the goan I network
PANAJI
The more you learn, the more opportunity you have to go places and that reflects in the pathfinding vision that has realized Dr Chhavi Rajawat as the first woman with an MBA in the country.
In the State, to deliver her motivational talk “When Women Rule” at the 13th D.D. Kosambi Festival of ideas 2020 in the city on Thursday, Rajawat recounted how she overcame the odds with her determination to make her backward village in Rajasthan, a rural model to look upon and replicate.
Hailing from Soda village in Tonk District, Rajasthan, Rajawat reminisced how far better her hamlet used to be when she used to visit it as a boarding product. Circa 2009-10, the drought situation bothered her so much that she felt duty-bound.
“The challenge that we faced with the drought in our underdeveloped district is what made me agree to the village elders to becoming a sarpanch. It is another matter that in 2010, there was a reserve seat for a woman otherwise there was no way I would be thought of to take up the position in an extremely patriarchal society,” she revealed.
Growing up as a tomboy, who used to be out all day when in the village and hanging around with whoever was willing to take her around, that kind of security she had in her one big family is what Rajawat firmly believes to this day.
But she also realized that in the passage of time with the government funding having increased, her village was regressing. This disconnect deeply disturbed her. “If I was a daughter of village not coming forward to help, how can one expect someone from outside coming to help,” Rajawat asked. In 2009, Soda had suffered from the worst drought they had seen. For a good 13 years the village had not seen rain. How would a rain-fed agrarian society survive? They needed rain water. Rajawat realized that the villagers had no choice but to drink the extremely saline and naturally contaminated ground water. She also pertinently noted, as a consequence of which a high percentage of people from the village suffered from Down Syndrome.
This prompted the goodness in her, to be a vision agent between the government and the village and the non-government or private sector and the village. “I know the government department does not have the wherewithal of deploying people to every village. This is where we can have collective action to interact with the people on the ground, speak the language of people sitting in government offices and private sector and make the connect happen,” the First Ladies National awardee stressed.
“If there is a donor agency or a company, we can monitor work for them, do their project work thus making sure that every rupee goes where it needs be. We would not only be assisting them but in the process assisting the village as well. That is where my vision of an integrated development came up because in Soda village everything is inter-related,” the second-consecutive term Sarpanch-elect added.
Rajawat highlighted how participatory development has helped the village change for the better by citing an example. “If I were to take the example of a school, if we construct the best school in my village but a child going to that village suffers from malnutrition or Down Syndrome, what good is that institution? I need to ensure that the child has the right diet or nutrition. His or her family needs to be economically empowered. If it’s a farming community, then we assist and ensure that they receive better prices. If it’s a non-farming community, they should have the skill sets to feed the family. Once that is done you have to ensure road connectivity to bring the child to school. When it is time for examinations, the child needs to study and for that you need to ensure that there is electricity. If the child falls ill, there should be health services available,” she explained.
“When development comes from outside it is not a mild perspective but one should see the bigger picture,” Rajawat pointed out.
