Recasting India (16 page)

A few kilometers before Ahmednagar, the car turns into a small lane and then into fields in places where roads don't exist at all. All very classic rural India until all of a sudden, a few meters from the village, a well-paved, bump-free road pops up again. This leads straight into a village that, in fact, does not seem like an Indian village at all.

The roads are paved and almost entirely pothole free. In fact, they are far better than almost any road I have seen in Bombay. There are no open drains, no garbage dumped at corners, no dirty buzzing flies, no filthy puddles and no stench.

As an Indian, with years of having traveled in and visited Indian villages—often utterly foul and despondent places—coming to Hiware Bazar is almost surreal. In a country where nearly 400 million people, most of them in Indian villages, have never had electricity, Bangar's cowshed—in fact, every cowshed in the village—has solar-powered lighting. So do all its dozen or so temples and the one mosque that villagers built for the only Muslim family in the area.

In a country where no one who can afford not to drinks water straight from the tap—since 80 percent of the sewage never gets treated and much of it seeps into drinking-water sources like groundwater and rivers—at Hiware Bazar, it is entirely safe to drink straight from the tube wells. I did.

The village office, two-storied and white-washed twice each year, looks better than most government offices in Bombay. Its toilets are cleaner; the Internet connection on its computers is steady rather than patchy.

Standing beside his seven cows, Srikant Bangar told me that in recent months the village council had run a little contest—spot a mosquito and win Rs 500. “Most villages are full of mosquitoes because there is water and garbage collected everywhere,” said Bangar. “But we don't have that here—no stale water, no mosquitoes!”

The contest may be apocryphal, but it points to a larger tale of Hiware Bazar and what it has achieved in the last two decades. When Bangar was a child, he remembers “people fighting in the village all the time.” Until 1990, brewing local hooch was the main business in Hiware Bazar, once the home of some of the best traditional wrestlers in the country. More than 90 percent of the villagers lived in poverty, under the official poverty line that marks those in need of state support, and violent crime was common.

Habib Sayed, from the only Muslim family in the village, told me, “Before 1990, when the police came to intervene in a fight, often they were beaten by drunken villagers and sent away. Many of the wrestlers had gone to seed, had become musclemen and alcohol makers. Sometimes the local police were so scared that they refused to come. Every day there would be big fights. Some would use knives, some axes or sticks, whatever they could find.”

This would have been disastrous in any community; in Hiware Bazar, it destroyed everything. To understand why, you must understand the location of the village—it lies in central Maharashtra, in Vidarbha, the drought-prone heart of India's most prosperous state.

Vidarbha has some of the worst droughts—and the most terrible rates of suicide among farmers maddened by poverty and debt. It is sometimes referred to as the heartland of India's farmer suicide crisis—where, according to some calculations, one farmer has killed himself each half hour for at least a decade. In 2011, the suicide rate among farmers was higher by 47 percent than among the rest of Indians. Even as I write this, five million farming families face drought, penury and starvation in Vidarbha.

In 1990, Hiware Bazar was so feared that no teacher was willing to join the government school. Its literacy level was barely 30 percent, well below the 45 percent national average.

To see what has changed since then, consider the numbers. In 1991, there were 180 families living in the village—this went up to 236 by 2011. There were 168 families below the poverty line in 1991—only three families remain at such low income levels. There were 22 landless families in 1991; by 2011 there were only six.

Per capita income rose from Rs 832 to more than Rs 30,000. Bangar's own family was making around Rs 50,000 ($843) a year—now they make around Rs 10 lakhs ($16,000). Their cattle produce nearly 100 liters (26.42 gallons) of milk every day. “Just from the sale of milk, we make around Rs 75,000 a month,” said Bangar.

In 1991, Hiware Bazar had no health facilities—now it has a proper health-care facility with round-the-clock doctors and a well-stocked clinic. The village school, which previously taught (when it could even get teachers) only till Class 4 now teaches till Class 10. Literacy rates have improved vastly, from 30 percent to 95 percent.

