Ranchi.

And Here I am! At Rukka near Ranchi interning with KGVK  Living amidst vast stretches of farms growing anything from arwa rice to starchy potatoes, from luscious lychee to glowing mangoes, I feel like I have been picked up from my room and put in the middle of nowhere! The past few days have been quite a revelation. Getting to know the life in the real India. The India which we aren’t aware of, where the basic amenities seems to be a far cry and where 9% growth seems like a foolish statistic. I have been learning about the various projects that KGVK is involved in in their various pillars of the Total Village Management (TVM) initiative, but going to the field and meeting people is something that cannot be substituted with any amount of knowledge. Seeing how families below poverty line live and how even in 2011, major population is still dependant on primitive agricultural practices. Such an experience is something which has brought me here in the first place and it’s certainly living up to it!
My newly made friends and I here at KGVK made a trip to a village called Kinni in the block of Patratu (Jharkhand). We started off at 7 am in the morning as it was a long way to the village travelling more than 60 kilometres one way traversing the zigzag way across the mountains and the water reserve over the Patratu Dam. It was a calm spectacle with the still water and flat green lands void of any existence. Then later we reached the village where we soon met the village folk. Everybody started to gather around in the church courtyard, a somewhat pakka ground surrounded with walls made of red bricks haphazardly placed, barring any use of modern construction techniques. It seemed like a perfect setting for my first experience. People poured in and seemed to be at ease with the idea of KGVK coming to their village. Most of them greeted with a gentle smile.
And soon it all started. I was surprised to see people coming in even after it started wanting to hear what all it was about. It was like they were genuinely inquisitive about the day’s proceedings. One by one people from KGVK talked about the importance of knowledge. While the government schemes focused on helping directly with resources, KGVK wants to assist with knowledge empowerment. It sounded like the perfect analogy of giving you a fish to eat or teaching you how to fish; Teaching the people about sound agricultural practices, livestock rearing and the importance of sustaining their natural resources. Not just that, the meeting talked about the importance of working together in combating poverty, focus on making self-help groups and adolescent groups so that further government schemes can be employed for their benefit.
However, the people weren’t completely accepting the idea of such schemes making a real impact to their lives. They had previously reared goats within a self-help group but the experience turned sour as the goat died. Scepticism was pretty visible but KGVK realises it to be a slow and painful process. The process of them getting to understand the schemes and slowly being imbued into them. So here it began the process, from one village to another.