Learning to rely on commonsense of community

It is often in the simplicity of peoples' lived experiences that one finds reasons for failure and success of complex schemes that are meant to change and better their lives.

I know this is stating the obvious. But my years of working with rights and entitlements issues have highlighted how quickly this thumb rule gets sidelined. We relish the comfort zones of complexities, value additions and protracted change arguments.

Last week during my travel to Bihar, I was refreshed by the commonsense of the community and its leadership. It was a humbling experience. My confusion or phase of a debate within was stripped away by a commentary from youth who said schemes are not just about what works and what does not. It is also about how it works on the ground, and often with results that were not intended.

From a macro perspective, a decline in wages through the national livelihood scheme for the rural poor is a setback. But a community that braves challenges of hunger on a daily basis, the decline is less important than the fact that the wages will now be earned while working on projects that are closer to home and will ultimately benefit the community.

The community also articulated the opportunity that state programmes create for not just bettering economic indicators, but of enhancing social empowerment. Even the struggle to get community meetings organised on functioning of the schemes is an exercise in bridging the gap.

From an ‘insider-outsider debate, the scheme does not work when it is not giving the figures that we expect it to and we try and fix supply channels, but for community it is not just about the statistics of failure and success, it is about the social processes that it creates.

Someday we need to get these two together, into a synthesis of what are the wider impacts and what is the community's perception of change.

Coming back to the large hall that evening, as darkness seeped in with little resistance by a single light bulb fed by a generator, the stories being shared were positive and incidentally the plots were not about who got what in terms of economic value.  The change narrative was much richer. It was about how voiceless got voice, how individuals became a collective and how state machinery was engaged.

Programmes at times need to see change indicators in fragments of outputs, but the community does not.

Between the discussions on how each community was pushing the envelope by challenging discrimination, one could not help but notice an over-sized portrait of Mahatma Gandhi under a roof that had gone through several reinforcements with old wooden log being supported by metallic beams. It presented an interesting metaphor for change and continuity, tradition and modernity.

As a testimony to the lucidity of narrative that only a community can create, do listen to this song on MGNREGA composed by new beneficiaries or as we call them change agents.