Expanded PMUY - IV

R K Narayan in one of his books wrote about an incident in a remote village in South India where a government initiative was launched to eradicate Malaria. As a part of the program, a projector and a screen were rigged and a film on Malaria was shown to the villagers. Seeing a close-up shot of a mosquito feasting on a person a villager remarked, “Nothing to worry, our village mosquitoes are far smaller and hence not harmful”.

As I move about in the remote villages, I am stating a few incidents, which you may call the human face of PMUY.

Incident-I

As I studied the figures on the computer screen, we found that two villages are having very low participation. Both the District Nodal Officer and the Field Officer gave a piece of their mind to the LPG Distributor (Name: Dinendra Narzary) who was assigned to that village.

So one evening Dinen with a school teacher friend visited the village for a session. About thirty villagers sat for the meeting. While explaining about the scheme Dinen said, “This is a developmental model of the Prime Minister”. 

Immediately the situation flared up.  The word “Model” has wrong connotations in the villages. They thought that these two people have come to take away their girls for a modeling career. The fact that Dinen was seen moving around the villages with a fat man from Guwahati who carried a camera, further aggravated the situation. Both Dinen and his schoolteacher friend was about to be lynched.

Luckily, an old woman who was a participant said, “Kinsmen, don’t be so angry. Dinen is my cousin’s son and I know him. He will never indulge in anything so wrong. He goes to church regularly”. Luckily the crowd was slightly pacified and Dinen and his friend came away unscathed.

This story might seem a bit far-fetched but let me state that, Witch-hunting and human trafficking are two major issues of that area. So the people’s anger or suspicion is not unjustified.

Incident – II

As we were driving through the long village roads, we saw a man hiding behind a tree. Dinen asked me to stop the vehicle and called out to the man, “Elder brother, what are you doing?”

The man came out from behind the tree with an apologetic smile on his face. He had a machete in his hands. With a guilty look on his face he said, “Oh, I was just chopping some firewood for the hearth”.  Hearing which Dinen said, “But brother I just released a gas connection to you three months back, is your cylinder empty”?

Actually, the LPG connection of the man was a gift from his son who works outside the village in a big city. However, the father and mother had kept the LPG cylinder and stove in a safe place without using it for even one day. They told Dinen that the cylinder will be put to use only during the rainy season when dry chopped wood is hard to get. They said, “What is the point of spending money on a cylinder when the wood available is free?”

Incident - III

The road was long and sweet and three women were coming from the other side. We stopped the vehicle and Dinen talked to the women.  Although I did not understand the language, I could get the gist of what was discussed. 

Three of the ladies wanted to give the LPG connection a try but one lady among them already had an LPG connection and she said, "After so much of trouble and submitting so many papers they did give me an LPG cylinder and equipment. Sisters, it is the most useless thing. The food cooked in LPG is not at all tasty like when cooked in a log fire. It is only good for making tea when for a few cups of tea you do not feel like lighting the fire in the hearth".