My summers in Dholpur were in short a series of first experiences- of working with an NGO, of milk dairies, of poverty, of a typical village life, of child marriages, of women empowerment.
The villagers of Dholpur have given the phrase ‘live for today’ a whole new meaning. If they have hundred rupees at hand they will spend those hundred bucks today, even if they don’t have a single paisa for tomorrow. And the NGO I did my summers with-PRADAN had the single most important job of changing this mindset and inculcating amongst the villagers the habit to save. Everything else followed it.
The district of Dholpur is situated in Rajasthan, near the UP border. Around a quarter of the population staying in its villages are below the poverty line. None of the villages have the basic amenities like electricity or running water. Even the basic sanitary conditions are absent.
For a person like me who has grown up in Delhi and has believed in the idea of ‘India Shining’, Dholpur was like a village in the black and white movies. No water, no electricity, farmers in a debt trap, money lenders, rigid caste system, and people having seven to eight children. These conditions were something I had read about. But it was at Dholpur that I came face to face with them.
If I could place my finger on two factors that are responsible for such poor conditions in Dholpur and whose removal would give a major uplift to the area then those would be- illiteracy and excess of children.
The people and the NGOs are working together to remove these two evils. Any and everyone who can afford to send even one child to an English medium school in town do so, even if it means paying fee that is unaffordable or even taking a loan. And many people are now undertaking family planning programmes in order to keep a check on the growing families (four to five children are now supposed to be enough). Yet couples do so only when they have at least two male children. If men at Dholpur a less educated, women hardly are. Some can write their names, but most can’t do even that. Only a few have gone beyond primary school.
One of the reasons for female illiteracy is that women are married quite young at the age of 12-13 years. Child marriage was another phenomenon about which I had just heard about earlier, but saw the reality of it for the first time in Dholpur. I have heard people making statements about child marriage and how it is a disease afflicting certain sections of our society. Yet my stay at Dholpur taught me that child marriage is not a disease but mere symptom of poverty and illiteracy. Any family that has some money delays their daughter’s marriage till she is around sixteen. It is the people living below the poverty line that marry off their daughters at ten or twelve.
In spite of all these short comings, something which stood out during my stay at Dholpur was the hospitality I received from those poor villagers. All the villages I went to I was welcomed with open arms and was made to feel special. Dholpur was all my first experience with the true spirit of hospitality. I was given the best when they hardly had anything for themselves.
Another thing that stood out was that despite the illiteracy and poor social status, adversity had made the women there stronger than there male counterparts.
Dholpur for me in short was stint with reality.
Pallavi Joshi
MBA 2007 Batch
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