Yellow Yellow Rural Fellow
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“Ramlal Ji, there is dignity in all work done in service to others,” I said looking him squarely in the eyes, “Collecting and dispatching the campus’ waste makes it hygienic and pleasant for everyone.”
“I’m not ashamed of my work. But to understand me, you need to see it with your own eyes.”
“Okay then, let me join you in collecting the waste today.”
Twenty minutes later we reached our first collection site, and I got to work.
I took a breath and crouched down with my right hand reaching towards the ground. The smell of blood was perceptible in the air. My fingers twitched as they tried to find a way to grip a used condom lying there.
Decency eluded every possible way of gripping it.
Menstrual pads, tampons, condoms, and a few toppled-over garbage bins lay scattered on the campus grounds.
I exhaled. And closed my eyes.
Ramlal Ji was right. No one should have to do this for a living. It didn’t have to be this way and should never have gotten to this point in the first place. It’s got to change.
Hi, I’m Ankit Dash
And this is the story of my friendship with 3 splendid individuals I met at Barefoot College in Tilonia. I hope by the end of this 3-part series, you too will feel some affinity for this little village, found on the trail from Ajmer to Jaipur.
Suman Ji, Gyana Kaki, and Ramlal Ji are staff at Barefoot College, an NGO training illiterate or semi-literate villagers into competent service providers to their communities such as teachers, doctors, midwives, solar engineers, accountants, mechanics, architects, and so on. At Barefoot, the villagers are students, the villagers are teachers, and the villagers are administrators. Almost no one has a degree or qualification (by design). And no one receives a certificate (when your community acknowledges the service you provide, what use is a paper on the wall?).
All three learnt their respective competencies at Barefoot by doing, trying, failing, and trying again.
A Quarter-Life Escape
So how did a DBC-guzzling, The Office-binging, Bangalore-based analyst like me land in a village, to begin with?
The short answer is my interests in bottom of the pyramid markets and rural resource utilisation led me to discover and apply to a Rural Development Fellowship. This program facilitates and funds selected fellows for 13 months to work with experienced NGOs on grassroots development projects.
A new place, challenging problems, freedom in solution approach, an opportunity to improve a few peoples’ lives, and possibly a new perspective on life — if I was selected, all this was just a flight and train journey away. And I got selected.
But not all my reasons for applying were logical; there were emotional nudges at play too. One after another all my friends — college buds, flatmates, office colleagues, you name it — started to leave Bangalore (you know who you are). And I was on season 7 where even Michael Scott left Dunder Mifflin.
It was the season of farewells, and do you know who doesn’t get a farewell? I’ll tell you — it’s the last person to leave. The one left staring an estranged city in the eye.
More notably, around the same time, my Dad was undergoing a nerve-racking operation. And rack my nerves it did. With these things beyond my control, I guess I felt a need to take charge of something. Making an impact where it’s most needed would be my thing.
So I put down my papers, picked up my backpack with some t-shirts, jeans, formal clothes, and a pair of sunglasses, and caught the flight to Jaipur.
(Crash)-Landing in Rural India
Here I was, my first week in Tilonia, with a blank slate but ready to put a ding in the universe.
The first week was orientation week and I had some time in the day to spare. One evening, a couple of Barefoot employees were headed to a nearby village called Kachnaria to visit a night school and I tagged along with them. Children in villages like Kachnaria have to assist their parents during the daytime by taking care of cattle and doing other domestic chores, because of which around 60% of them didn’t use to attend school at all. Through night classes, the children now learn about democracy and citizenship, how to measure their land, what they should do if they’re arrested, and how to attend to a sick animal; after they’re done with their daytime chores.
As we entered Kachnaria, our jeep’s headlight seemed to be the only source of light. This might be difficult to believe: it turned out the whole village had just two lightbulbs. More than 200 houses and a population of over 1000 had two solar-panel lightbulbs for any visibility after sundown. Both the lightbulbs were deployed at the village’s night school; one near the classroom entrance and one deeper inside.
Apart from being the only structure adorned with lightbulbs, the night school was indistinguishable from the mud houses right beside it. The mud houses’ residents included parents of some of the night school children. A brief interaction with adults residing in the adjacent houses produced a discomforting sight: many of them had bent legs and twisted bones.
