The village manager

Chhavi Rajawat gave up her private sector job to become the sarpanch of Soda in the heart of Rajasthan.

Soda, in the Tonk district of Rajasthan, is just 60 km from Jaipur, but belongs to another world. Some 10,000 people live in seven dhanis or hamlets here. The mustard fields are in flower. Most houses are made of mud walls and thatched roofs. The courtyards, where cattle are tied, are clean but can become a nightmare in the rains. Only around 1 per cent of the houses have toilets. Water is scarce. The power supply is erratic. The high school has inadequate furniture and teaches only three subjects — Hindi, Sanskrit and Geography. For everything else, students travel to Malpura 25 km away. Literacy is as low as 50 per cent. There’s a doctor posted at the primary health centre, but today he is out for a “meeting”. Almost 40 per cent inhabitants have migrated to cities for jobs. Every drought drives more families away. Men here wear dhotis, and women cover their heads in long ghoonghats.

Sitting in her cargos with a belt pouch and dark sunglasses under a tree in the primary school, 30-something Chhavi Rajawat wants to change the fortunes of Soda. She is, after all, the sarpanch, or headman, of the village. There are many women sarpanchs in the country because many of these posts are reserved for them. What sets Rajawat apart is her MBA degree from the Indian Institute of Modern Management in Pune, and her work with Carlson Hotels, Airtel and The Times of India. Her family runs a hotel, Kailrugji, in Jaipur and she has interests in a horse riding academy in the city. But she now lives alone at the family home at Soda and drives around the village in her Ford Endeavour.

The Rajawat house is old. By Soda standards, it’s big, but it’s modestly — almost sparsely — furnished. It’s an open house and there is enough in the kitchen to feed unexpected visitors. The only sign of luxury is a big, lush lawn behind the house built on a raised ground. In the night, when power fails the village, Rajawat turns to the inverter. It’s the only house in Soda to have ever had a fixed-line phone. But it doesn’t work any longer, though mobile phones are popular in the village.

The walls inside have pictures of dignitaries like Jawaharlal Nehru with Rajawat’s grandfather, and of Man Singh, the last ruler of Jaipur, and his glamorous wife, Gayatri Devi. Her surname means royal lineage and carried a lot of weight when Rajasthan was a cluster of kingdoms. Her friends from school, Rishi Valley School (near Madanapalle in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh), remember she used to prefix HH (His Highness) before the name when she wrote back home. But that doesn’t sit well with her current mission and claim to fame — she has been seen at functions in India and abroad on rural and women empowerment. The connection to royalty, she says dismissively, “is distant. My grandfather and Man Singh were cousins.”

The Rajawats are the only Rajput family in the village. Maalis, Jats, Brahmins and Banjaras (gypsies) form the bulk of the population. People occasionally come and touch her feet. At a function in the night to celebrate the birth of a child, some villagers pull out a diwan for her to sit. She, instead, chooses to sit on the floor and eat like the rest. The villagers call her Baisa — a term reserved for women of high birth.

Rajawat’s day is spent moving from one hamlet to the other, often in her SUV, talking to people on the way, asking them their problems. They, in turn, drop whatever they are doing to greet her, sometimes with folded hands, at times with a wave. She knows them all by name and also appears familiar with their habits. “Aaj aapka chhaata kahan hai?” (where’s your umbrella today), she asks one. “Aaj chaaj nahin pilaoge?” (won’t you offer me butter milk today), she says to another. Her cargos, dark sunglasses and sneakers don’t seem to matter. Men and women, in the heart of feudal Rajasthan, appear perfectly at ease with her. Many of them speak to her in the local dialect, Dhundhari, and though Rajawat says she understands it perfectly, she’s not entirely comfortable speaking it. But she gets along fine in Hindi which the villagers understand.

As she moves around the village, the smile sometimes disappears. Rajawat does not hesitate to reprimand people where she finds a slip. On one occasion, she takes the school principal aside and ticks him off because she’s got a complaint that he isn’t opening the school on time. The villagers don’t seem to mind. They want development and are clearly willing to pay the price for it. In one hamlet, for example, villagers themselves broke the boundary walls and even portions of their houses when Rajawat explained to them how wider roads and proper drains could make their lives better. She wants them to speak out; at the first meeting of her panchayat (the village committee) she put up a mike and asked people to voice their problems. “It took me 45 minutes to get the first person to speak,” she says.

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Till two years ago, this job wasn’t on her mind at all. In the winter of 2009, some 50 men from Soda landed at her house in Jaipur. Most of them had known her since she was a baby. They had carried her on their shoulders around the village as a child; she had played in their laps and eaten in their homes. Now, they wanted her to become their sarpanch. Rajawat was stumped. But the men persisted. They came back again, and one of them said to her, “Right now only 50 of us have come. One phone call and another 100 will land up here to convince you.” Sure enough, a few days later about 150 villagers arrived at her grandfather, Brigadier (retd) Raghubir Singh’s, farmhouse — Rajawat Farms — in Jaipur. Brig Singh had himself been the sarpanch of Soda 20 years ago; they knew once they convinced him, his granddaughter wouldn’t be able to say no.

Cornered, Rajawat decided to visit her ancestral village where she had spent all her school holidays. “The entire village had gathered with musicians and drummers,” recalls Rajawat. Even before she could get out of her car, they cheered: “Hamare naye sarpanch aa gaye” (Our new sarpanch is here). “It was emotional blackmail; I had no choice,” says Rajawat who was elected sarpanch on February 4, 2010.

The villagers say the work that her grandfather did and the confidence that the Rajawat name inspires in the area made them turn to her when they learnt that the Soda sarpanch’s seat was reserved for women. “Twenty years ago, her grandfather worked for us, giving us roads (which are better than the highway to Soda), schools and hospitals. Now she is here to change our lives,” says an old gypsy with handlebar moustaches who lives in a hamlet called Banjaron Ki Dhaani in the village. Rajawat calls him Gypsy King.