Groundwater level, which had fallen to between 90 and 120 feet in 1991, has risen to between 15 and 40 feet; the area under irrigation has risen too, from 125 hectares (308 acres) to 650 hectares (1,606 acres). At the peak of summer in this rain-deprived region, the area under cultivation used to be barely 1 or 2 hectares (2.5 or 4.9 acres). This has grown to around 80 hectares (198 acres). Cropping intensity (the ratio between net area sown and total area cropped) has grown from 94 percent to 164 percent and the number of dug wells from 97 to 284.

Previously, the village had not a single hectare under drip irrigation—a critical, water-saving technique in water-deprived areas—but now it has 250 hectares (618 acres) under drip irrigation.

The number of milk-producing cattle has grown more than six-fold—from under 100 to 650. And milk production has grown from 150 liters (about 40 gallons) a day to 3,500 liters (about 925 gallons). What helps the milk production is the availability of good-quality grass, which went up from 100 metric tons (110 short tons) in 2000 to 6,000 metric tons (6,613 short tons) in 2004 and has since grown multifold.

The 977-hectare (2,414-acre) Hiware Bazar symbolizes how we can turn around everything that has gone wrong in Indian agriculture. Its key problem was universal to Indian farming—water. Most of Indian agriculture is rain fed. In large parts of the country, and especially in Maharashtra, water retention tends to be low because of geology—a lot of basalt rock. How to retain, manage and deploy water efficiently remains the biggest challenge of the Indian farmer. For years, and in the absence of a sustained push toward drip irrigation and having desecrated the old systems of water harvesting and cropping appropriate to water availability, farmers have pumped and dug deeper and deeper for water. In the next two decades, World Bank data shows, 60 percent of all aquifers in India will be in a critical condition of contamination and over exploited. This is because India is the largest user of groundwater in the world—around 230 cubic kilometers (about 55 cubic miles) a year, or a quarter of the global use of groundwater.

But all of this began to change in 1990 when a man called Popatrao Pawar, whose own father was a well-known local wrestler, became the
sarpanch,
or the head man, in the village elections. Pawar was barely in his late 20s then and had just about received his MCom (masters in commerce) degree from Pune University. He began a process of completely changing the way Hiware Bazar had looked at its water resources.

When I met Pawar, I asked him if he was thinking like an entrepreneur when he began his work. He laughed and said, “At least I had the problem that every start-up has—my family and friends told me this was utter stupidity and I should get a good job in the city.”

Pawar said he spotted the key to the village's problem. “We had to convert our most precious resource—water. Everything else flowed from there.”

So he got the people of the village together and decided to use government grants and funds for village water conservation projects. A watershed is a place that drains water to a common spot. When rainwater gathers in a watershed, it flows out in drainage lines. But if there is no vegetation or forest cover, the rainwater seeps off the land rapidly, carrying rich topsoil with it.

Using government funds, Pawar repaired 70 hectares (173 acres) of forest lands in and around the hillocks surrounding the village. Volunteer labor from the village helped create 40,000 contour trenches on the hills. A re-plantation drive that began then has added more than 100,000 trees to the village. The results were evident by 1993. “Right after the monsoons, many wells which had not seen water in years filled up,” says Pawar. That year total irrigated area also rose from 20 hectares (49 acres) to 70 hectares (173 acres). By 1994, the village had its own five-year plan for regeneration built on some key principles—a ban on liquor and on cutting trees and unchecked grazing; added to that were family planning and volunteer labor by villagers in development work. Pawar and his associates like Sayed convinced 22 villagers to donate their personal land to expand the local school.

Around 660 water-harvesting structures were built, with contours to stop the runoff of rainwater across 414 hectares (1,023 acres); 70 hectares (173 acres) of regenerated forests began to recharge the wells. In all, in the first few years Pawar spent around Rs 42 lakhs of government money on fixing 1,000 critical hectares (2,471 acres). Grazing of cattle on watershed development land was banned, as was cutting trees except on private land for fuel. Bore wells were banned except two for drinking water to control the extraction of groundwater. Also forbidden was growing water-intensive crops like sugarcane and banana; instead, horticulture and vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes and onions are now grown successfully. In Hiware Bazar only 0.5 acres of sugarcane per farm can be grown as fodder, and drip irrigation is mandatory.

