SHABDO, GAYA, OCTOBER 24 This village has no boundaries, any longer.

Farm boundaries—and sometimes alcohol—had been the source of all feuds and fights in Shabdo. People broke each other’s head, and even killed over the grass grown on the boundary or over sharing water. This is their first Diwali after they merged their individual fields totalling 175 acres. And they are celebrating it without liquor.

Children in village Shabdo have just learnt new lesson From a cluster of houses at war with one another, Shabdo has been transformed into a community. Collective farming has increased wheat production by at least 25 per cent. ‘‘Earlier, the mighty ones captured the limited water in the ahar (the pond that is part of an ancient water management system in the region). Now, whatever is cultivated is shared proportionately,’’ says Ramasheesh Prasad, secretary of the gram samiti.

There is a smile on every child’s face. They all wear the same colour to the school they attend without fail. Even the farmers have a uniform. There is no pile of garbage in the lanes of this village of 40 homes. Their cattle will now be kept at a common shed, which is under construction. The story of Shabdo, in the middle of the highly sensitive Naxalite area on the Bihar-Jharkhand border, is a rare tale of people’s will overcoming state apathy.

Shabdo is among the 40 villages on a 45-km long, centuries-old,defunct canal system—what is traditionally called the ahar-paine or the tank-canal system—revived by the people after Sarita and Mahesh, two unusual social activists reached here in 1999. It had taken her a few years in the underground Left movement before Sarita realised power do not flow from the barrel of the gun alone. She had a new conviction—‘‘people should act for themselves, someone else acting on their behalf was not permanent.’’ Somewhere down the lane, her path crossed with that of Mahesh Kant’s. Mahesh had come to Patna from Haryana in 1979, started as a small-time builder who carried the concrete mix himself and made it big in life. He contributed a large portion of his wealth to charity, but was disturbed that the ‘activists’ splashed his money unproductively. He was shocked when a Rs 20-lakh hospital that he made in a village was pilloried by the very people it was meant for. He realised that, ‘‘unless the people wanted it, you can’t force something on them.’’ After heated arguments over means of social change at a seminar in Patna, Mahesh and Sarita left for the villages of Gaya as a team.

They were most unwelcome—the villagers and the Naxals thought they were intelligence agents of the state whereas the police believed they were Naxalites. Mahesh was roughed up by the police several times. They began teaching children and slowly earned the people’s trust. They both spend 25 days a month in villages. Sarita spends the rest with her family. Mahesh is unmarried and his brother looks after his business. The ahar-paine system, believed to be a 4th Century BC invention, connects village ahars (tanks) to a river or stream through a paine (canal) and small branch canals. During the monsoons the river water flows into the tanks— there is no dam in the river. From the ahars, water is carried to the farms according to the needs. In the 18th century Vidhata Singh, a landlord in the village of Patna’s Taranpur, is said to have adopted it. It soon spread in the entire region but had been defunct for the last 60-70 years.

Sarita and Mahesh encouraged 35,000 people in 40 villages in Gaya district to revive a 45-km long canal, with branches into 170 tanks. This network was built by a landlord in the Salaiya village, the end of the canal. In 2000, the villages swung into action—after the irrigation department pegged the cost at an impossible Rs 6 crore—and cleared the canal in just seven months time. There were bridges and depressions that helped them track the canal.

There is a sweet irony in the entire effort. During zamindari, the zamindar maintained and controlled the costly system. He in turn, passed on the cost to the tenants, making land rents in this region several times compared to the rest of Bihar—as high as 80 per cent of the crop went as rent. But the renovation of the canal that passes through the hotbed of Maoist Coordination Centre-People’s War activism is in a different format. The very construction of the canal cracked feudal edifices—Rajputs and Musahars would bring food, exchange and eat together for lunch during digging.

Land in Shabdo was unfertile and the villagers worked hard to revive the canal. They added more land and crops to their farming over the last three years. When the Zila Parishad gave them Rs 22 lakh, they donated the land to build a community centre, anganwadi and a playground. In a place where no one trusted anyone, building material for the entire project was raised on credit from local shops. As trust and collective interest grew, they broke the boundaries between their farms. ‘‘Once they gained momentum, it was not difficult,’’ says Sarita.