Miles To Go – The Janwaar Data Project

REMOTE. The Rural Changemakers Of Janwaar.

Ulrike Reinhard / Editor

Miles To Go The Data Project Avinash Kothuri

The author has written this article on behalf of Apoorv Anand, Mannan Gupta and Divyansh Jimmy.

It was just another cold December morning in Janwaar. One of those mornings that makes it incredibly tough to get out from under the warm blankets provided by the homestay. And yet there we were – four volunteers awake at 6 am shivering through our morning routine. And greeting us at every corner was a condescending sneer from the villagers as they looked at our plight in the cold. I’ve never felt inherently inferior before but topless men functioning ten times as well as I did with four layers on just might have killed some of my chutzpah. But I had to put my insecurities aside as we were there to get some work done. And it was an important job at hand.

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The data project It’s been three years since Janwaar Castle kicked off as an experiment. In these three years, we’ve successfully managed to familiarise ourselves with the village and the issues the villagers were facing – or that’s what we thought. But it was high time we took the next step to weed out beliefs from facts, and to make this understanding more quantifiable – a bit more concrete. This is how the data project began.

As part of the data project, our primary goal was to collect the demographic, economic, education, and occupation information at an individual and household level. This data would then be matched with existing government schemes to identify those individuals/ families eligible for them. Once these individuals/households are identified, we have the manpower ready to help the villagers apply for the schemes. On top of this, we'll also get a much better understanding – at an aggregated level – about the issues that the villagers are facing. This will help us to prioritise and think of ways to tackle these issues one by one.

We initially faced quite a few challenges in identifying the relevant schemes for Janwaar. There is no single source of schemes available online that is exhaustive, accessible, and consumable. So after quite a bit of teeth-grinding and hair-pulling, we finally identified about 70 direct benefit schemes from a total of more than 350 schemes that the state and central governments offer in Madhya Pradesh. And while we were in no way confident about the exhaustiveness of this number, we were comfortable in the consensus that it is a good start. So we moved on to the data collection.

The sound of silence This brings us back to the cold days in December 2017. We were four volunteers, the questionnaire loaded on our mobile phones, ready to head out to every household we could find to get their consent and information. And while the initial goal of understanding scheme eligibility was very much etched in our minds during the process, the actual collection of data turned into something much more than just collecting data. It became a reason to hold conversations with every single villager. And after we had those conversations, when the volunteers all gathered again in a room, there was a distinct air of silence. The experience had hit us hard. We always knew that the Page 118/119 – Ramrati, 70 years old, cooking in her room. She has eight sons and hardly anyone takes care of her since her husband has died a year ago. Photo by Vicky Roy.

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villagers – especially the Adivasis – faced a difficult life. But nothing had prepared us for what we witnessed these days. The uncomfortable silence as all volunteers just stared at the walls of my room spoke louder than any passionate discourse.

We eventually spoke. And when we did, it wasn’t about the data – it was all about the stories we’d heard. Some stories hit us harder than others. Apoorv met a woman living with vaginal cancer with no money to treat it. Mannan heard that the Anganwadi1 only gets dough for 15 kids even though 40 kids need to be fed. I was shocked by the fact that most of the tribal women in the village carry heavy loads of wood on their shoulders and walk 10 kilometres to sell it for a paltry 100 rupees ($1.6). Divyanshu met a family that had lived in the village for years but still was not part of the ‘list’ and hence was ineligible for all government schemes – food, and housing, toilets included.

We heard from multiple sources that the Sarpanch (head of the village) allots work to the villagers, and before they even return from the bank, there he is waiting at their houses to collect his cut – which in most cases is more than 50%. One by one, everyone started rattling out the tales they’d heard – teachers stealing food from children, 17 people living in a one-room house with one toilet, adults stealing skateboards and selling them etc. The stories were appalling. And they kept on coming.

As it turned out, the conversations we had with the villagers became as important to the project – arguably more so – as the data itself. Listening to these stories as we stood behind a $300 smart phone and asked for their info, the disconnect between our lives and theirs seemed glaringly obvious – and for those few moments, unbridgeable.

Many of the stories were upsetting and some downright heart-breaking. They left us with a sense of helplessness for we could never be able to empathise. Add to that some bits of joy that we’d never have in city life, and it was clear that the thing about our lives being worlds apart was no understatement. These brief moments let us step into the figurative shoes of these barefooted people and see daily life for what it actually is in a village.

What hit the hardest however was the realisation that the entire sample size for this exercise was a village of barely 150 households. There was blatant corruption, deception, and dishonesty at the absolute last mile. These were people who lived within a 1

According to Wikipedia an Anganwadi is a type of rural mother and child care centre in India.

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few hundred meters from each other, and yet who showed absolutely no remorse in cheating the others for personal gain. One could be called extremely naïve to believe in a possible utopian country of 1.3 billion people living in harmony. However, it was difficult to come to terms with the stark fact that in such a small, open, disconnected community, economic incentives still trumped moral and social incentives. It was almost as if immorality and corruption were inherent characteristics of man. Thomas Hobbes would have come out of the exercise vindicated.

The North Star As part of our data collection exercise, one thing was remarkably obvious – the people now trust us. It was good to see that the work that we’d put in over the last years had gotten the people to believe in our motives. There were areas we knew that we hadn’t reached effectively as a project, but even these parts of the village warmed to us rather quickly. And this was heartening to see. And their warmth ensured that we got a clear understanding of the way they lived – how they ate, how they worked, and how they thought.

The way forward seems tough, but hope is not lost. As a project, we’ve only been here for less than three years. Believing that this is in any way near enough to make a sustainable, significant change in the mindsets and the daily lives of the people would be sheer arrogance. But it’s great to see that we’ve won the people’s hearts. We have always positioned ourselves as the catalyst in the transformation of a community towards the direction that the community itself chooses. While the catalysis is slow as expected, it has proven to be positive.

The data will now make it easy to identify and prioritise the issues to take up. Topics such as nutrition, and higher education always seemed like major issues, but we now have data to back up such a perception. Nutrition seems to be first on our priority list.

We’ve already begun with the small step of supplying fruit to the Anganwadi to ensure adequate nutritional supplements for the kids. And while we’re at it, we’re thinking of sustainable solutions that could solve this issue. Other steps will follow. The data serves as our guiding light. And now that we know we’ve won the trust of the villagers, we can use the data collected to show us – meaning the villagers and us – the way forward.

Page 122/123 – Sandeep (left) and Pradeep enjoying their bananas in front of the Anganwadi in Janwaar.

Photo by Vicky Roy.

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