To improve health, the village also decided to stop using wood-fueled open earth ovens or
chullahs.
Instead, small biogas plants that provide kitchen fuel have been set up alongside huts and cattle sheds. Open defecation—a curse of Indian villages that causes disease—has been totally eliminated. Every house has toilets.

“I worked on the principle of return on investment. I told the government officers that if we can fix this village, it will become a model for the whole country, and I told the villagers that this was the only thing that could totally transform their lives. The ROI, as they said, was unbeatable,” says Pawar, whose work has won Hiware Bazar, which gets a meager annual rainfall of only 300 to 400 millimeters (12 to 16 inches), 700 awards from the state and national government.

Pawar says that handing the water resources of the village to its women has really helped. “We realized that the biggest victims of the water crisis are women who often had to travel miles to get water for their homes, but since we started ‘water budgeting,' it is the village women who determine everything and fine anyone who uses more than their quota of water,” he said. Depending on the rainfall in a particular year, water is allocated for various uses starting with drinking water for villagers and cattle.

Rameshrao Pawar (no relation to Popatrao) is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Hiware Bazar's success. From an annual income of less than Rs 1 lakh, he now earns around Rs 30 lakhs. He says he does not think of himself as a farmer anymore but as an entrepreneur. “Farming is in deep crisis in India because the farmer does not think of himself as an entrepreneur, with clear growth, revenue and profit targets,” says Rameshrao. He says none of it could have been done without a sense of equity. For instance, to start with, there were 22 landless families in the village. Typically all the groundwater belonged to the landowner, as did the grazing sites—so a landless farmer would have almost no incentive to participate in watershed projects or stop his cattle from free grazing. As the village has been able to irrigate and revitalize more and more of its land, plots for farming have been given to landless farmers. Even the remaining few landless families are about to receive land.

Both Rameshrao and Popatrao agree that the equity benefit and access to all is the core of their success story. “We agreed early on that community resources are for everyone. Water comes through rain—everyone has an equal right over it. Depending on how large the farm is, proportionally everyone would get water, without exception,” says Popatrao.

To keep the village unpolluted, Hiware Bazar decided in 2008 that no one would use cars on village roads (even though they are one of the few villages in India whose roads can effortlessly handle any car)—only cycles and motorbikes. Cars are used only to travel to other villages or towns.

Also, a few years ago, the village decided to make HIV tests for men and women mandatory before marriage. Each of these decisions has been taken in open-forum village meetings and with the complete consent of all villagers.

There are now nearly 60 households in the village that have rupee millionaires or that earn more than Rs 10 lakh (one million rupees). Popatrao Pawar has been made the head of the state Model Village Programme, a government department that aims to effect similar change across at least 100 villages in Vidarbha. He says he has narrowed down his “formula” into a two-year strategy that can alter villages. “We no longer need the two decades during which we experimented at Hiware Bazar. We now know what works and what doesn't. We can apply things like developing watersheds, paving roads, building toilets, preventing detrimental grazing within two years at each village,” says Pawar, who once dreamed of playing cricket for the state team. One of his biggest achievements he says is the return of 93 families who had migrated to Bombay from the village but have returned in the last five years. “We are saving hundreds of liters from the Bombay water consumption,” says Pawar, smiling.

Before I left, Habib Sayed showed me around the village and also showed me a series of before-and-after photos of the village. He then took me up a hillock on the border of the village. A snaking, scrubland path spiraled up and finally arrived at a “viewing point.” A neat concrete shelter with a paved floor and a concrete roof opened to a sprawling view of the rolling hills that surround Hiware Bazar.

Standing there Sayed looked quietly at the distant village for a while and then said, “And they say villages are backward.”