Jhadol Block, Pt. 1

Last Wednesday I was back amongst the Aravallis on my way to Jhadol, the seat of the largest of six blocks in which Seva Mandir works—blocks being administrative sub-units of the larger district. The Hills reveal more than the antic scattering of bumps and rises of my previous sojourn beyond the city: Evidence of their former splendor appears in the form of high and far-ranging ridges, fingers of which produce a landscape of haphazard valleys and bottomlands, some transected by streams, others guttering out in rock and dust. But all is green. The land folds like an accordion, producing neat ridges; it opens onto vast expanses heaped all around with regular hillocks, like gooseflesh rising from the pores of the earth; its hill huddle together as if to whisper, their sides so steep as to admit only the intrepid. Most often these features intermingle, to striking, if curious effect. What shaped this landscape? I wonder. I would commend its insouciance, its rejection of orderliness and symmetry and expectation. Does it operate in algorithms for which we cannot yet bring account? I assume that science can mold such chaos as the Aravallis into a comprehensible tale of birth and growth and inevitable decline. Science is good for nothing if not undercutting superstition and myth, for creating the rational counter-narrative. Still, the Aravallis must lay down a challenge. I know that the proper hills were created in a Precambrian geologic event; this accounts for the high ridges that bound the valleys all around. But what of the rest? How are they to be explained? I’m not rushing for answers.

By the time I arrive at Seva Mandir’s Jhadol office, I am sick. This owes as much to the driver’s rapid two-step of brake-and-accelerator as to the jarring, twisting roads. Suitably recovered within an hour, I hop onto the back of Anuj’s motorbike (Anuj, though he works in Jhadol, stays at my guesthouse on frequent visits to Udaipur), and we’re off to a village. I visit only two over the course of my time in Jhadol Block, but this is no matter. I am only seeking a glimpse of the world in which Seva Mandir works, a glint of understanding. I visit anicuts (small dams built by communities with Seva Mandir’s support), observe existing water sources, conduct informal interviews with a few scattered households. Where do you get your water for household use? I ask. Are your children often sick? Do you take any precautions to ensure the water is safe for consumption? Would you be willing to pay 10 Rs a month to finance a supply of clean water for your family? (This may prove the rub.)

Superficially, these villages are similar to ones in which I’ve spent time in Kenya. In both places rain arrives but once a year, in a furious gushing torrent of two or three or (in a good year) four weeks. Perhaps two feet will fall. The land, for the time being, is flush. But that is temporary; for the better part of the next eleven months, no appreciable precipitation will find its way to earth. The sun is brutal and direct (particularly in Kenya, which straddles the equator); water evaporates at several times the normal rate. With no outside source of water, no piping from a distant reservoir or siphoning off of some mighty river with its provenance in the mountains, every drop is precious. What monsoon brings, what the rainy season brings, must last. Subsistence is tenuous for most. Poverty signifies readily: small children are without pants, shirts; older children wear tattered and filthy school uniforms; bellies distend. It is all very familiar. India seems more blessed for the moment—greener, more water, more forest, more fodder—but perhaps this is a trick of the recent rains. In any event, the sheen of similarity does mask some fundamental differences in the social, cultural, and economic make-up of the two places—differences in land distribution, primary income sources, valuation of education, and the reach of government, among others.

One of the first, self-evident rules of development is that one size does not fit all. I have come to the field to receive what hints of identity might be offered up by this particular subset of “all,” this peculiar people nestled away from the world in the Aravalli Hills. What size will fit them? My superiors at Seva Mandir hope I can begin to answer this sort of question, one which, over many years, they have come to answer, if not entirely satisfactorily, at least to a degree to which they are peacefully resigned. It’s not that the people here are especially enigmatic; it is only that in development, one can never be assured of continuity and replication, of understanding and success. What works in one village does not work in the next, and this conundrum presents itself throughout the world—whether in the hills of western India, the slums of Mexico City, the jungles of the Congo, the mountains of Afghanistan, or inner-city Baltimore, rural Harlan County, Kentucky, and the banlieues of Paris. It hinges on questions of behavior, practice, custom, habit, belief, and values. This is the crux of development, or the implementation side of it at least: What will work in this place and why? Science fails here, or succeeds incompletely; it may tell us what should work, but it has less to say when its prescriptions falter, which is often. Its explanatory power shrinks in the face of multifarious humanity and its multifarious behavior.

The other side of development, what may be called the policy and management side for lack of a better term, involves mustering sufficient resources for a particular intervention (or more likely interventions) and then allocating them efficiently and effectively. It is a different sort of challenge, and one which I hope might be less intractable than the first. I will be dealing with both problems, but first things first: Given the world in which Seva Mandir works--its values, its beliefs, its culture, its economic and geophysical reality--how can a safe supply of drinking water be ensured? For the time being, this is my charge.