Hivre Bazaar - The proof is in replication

When I spoke to Manish Kumar, co-founder of www.farmsnfarmers.org (a nonprofit organization that aims at marketing farmers crops direct to wholesalers) and told him that I am planning to go to Anna Hazare’s village Ralegan Siddhi to understand the self-sustaining Adarsh gao (ideal village) model, he urged me to also visit Hivre Bazaar. Hivre Bazaar had taken the Ralegan model of sustainability and replicated it with even greater success.

Ravindra Gajre - my ride from Ralegan to Hivre Bazaar

So I decided to stop at Hivre Bazaar and check it out for myself. Hivre Bazaar is located 50 KMs from Ralegan, however public transport from Ralegan to Hivre Bazaar wasn’t easy to find. Luckily one of the locals Ravindra Gajre who showed me around Ralegan on a bike offered to give me a lift to Hivre Bazaar.

As mentioned in the previous post in the words of Anna every village can become a model village like Ralegan Siddhi but there are 3 prerequisites:

1. A strong leadership
2. Strong moral character
3. Lots of sacrifice

The Sarpanch (elected village head) of Hivre Bazaar, Popatrao Pawar satisfies all the prerequisites. While I waited for Mr. Pawar to arrive at the local gram sabha (the village governing head quarter) I took the time to explore the village. I couldn’t find a single shack, every house was well constructed and even the low income households although smaller in size were still well built. 

Communal marriage hall in Hivre Bazaar

One of the locals Mohan Chhatre took great pride in showing me an area of approximately 1 acre (43,000 square feet) under construction and informed that the village was building a venue for mass weddings. Villages in India are rife with the caste and dowry system, a strong reason for female foeticide which explains why the male to female ration in India is skew and currently stands at 917 females for every 1000 males. These mass communal marriages are attended by the entire village, villagers cook and serve the meals and no dowry is exchanged. Mass communal weddings are also practiced in Ralegan.  

Hivre Bazaar became an ideal village in 1995 with the help of funding from Maharashtra government which had plans to transform another 300 villages, however the success of Ralegan and Hivre Bazaar and the rising stature of Anna Hazare made the government insecure and subsequent funding was stopped.

Hivre Bazaar practices a similar value based approach to progress as Ralegan

1. Nashabandi (ban on addiction),
2. Nasbandi (sterilisation),
3. Kurhadbandi (ban on felling trees) and
4. Charaibandi (ban on grazing) and, additionally,
5. Shramdaan (voluntary labour)
6. Lotabandi (ban on open defecation). In fact almost every household has its own enclosed toilet and only someone who has been to India would realize the value of this achievement.

 While the transformation of Anna’s Ralegan began with the building of a temple, the transformation

of Popatrao Pawar’s Hivre Bazaar started with building the local school through shramdaan (voluntary labour). Soon people were harvesting rain water, building check dams, using drip irrigation to save water and in 2007 Hivre Bazaar won the first national water award. The average per capita income is now one of the highest in rural India and there are even instances of reverse migration, where people who once left for cities in search of higher income have returned to Hivre Bazaar and are better off financially and emotionally. The village has planted 1 million trees with the help of school kids.

After taking a brief tour of the village I returned to the gram sabha building, a beautiful building

Gram Sabha built with voluntary labour and government funding

constructed through voluntary labour and saw a group of people who were touring from other villages to meet with Mr. Pawar and hopefully take some of the lessons from Hivre Bazaar to their village. Such tours are called visits. I took lunch with the volunteer members of the gram sabha who spend some time everyday discussing matters of the village, talk to people who come on visits and handle the admin work of the gram sabha – all this for no pay because they take a lot of pride in the work they do for their own village.

Buffet with the gram sabha volunteers

I ate what the gram sabha folk told me was the local buffet where people open their lunch and share each others food. I found a new way of eating onion here (Ahmednagar is the onion belt of Maharashtra or for that matter India), which basically involves placing a whole onion on the floor and slamming it with your palm so it breaks open in to a few pieces – very satisfying.

 

Hivre Bazaar sarpanch  - Popatro Pawar

Soon after lunch Popatrao Pawar arrived and started addressing the people who came on the visit in the local language Marathi, he did check with me if I understood and I said I did - almost 80% at his pace. Mr. Pawar is young, educated, fit  and full of energy, he has an aura which is hard to miss. He spoke the same language as Anna and had the same ideas as Anna, it was almost as he was the younger version of Anna. I told him I was visiting from South Africa to observe how one village could transform itself from poverty to prosperity in a span of 10 years. 

Popatrao Powar and villagers from the neighbouring districts

 

He said that he wanted to do something for his village and hence he decided to run for Sarpanch instead of going to work for a corporate and is inspired by Anna and does meet him from time to time. Mr. Pawar is an M.Com Graduate of Ahmednagar University and played cricket at the state level.

 

After meeting with Mr. Pawar I was glad that we have selfless leaders like him who are relentlessly trying to create ways for a better quality life in rural India. I am glad the India envisioned by Gandhi is being realized by modern leaders like Anna Hazare and Popatrao Pawar.