With sheer will, this duo is transforming lives of women in rural India

An ambitious civil society initiative is trying to plug the state's failure in some of the most backward parts of the country

For Anish Kumar and Anirban Ghose, the two encounters bordered on the epiphanic. Kumar and Tata Trusts managing trustee R Venkataramanan were touring Jharkhand when they met a middle-aged woman in Tilladih in Gumla district. Thanks to the introduction of water harvesting and intensive agriculture, the 70-odd households in the village had seen their average incomes shoot up from Rs 40,000 to almost Rs 300,000-400,000 a year. When they asked the woman what else she wanted, she gave them an astonishing reply: She said that she wanted her children to be like them. 

The woman explained that though she had more money now, she could not ensure a better quality of life for her children because her village did not have the necessary health and education infrastructure. The village school was almost dysfunctional. A serious illness could not be treated locally and often resulted in death.

"Your children do not die of diarrhoea, but ours do. Your children speak, converse and think in a certain way because they have access to good education. We want our children to be like you," she said. 

The second encounter occurred closer home -- in Delhi's Hauz Khas. Kumar and Ghose, who worked with the Delhi-based NGO, Pradan, met a sweeper employed by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and got chatting with him. The man, who was from Karouli, Rajasthan, said that he led a wretched life sweeping the city roads even though in his village he had land, three buffaloes, and could afford to eat rotis with ghee. But he had made the trade-off for the sake of his children. His village had negligible medical facilities and no school to speak of. At least in Delhi, he had a better chance of keeping his children alive and giving them an education. 

That's when the penny dropped for Ghose and Kumar. They realised where NGOs like Pradan, which work to empower the marginalised, came up short. While they could certainly make an impact on improving livelihoods, food sufficiency and so on, they could not ensure quality education and medical care for the community's children.

"Our studies showed that a girl born in rural India is 80-90 years behind a girl born in an Indian city. Communities' aspirations regarding education and health were simply not being addressed," says Kumar.

It was this realisation that led to the birth of the Transform Rural India (TRI) mission. Based on a few long discussions with Tata Trusts, it was decided that an independent civil initiative would be set up to work on plugging the gaps left by the state in delivering social infrastructure to India's villages. Kumar and Ghose worked with TRI for a year on deputation from Pradan, and once it was registered in 2016, joined it full-time. 

TRI aims to collaborate with the government to work not only towards raising income levels, but also improving the quality of education, health and sanitation in its project areas. And the aim is to involve the community in this exercise. "Community engagement is often missing at the village level. Villagers are often not aware of what they are entitled to and so the state gets away with little or no delivery," explains Kumar.

TRI is conducting two exercises: A public system gap analysis and a community-need assessment. The gaps will be identified and placed before district and state officials. Further, TRI will work with established NGOs (see chart) to help bridge the delivery gap. For example, it will identify an NGO with vast experience in the education sector to work with a government school to increase accountability and tone up delivery. "We will bring the best practices and implement them," says Kumar.

A mapping of villages done by the government in 2011-12 found that 100,000 villages, mostly in central India, Jharkhand and Bihar, were "stranded". TRI will focus on this backward area and try and raise the income of 80 per cent of the households from the present $1,200 per year to $3,000 per year. Its other goals include: Ensure all households have proper drinking water and sanitation facilities, reduce school dropout rates so that 80 per cent of the girls study till the age of 14, and create vocational opportunities for students.

Initially, TRI will concentrate on Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh. Employing a cluster-based approach, the mission has so far reached 25 blocks and 1,600-odd villages while the target outreach is 3,200 villages. The work is expected to cost Rs 6 million per block for five years. Both the MP and Jharkhand governments have been responsive to the project and Rs 1 billion has already been leveraged from them. The aim is to eventually impact the lives of 100 million people.