A ruby sparkles as governance glows
Technology and capacity-building support are changing lives in remote regions
Rubina Readymade Garments — the name stands out boldly on a hut in a small village in Basta block in Odisha’s Baleswar district. Inside the hut are a few sewing machines and sitting behind one of them is young Rubina Khatun, who hails from a traditional background but has aspirations of becoming a successful entrepreneur.
“I am extremely grateful to the officials of the Tata Trusts, who encouraged me to set up my own small business,” says a shy Rubina. “I have four other girls working with me here, and a Bhubaneshwar trader buys all that we produce.”
Rubina is one of a new generation of young Indians who are seeing a gradual transformation in their lives. Fuelling their ambitions are ground-level development initiatives such as DDG, promoted by the Trusts.
DDG aims to provide technology and capacity-building support to rural and urban decision-making systems. The Tata Trusts started the initiative in April 2015 with the development of a tech-enabled micro-planning platform called the DELTA platform. This framework has been implemented in 1,200 village councils. “We are trying to create governance tools to compile and collate data using technology, and thus create processes by which informed decisions can be taken,” says Dr Poornima Dore, who heads DDG.
The Trusts are engaging with district and block level entities to use DDG to drive sustainable community developments in Baleswar in Odisha, Chandrapur in Maharashtra, Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh and Noamundi in Jharkhand. They are also working with the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, which is active in different development initiatives.
Government boost
Dr Dore says that the DDG initiative got a boost when the Indian government launched the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana in 2015. The scheme encourages Members of Parliament (MPs) to develop a village in their constituency as a model village.
“What the Tata Trusts are doing in my constituency is simply superb,” says Rabindra Kumar Jena, MP, Baleswar. “They are involved with 100,000 households; they are putting in enormous efforts and their community involvement has grown multifold.”
DDG is helping shine a light on the actual needs of villages and villagers. More important, the deployment of technology is helping drive change and give much-needed focus to governance in areas where it is most needed, India’s rural hinterland.
‘Hope this becomes a model for the country’
He has access to key facts and data relating to his constituency at his fingertips. Rabindra Kumar Jena, member of Parliament (MP) from Baleswar constituency in Odisha (and representing the state’s ruling Biju Janata Dal party), believes that it is essential for people in government to have data that reflects the quality of life experienced by ordinary citizens in their constituencies.
“Unless you have access to ground realities you remain clueless,” he said. “I respect data highly and use it to keep track of developments here.”
Elected to Lok Sabha in the 2014 general elections, Mr Jena regularly interacts with residents of his constituency. “I represent 1.5 million voters in a constituency that has a total population exceeding two million. But meeting a few hundred in my office daily is not enough. I need to travel to different parts of the constituency.”
The MP visits remote villages across Baleswar and has come across astonishing facts. At one village, officials said it had access to electricity for six years. “When I went there, the villagers told me they had no electricity,” says Mr Jena. He got the government machinery to move and within six days, electricity lit up the village for the first time in its history.
“That incident became a trigger point for me,” says the MP, who started recruiting young volunteers from villages to promote activities that helped the needy. He invited the Tata Trusts to help because he had heard of its development achievements in rural Andhra Pradesh.
The MP notes that what the Tata Trusts is doing in Baleswar is ‘superb.’ “There are nearly half a million households in my constituency and about 100,000 have been touched by its programmes,” he says. “I hope this becomes a model for the entire country.”