Bees Saal Baad (Twenty Years Later)

Few decades ago, my father left his village of Bhatta (a village with a population of 10,000 situated almost 100 km from Delhi in western Uttar Pradesh) in search of better livelihood. My grandparents were farmers who inherited some land and lawsuits in a joint family. My father, the eldest son, was one of the few who cleared Indian Air Force exams to join as an Airman. My mother and elder brother joined him in the city after a few years of marriage.

I spent my summer vacations in the village of Bhatta and a few other villages in western Uttar Pradesh where my maternal grandparents and other relatives lived. My brother and I became proficient at switching to village dialect at the beginning of summer vacations and again picking the city’s dialect at the end of the holidays. Nowadays the visits have become lesser with busier adult life and losing my grandparents but I have been fortunate to see the changing rural India through these villages in Uttar Pradesh.

Here I am sharing the shifts I have seen in the villages over the last few decades and the opportunities ahead of us.

Houses, transportation, electricity - infrastructure has evolved

1. As a child, most of the houses around me had at least some floor that was kachcha. It was a weekly task for the women in the house to sweep the kachcha floor with a mix of cow dung and local soil. Today the kachcha floor is a rarity. The houses look similar to multi-storied houses in towns and cities. On the night of Diwali, you can see many roof tops with Chinese lights and candles instead of mitti ke diye.
2. During my summers, most houses had nal (handpumps) for water. We used to fill buckets of water for everything. Today many houses have replaced their nal (handpumps) with taps and plastic water tanks by building their own water borewells. Electricity and battery powered inverters and generators are more common now.
3. Dankaur, the nearest town to our village, is 7 km away. My father used to walk the distance to his school. When I visited the village during summers, the primary mode of covering the distance was a shared auto. Today people use their personal two-wheelers and four-wheelers to cover the distance. Children use cycles and even scooty to cover the same distance.

Social fabric has shifted from barter and community-driven to money and professional-driven

1. Few decades back, life in the villages was more community driven. Households used to be self-sufficient in their needs for milk, curd and ghee. When a household ran out of milk, they took some from their neighbors. These trades were common behavior, we used to barter wheat grains for savories at shops in the villages. Today with the arrival of dairies, households are not only selling milk but they have also started buying milk from dairies for their daily needs.
2. In the absence of machines, agriculture used to be labor intensive. Households were dependent on each other to carry out big farming activities such as sowing and harvesting of crops. For eg. sowing the sugarcane crop was a mini festival where many friends will help the family in the activity and the host family will prepare a meal for everyone afterwards. Today with the arrival of machines in agriculture, the dependency on these community practices has reduced. The practice of kaam-ke-badle-kaam (work-in-exchange-of-work) has been replaced by kaam-ke-badle-daam (money-in-exchange-of-work).

People are not dependent on agriculture only, entrepreneurship is growing

1. Earlier farming was seen as a way to fulfill the needs of the family, the dependent livestock, and a little extra. Today the outlook towards farming has shifted from fulfilling family needs to a business that brings cash. Households are willing to buy their vegetables, rice from the market but they are producing cash crops.
2. Today households are not dependent on agriculture only. People have started many processing based businesses in the villages. Some of these include processing sarson and rice, processing milk, poultry farming.
3. Other businesses such as marriage halls, renting tents, pesticide shops, fast food, computer shops, pharmacies can be seen in small towns and big villages in the rural area.

Mobile phone is leading the revolution

1. Few decades ago when televisions appeared in villages, they expanded people’s aspirations by exposing them to the lives beyond villages. Now mobile phones have empowered people to fulfill those aspirations by democratizing access to knowledge.
2. People are experimenting to increase their income in agriculture and beyond. Youth from families with no business background and guidance are venturing into starting small businesses.
3. Some of the common apps on the mobile phones in the villages include e-ganna (an app to connect to sugarcane mills), IFFCO Kisan app (for farming knowledge), Meesho (e-commerce), Ajio (e-commerce), Byjus (ed-tech), Khan Academy (ed-tech), Mauj (entertainment), Josh (entertainment) and the popular Youtube (education and entertainment).
4. Apart from democratizing access to knowledge and expertise, another leading factor is access to credit. Earlier the local Sahukars or Seths were the only medium to get access to money. Today people in the villages know about loans like Mudra loan that gives access to credit to open shops without any collateral.

Customer behavior is changing

1. Till five years back, marriages in the villages used to take place under a make-shift arrangement in open spaces. Recently, marriage halls have come up in the villages and people are willing to pay for the marriage halls for the convenience and social status.
2. This year, for the first time, I was able to post rakhis through Amazon without even a house number. The delivery in rural areas and small towns works on the basis of a phone number. The absence of house numbers in most areas is not a hindrance.
3. People’s emphasis on education has continued over the decades. I have rarely seen students in the government school near our house in the village. Every family wants to send their kids to private schools in nearest towns or in English-medium schools that have appeared in numbers in the villages. Government schools are used only by very few families who are in a very bad situation financially.
4. People still rely on nearby towns for access to secondary and good healthcare facilities. However, more pharmacies and small clinics have opened up in the village.

Women’s education and aspirations are leading

1. I clearly remember the day in the summer when my friend in the village was asked to stop her studies after 8th class. She was a really good student and wanted to become a teacher. Ironically, her brother who had already failed the 10th class once, was asked by their father if he wanted to re-appear. Today my friend is married, living in a nearby village but she is making sure that her daughters are going to good private schools.
2. My friend is not just a one off case. While the number of girls getting married without a chance at a career is still high, I am also seeing examples of girls resisting marrying young. They have aspirations. Recently I received a call from a girl in my village. She wanted to discuss a job email that she received to work as a medical lab technician outside India. She was disappointed when I told her it was a spam email but nonetheless she still believes in the possibility.

Small scale farming is still unsustainable and migration is still aspirational

1. People still want to get out of farming at the first opportunity that they get. The rising cost of farming (expensive inputs) and the unpredictability of weather has forced people to look for other opportunities. Over the generations, the land has been divided into smaller holdings, making farming unsustainable even for nuclear families with rising lifestyle costs.
2. Those with small landholdings are finding small jobs in the cities and factories due to proximity to Delhi-NCR while the families stay back in the villages. Even the landless households prefer to find a seasonal job in the city than the villages in comparison to wages of INR 200-300 per day.?

Money has appeared but money management has not

1. In 2011, the villages of Bhatta-Parsaul were the center of widespread farmer protests against land acquisition. With the government acquiring land in the area, many families in the village got big sums of money. However, in the absence of right knowledge, many families ended up spending it on one time functions such as children’s marriages and bought depreciating assets such as bigger houses, cars in the villages. In the end, their life became worse as they lost land as a permanent income source and didn’t gain any additional investments or skills through education.

Why does it matter?

Because in the problems lie the opportunities and in the grit and aspirations of the people in rural India lie the next big dreams.

NOTE: This piece is inspired by Vipul Rawal's reflections, Partner at Elevar Equity, on the changes he has seen #BeesSaalBaad in his village in Rajasthan and the promises held by rural India and the entrepreneurs working towards this customer segment.