svamitva” can become a game-changer. It was inaugurated by Hon'ble Prime Minister with physical distribution of Property Cards on 11th October 2020. Approximately 1.32 lakh house owners of 763 villages consisting of 221 from Haryana, 02 from Karnataka, 100 from Maharashtra, 44 from Madhya Pradesh, 346 from Uttar Pradesh and 50 from Uttarakhand received their physical copies of Property cards/ Title deeds. It is expected that in the next three years all the villages in the country will be fully covered in this scheme.
The next step will be to remodel or redevelop the villages to ensure availability of all kinds of civic amenities to our rural population to bring them at par with those residing in urban areas. This will require the creation and setting up of new institutions at various levels including at village levels. Village panchayats need to give place to new institutions with changing times.
With the removal of widespread disparity in civic amenities between rural and urban habitats, the economic development of rural areas will take a new trajectory. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The villagers should develop such a high degree of skill that articles prepared by them should command a ready market outside. When our villages are fully developed, there will be no dearth in them of men with a high degree of skill and artistic talent. There will be village poets, village artists, village architects, linguists and research workers.”
Vijay Shankar Pandey is the former secretary, fertilizer. Views expressed here are personal.
