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Proving wrong the perception that government officials are lacklustre and lacking in ideas, a group of bureaucrats has worked with commitment to change the lives they touch in rural India. The Prime Minister’s Awards for Excellence in Public Administration (2006-2007) given last week acknowledged their initiatives

NISHA NAMBIAR
“It was like giving back to the education system from which I came,” says Pune District Collector Prabhakar Deshmukh. He studied in a Zilla Parishad school and years later as CEO of the Zilla Parishad in Kolhapur in 2002, he ensured that the government’s Rajarshi Shahu Sarvangin Programme to improve the quality of primary education, actually did so.
Deshmukh, along with his deputy commissioner in the state council for examinations Mahavir Mane, involved all stakeholders in the village, drawing out a plan that saw students, teachers, sarpanch, panchayat samiti members, MLAs and MPs working together. The results were heartening—100 per cent enrollment, improved academic performances and innovative teaching methods.
Its success made the Maharashtra Government take notice and convert this model into a Government Resolution last April 26. It is to be replicated in all Zilla Parishad schools in the state.
How did Deshmukh and Mane turn things around?
Well, first they held a workshop for teachers in January 2002 and chalked out a detailed plan for both the holistic development of a child and for improving the skills of teachers.
“People’s ownership for the programme was very important,” says Mane. After being approved by the general body of the Zilla Parishad, the teachers union and the gram sabha, the project took off in June 2002, covering 1,732 Zilla Parishad schools in Kolhapur with the participation of 8,585 teachers and over one lakh students.
There were other initiatives. A pre-test was devised for children and extra classes arranged for weak students. After this, says Deshmukh, it was the teachers’ initiative all the way.
Seeing the teachers take responsibility for their children’s education, the villagers decided to contribute to the infrastructure of schools. Deshmukh remembers how a 65-year-old woman walked up to him and gave him a ladoo in appreciation of the programme and told him that she too contributed to the programme. “She would visit the school and check on the number of absentees and then go to each of their homes and get the children to attend school,” says Deshmukh.
Another time, a few villagers made a cowshed on a school campus near Wadgaon and refused to vacate. So the children and teachers took on the role of anti-encroachment drive officers and got the place vacated in an hour. The MPs and the MLAs did their bit by making the necessary infrastructure available through funds while the mothers of students monitored their nutrition. The programme also roped in 500 ex-servicemen who imparted physical training to schools for an hour everyday.
The efforts paid off. The dropout rate in schools reduced from 7-8 per cent to 1.5 percent and academic performance improved considerably. Deshmukh and Mane now want to see this district’s success replicated everywhere in the state.

Lokvani Uttar Pradesh
Virendra Nath Bhatt
As additional project director of a project for family welfare, Amod Kumar worked on a software that could monitor schemes launched by the health department. Before he could get the system going, he was posted as district magistrate of Sitapur in 2004.
There Kumar, now special Secretary IT, worked with S.B. Singh, senior technical director, National Informatics Centre, UP unit, and launched Lokvani. Under this scheme, e-kiosks were set up in districts, where a villager could go and file a complaint. The kiosks are run by private players who forward the complaints to the DM’s office, which in turn asks the concerned department to respond to the complaint in a week.
Apart from getting their grievances addressed, villagers can also use Lokvani to check land records online and monitor tenders.
Singh gives the credit for the scheme’s success to the e-kiosk owner and operator. “Actually it’s the kiosk owner who does this scheme’s marketing. He tells the villagers that their problems would be redressed by the district magistrate and district police chief, if they filed the complaint through his e-kiosk,” says Singh.
The expenditure on computer hardware and Internet connection are borne by the entrepreneur and he makes his money from the Rs 10 per page that he charges the complainant.
The success of the project can be judged by the fact that so far over 3.25 lakh complaints have been filed by villagers across the state.
Singh is now busy implementing SWAN (State Wide Area Network), which will link all 71 districts, tehsil and community development block offices with Lucknow, with optical fibre cable by the end of July next. The NIC team under Singh’s leadership is also working on an e-district pilot project in six district—Rai Bareli, Ghaziabad, Greater Noida, Sultanpur, Gorakhpur and Sitapur.

Water and Sanitation Management Organisation (WASMO) Gujarat

BASHIR PATHAN
Chandrikaben Patel is the sarpanch of Dingucha village in North Gujarat. She is also the chairperson of the Pani Samiti, successfully managing the in-village water scheme, ensuring an adequate daily supply of water to 1,800 households (with a population of over 4,800) in her village. “Before we executed this community-managed project with borewells as its source in our village, women had to walk long distances to fetch potable water. Now, the water flows through the taps installed in each of the village households,” she says. Pani samitis were formed by the Water and Sanitation Management Organisation (WASMO), an autonomous body set up by the Gujarat government in 2002, to address the problems of the parched villages of the state.
In the five years that the organisation has been around, it has helped villagers form pani samitis in 10,640 of the 18,000 villages across the state. Women head such committees in about 879 villages and in fact, there are several pani samitis, where the members are all women. They monitor, maintain and even operate the water projects themselves, collecting community contribution and water tariffs fixed by the pani samitis and ensuring equitable distribution of potable water and its quality.
The pani samitis are formed in consultation with the Gram Panchayat and Gram Sabha and have representation from marginalised communities—at least one-third of their members are women. Funds are transferred to the samitis along with the responsibility of implementing in-village community-managed potable water schemes. WASMO provides the samitis with all information, technical, managerial and financial support and helps them implement the water schemes efficiently.
“We have set a target of forming water committees and launch community-managed potable water schemes in the remaining 8,000 odd villages by March 2009. About 27 lakh of the total 58 lakh households in rural Gujarat have already been given water taps under this programme and there are plans to provide water connectivity to nearly 15 lakh more rural households by 2010,” says WASMO CEO Jaipal Singh.

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