A few metres away and you are on Amruta Baba Pawar’s land—15 acres of lush green on which Pawar grows jowar, onions, peas and fodder. The yield has been good enough for him to rebuild his house, send his son to the army and buy a vehicle. Much like Satish Ramdas Thange—his five-bedroom mansion has a car, a jeep and a tractor and his son goes to an English school outside the village.

Pawar, Thange and Satish Thange are all part of a script that dared to turn round the fortunes of Hiware Bazaar, a village 17 kilometers from Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. In a little over a decade, it changed from being a drought ridden, crime infested village to one of the most prosperous villages in the country. Over the years, this turnaround has earned Hiware Bazaar awards like the Best Ideal Village in the State, National Productivity Award and Sant Tukadoji Maharaj Cleanliness and Sanitation Award. The village was among the few that witnessed the phenomenon of ‘reverse migration’, when over 40 families who had migrated from the village to cities returned between 1992 and 2002.

Today, however, Hiware Bazaar has a whole new claim to fame. Of the 216 families in the village, one fourth are millionaires with an income of over Rs 10 lakh a year. Apart from these 54 millionaire families, the per capita income of the village, at Rs 24,000, is almost thrice the average of the top 10 per cent of rural areas nationwide and the average income has apparently risen 20 times in the past 15 years.

While in 1992, 168 of the 180 families lived below the poverty line, the figure went down to 53 in 2000 (among 210 families) and to three (out of 226 families) in 2007. “Our aim for 2008 is to make this figure zero. The Gram Sabha will give land to these three families and make sure their status is elevated,” said Poptarao Pawar, the sarpanch of the village who scripted the amazing turnaround after he took over in 1992.

“The main problems the village faced were that it fell in the rain shadow area with an average rainfall of just 350-400 mm, heavy soil erosion, degradation of natural resources, and scarcity of drinking water, fodder and wood for fuel. Given the situation, there was mass migration and those who stayed back indulged in crimes and drank all day. The village became a punishment posting for government officers and teachers,” said Pawar, a B.Com graduate, who as sarpanch decided to use funds from government schemes like the Employment Guarantee Scheme to regenerate the village’s natural resources—soil, water and forests—and put together a transparent administration led by a strong gram sabha.

The gram panchayat built 40,000 contour trenches around the hills to conserve rainwater. Ten lakh trees were planted. Bans were implemented on grazing on agricultural land, on digging of borewells and on planting water-intensive crops like bananas and sugarcane. The village also banned liquor, advocated the one-child-per-family norm and spruced up education.

The number of wells increased from 97 to 217, irrigated land went up from 120 hectares in 1999 to 260 hectares in 2006. Last year, the yield from onions alone was Rs 1.5 crore.

“Ours is the first village in the country to initiate a water audit,” said Pawar, who had been invited to Tokyo two years ago to present a paper on watershed projects and will now go to Turkey for a world conference on ground water management.

There’s more: crime rate is zero while literacy rates have shot up. Since 2002, HIV testing has been made compulsory for anyone getting married. Almost every family has a person in service—in the army, as a teacher or with the government. There has been no migration from the village in the last 10 years.

“Why would anyone want to migrate when the village offers a much better quality of life today,” asked 49-year-old Kashinath Padhiye, who was mockingly called ‘Sahukar’ by villagers till a decade back for doing any work asked of him as long as he was paid Rs 30 for it. Today, he owns 31 acres, a new house and an annual income of over Rs five lakh—and can rightfully lay claim to the title.