Ladybug's field notes

Visiting field areas for work is always an exhilarating experience as you get to learn much faster than you can learn from a report. As one keenly listens to people and their observations one tends make more connections in one's head. Many assumptions get challenged. Many new learnings emerge.  I recently visited areas around the Indo-Nepal border in Uttar Pradesh. One of the most interesting insight that I got during this travel is that there is active push-back to adolescents’ aspirations. The Community Developers or the field workers working in these areas found this active push-back as one of the greatest challenges in working with adolescents. I would have assumed it is around getting boys and girls to sit together for the sessions in the villages, which was surprisingly seen as a positive thing by the mothers with whom I talked to.  They felt it was important. However, I heard that the greatest challenge came from the village elders who think by engaging with...

I tried to refer to everyone by their first name. It was my first effort in feudal eastern Uttar Pradesh to challenge the assigned gender-roles and caste ridden social norms. But I could not follow this with R B Palji. His name was Ram Badan Pal. I felt on many occasions that he did not like his name. He never introduced himself with that name. He hence remained, Palji or R B Palji to me whereas everyone else was called by their names. Even the senior most.  When I first met him in a training on "Human Rights and Gender in Development" in 2008, I thought he was a misfit in the group. A well built man in his 40s, he mentioned Pedagogy of the Oppressed within the first few minutes and I said in my mind, "O..o! Here comes a theoretician who would  take the training completely off track!" I admit this today with much shame! But, the situation changed quickly. We stayed in the same campus for 5 days and I got to talk to him. A lot! It helped. And what helped more ...

"Rama jagi..Ram jaga/jagi nagri saari/Maya jagi, Kala jagi/Jaagi ghar ghar nari" (Rama woke up, so did Ram/ the whole town woke up too/ Maya woke up so did Kala/ each wman in each house woke up too) Or thats what I frequently claim about the work with women on rights of the poor. In Uttar Pradesh's 9 districts, I did not work on women's rights with poor Dalit women. I did not even work on Dalit rights. I strongly believed if you work with the most  vulnerable in a marginalized community and facilitate the process through which they take charge of changing their community's future, you would be able to protect the most vulnerable's rights in the most sustainable manner. I started developing rights based projects in an  environment ridden with skepticism. "Rights based work? Umm..isn't that all about destroying national property and wasting time (of the right holder as well as the duty bearers) and money by blocking roads, jamming offices, promo...

"We are poor when elections are here. When it is time to count the BPL (Below Poverty Line) families, we are not poor at all"! added Anarsi with a sarcastic smile. her simple analysis stumped me! She was explaining how the Gram Sabha (open meeting of the village council) meetings take place. Women in the meeting explained how they protested there against the Gram Pradhan and Secretary smoking country cigarettes ( birhi ) and passing time. They actually asked them to stop fooling around and conduct the open meeting of local self governance seriously. Ramratti was quick to add, "The Secretary then told us, had we been so vocal and upbeat about the Gram Sabha processes, there would not have been so many wrong BPL cards! It was I, who said then..", she emphasized, ".. mere bhai (my brother), I was not there for sure but were you also not there? Was it not your work to ensure the deserving ones get the cards?" (Gram Sabha) These are leaders of Pra...

--> A population of 1.45 million, 598 Gram Panchayats, 9 Blocks and only 3 Block Development Officers (BDOs), one of whom I met recovering from a tell-tale sign of a hangover and lying in his courtyard on a sunny winter afternoon. We reached his office and was quite taken aback by finding him on his cot in the backyard of government quarter instead of the office. I was in Uttar Pradesh  trying to satisfy my curiosity regarding what keeps UP at the bottom in NREGA implementation. Now don’t tell me you do not know NREGA. You will be hanged, drawn and quartered in the present government’s raj if you don’t. After all the current political party in power has beaten and keeps beating every willing and reluctant drum available to announce the program that at Rs 390,000 million has the single largest chunk of allocation and is second only to defense. If you are part of the middle class paying tax diligently like me (just because the tax norms are becoming tighter a...