Within the classroom sat about 15 children cross-legged on a narrow carpet. Chairs, desks, and ceiling fans were absent, and the room was too simple to have a window. A singular steel almirah housed everyone’s notebooks and a few textbooks. The girls outnumbered the boys, and ages varied from 6 to 14. Invariably, they were thin. Disturbingly thin. None wore spectacles, and the clothes on the younger ones appeared particularly tattered. Perhaps they were hand-me-downs.
Once the learning session was adjourned, I interacted with a few children; asking each their name, age, and about their family members. I noticed many of them had a slight reddish discolouration of the hair, and many had brown discolouration of the teeth. Speaking about her family, one girl said “Mere do chhote bhai shaant ho gaye.” A while later, a boy mentioned “Meri do behnein thi, ek shaant ho gayi.” Shaant was their way of saying “dead.” It took me a couple of seconds to understand what they meant because those sentences were stated as matter-of-factly as what their parents do for a living. In the 10 minutes that followed, I learnt every child there has lost a sibling. Most have lost two.
Not knowing whom to talk to about what I’d just seen, I sat in silence on the way back to Tilonia. Staring out the jeep window, I knew what the rest of my night was going to be: I’d hold a straight face until I was back to my dorm and had the room to myself. And then I’d let the tears roll.
Ding in the Universe?
The lump in my throat following the Kachnaria visit lasted a few days and was perhaps eased by an eventful orientation. I got to learn from Tilonia’s most powerful communicator (a puppeteer named Ramniwas who has performed for dignitaries like Princess Diana) and acquaint with my co-fellows. My co-fellows brought experience from consulting, banking, and analytics. Some came armed with an MSW (Master of Social Work) and some with an MBA. One was a self-declared and proud stone pelter from Jammu and Kashmir.
With the orientation concluded it was time to choose the project I would work on. Among my options were:
● scaling up the night school model
● integrating arts and sports into the night school curriculum
● scaling up a bee-keeping initiative
● scaling up a nutrition initiative called “super 5”
● debugging and enhancing an existing waste management model
● creating menstrual health awareness
● scaling up rainwater harvesting
Since the time I’d arrived, I noticed trash and filth lying around the village. So I decided to work on debugging and enhancing the existing waste management model. This way, the result of my efforts (or lack of it) would be visible to the eye.
Right away, several challenges presented themselves. Was it viable to collect garbage from village households when a) they were so few and far between, and b) the amount of waste per household was quite low? The region’s scanty rainfall meant drainage pipes clogged more often. As for composting organic waste, the typical vermicomposting approach (using worms to do the decomposition) was not an option because worms can’t survive extreme temperatures. Turns out, dead worms aren’t as effective…
The worms had my empathy; Rajasthan’s winter was doing quite a number on me. The dorm chaadar I was given must’ve been someone’s idea of humour.
Then there was the language barrier. While many locals spoke Hindi, a significant fraction didn’t. And I didn’t know a word of Marwari besides padharo, mhare, and desh. How I was going to work with and seek cooperation from the locals, I had no idea.
I was way out of my comfort zone — the comfort zone was a dot to me (Joey reference intended). And not just on the project front.
In rural Rajasthan, having access to clean drinking water is a privilege. A 200-meter walk from the dorm was an RO water filter with four outlets serving all 250 residents of Barefoot College. The water tasted salty due to fluoride content, despite being filtered. I had an upset stomach for the first month and pain in the knees that would stay with me intermittently all through the fellowship.
The business casuals I wore amused people. “Interview dene aye ho ka?” said a colleague, tongue in cheek. To do a good job, I needed to inspire trust and eventually wield influence with the locals. Coming across as an aloof tourist was not going to help.
I buried the case containing my sunglasses deep into my backpack, as I chuckled at my naivety, and typed a message into WhatsApp: “Papa, please send me some light kurtas and pyjamas as soon as possible.”
It was just a couple of weeks since my arrival, and I realised it was Tilonia that was going to put a ding in me.
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Part 2: There’s Suman for Everyone