The first bank in the village, State Bank of India, opened this February through MPLADS funds after Rajawat chased the Member of Parliament from Soda, Minister of State for Finance Namo Narain Meena. The bank now caters to 20 panchayats and also offers Kisan Credit Cards. Earlier, people had to travel 20 to 30 km to reach the nearest bank. “A lot has changed since Baisa became the sarpanch,” says Kamla Devi, a villager. “A computer centre has opened, roads have improved and there is more cleanliness. But we need toilets,” she adds.

Rajawat recalls how when she approached a particular official for toilets and a drainage system, he laughed and said: “Why do villagers need drains and toilets?” One NGO which did built some toilets used very poor material and the seats fell apart. “They even dug the cesspits at the entrance of the mud houses from where people take their livestock in. Imagine what would happen if the pits caved in under the weight,” says Rajawat. The district headquarters, she adds, is now willing to give Rs 3,200 per toilet, which should help. “The wry joke among the village women is that they are supposed to cover their faces but expected to bare their bottoms,” she rues. Her own panchayat office does not have a toilet.

Water is another problem. The village has enough reservoirs, practically one for every hamlet, plus the main 100-acre Sarvajana Talab. But the water is unfit even for farming. Pointing to a hunched woman walking past her SUV, Rajawat says the water is dangerously high in fluoride. As a result, most people here suffer from dental fluorosis which can later worsen to become skeletal fluorosis. Rainwater harvesting, she adds, is the only way to provide safe drinking water to the people. But when she approached the government to get the reservoir desilted, she hit one hurdle after the other. Rajawat needed Rs 3.5 crore; only Rs 70 lakh was sanctioned; and what she got finally was Rs 24 lakh.

Help came from unexpected quarters. Vandana Singh, a Delhi-based second-generation entrepreneur, heard her interview on radio while returning from Amritsar to Delhi and sent Rs 50,000. “I asked Rajawat about it and she sent me a detailed report about the reservoir,” says Singh. Rajawat’s family and two of her father’s friends also chipped in and she managed to collect Rs 20 lakh to desilt 10 acres of the lake, which she says is “just a drop in the ocean”. With the silt that was pulled out, Rajawat got an island built in the middle so that migratory birds would return to the village. “As a child my father would throw me into this beautiful lake to swim. What’s become of it is a pity,” she says.

In March this year in New York, during the UN summit on poverty, Rajawat met Sari Schorr, a woman who works for children in Haiti. Hearing the story of her village, Schorr came down straight to Soda, stayed here for about a week and helped set up the website, soda-india.in. Later, she also sent her a book to help her manage the website. Schorr now wants to raise funds for Soda through a concert with Sivamani. “He and I have spoken about the possibility.”

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Rajawat says her MBA education comes handy while preparing project reports and proposals to get funds sanctioned. But the going has not been easy. “Though funds are supposed to reach the village seamlessly, a sarpanch is constantly chasing officials for them. A village my size is supposed to get about Rs 1.5 crore under NREGS alone, but we’ve barely got a fraction.” On top of that, there’s a huge disconnect between what the panchayat, which is meant to be the government’s link to the village, demands and what the village gets. “Our priority and proposal was for water projects. Instead, they built us an anganwadi and two gravel roads,” says Rajawat.

Her corporate experience has taught her the importance of networking. She is often out meeting government officials, reaching out to companies to urge them to take up her village as a CSR initiative or drawing attention to Soda from platforms like the UN poverty summit. (Catching her in Soda takes weeks as she busy chasing officials). This month, Bosch Power Tools has donated a hundred benches for village students. It has also sent a demonstration van equipped with several kinds of tools — metal cutters, drilling machines, carpentry equipment et al — to make villagers aware of technology that can help them work better and earn more. SAP has started a computer literacy programme. “Over 100 boys and girls come to the centre every day,” says Om Prakash Swami, a computer teacher who, until recently, taught at a school in a neighbouring village. As he speaks, two village women — Kamla Devi and Ramkanya — enter the centre to try their hand at a laptop.

With help from SAP, Rajawat wants to make hers the country’s first computerised panchayat, but the village has no Internet connection. She is now counting on Minister of State for I-T and Communication Sachin Pilot, who is monitoring the programme to provide broadband connection to all 600,000 panchayats across India, to deliver. “The portal will provide basic citizen services like birth, death and marriage certificates, old age and widow pension, and land records online, as well as help in fund management,” says Mathew Thomas, vice-president (strategic industries), SAP India. The idea is to automate the sarpanch’s office so that villagers know what all funds are coming in and how they’re being spent. All this is expected to be in place by mid-April 2012. “The short-term plan is to enable this through the mobile phone, though in the long run we will need a broadband connection,” admits Thomas. What was initially meant to be a 24-hour service will function keeping in mind the power problem which the village faces.

Despite the challenges, Rajawat’s efforts seem to be paying off. Sub-divisional Officer Prakash Chaudhary says Soda has been shortlisted “as a model village”. But Rajawat’s knows her job is far from done. Pointing to the host of problems — “absence of toilets, lack of streetlights, drainage system and infrastructure” — she says a lot more needs to be achieved.

Some villagers say there are sections which are resisting her moves because they have become scared of her. “They fear she will become politically powerful by winning the goodwill of the people,” says Satyanarayan Sharma who runs a sweetshop in the village. But does she have political ambitions? Or will she go back to the corporate world once her tenure as sarpanch ends in three years from now? “I don’t know,” says Rajawat. “But what I do know is that I will always stay connected to my village.”