Mission Eval part 1

It was wondering many of my friends why was it called “Mission Eval”.
To all of them my reply was that this was a mission impossible in which tom cruise was me Binoy menon.
As I am narrating I have all the very rights to consider me the one. The time limit which was allotted by my boss was adding that term impossible in front of the mission.

Secondly it was one poor arid village called Eval which was bordering Pakistan and for the villager it was just a ride through unfriendly salt desert of Rann to Pakistan.

It was not my first village visit, but it was my first village visit as a part of a government team which is going to do development worth millions of Dollar.
Our first visit to the village was with long caravan of vehicles which included almost four Bolero and two of which were having a Red light flashing in top.


This has helped a lot to spread rumors between the villagers. It was said that certain sahibs where there into the village with some big land maps and records of landholding. This raised a fear about the revision of land taxes or that of some land acquisition.

The first and important thing to start our process was to do some surveys. The format says we need to do both social survey and natural resource survey. To our intimation of social survey there was a guarded response.
The patwari and Sarpanch provided us with the names of some of the people who could help us.
They where even introduced but the language barrier was putting a barricade in between us.
We got a mixed response from the people who were gathered for our help when we discussed about the participatory rural appraisal has this jargon is called has PRA.

Somewhere in my mind clicked Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ‘s Piya Re Piya Re lyrics and I was almost lost in scenic beauty of Kodai where the video of song was taken, when suddenly Mukesh woke me up from my day dream. This made me realize how difficult it is to explain a villager the purpose of our visit. Our team leader tried to explain the group of villagers with better reference to those few gathered to help us the reason of our visit.

One major question which they asked or even I wonder, I would ask was that “How this will benefit me ?” “Will I get canal water for irrigation?” “How much money will I get from Government?” “Will they give us job?” The questions where shooting from all sides and sitting somewhere in the crowd of officers who where outnumbering the villagers. I asked myself aren’t these questions my challenging theoretical knowledge. The physical comfort which I used to find in mind has long vanished with the distorted truth of reality.

That night I was sitting with Prakash and was discussing with him. How can we move through these problems? Hundreds of theories piled into my small mind. Hundreds of pages which I had jotted down during those lectures were counting to be worthless before this small experience.

There was another concern which was haunting our mind that a day is wasted with no fruits. Our desire to seek valuable information from villagers were nowhere at Horizons and we were feeling that we were lagging in the survey schedule.


Day two of our arrival, we had planned lot of thing in the village regarding the survey which we had discussed with the team. At a distance I could identify the village from the hilly terrain and a signal antenna of BSF out post which stand welcoming us into the village.

We split ourselves into two groups one would continue with the household survey and other will go around the village collecting the soil samples and taking GPS reading of the resources identified. I proceeded with the other group which was a group of three people including me, accompanied with a forest guard who was said to know each and every bush in the area.

We walked a kilometer towards the only source of water in the village. It was like an oasis with a flock of sheep and herds of cows waiting for their turn to drink water. Other side of the well was a check dam of irrigation department.

We climbed a small hill, too far to the horizons there were ubiquitous Babul and to one corner of my sight was the village. A narrow lane with small brick houses with asbestos roofing on either side of it neatly arranged as block games. These houses were newly constructed after devastating earth quake that rocked whole Gujarat.

We proceeded in search of more wells with our GPS machines.

Some of the villagers were drawn to us fascinated by those fancy equipments we were carrying with us. We felt that now the villagers where free to interact with us. They showed us a small stream which leads towards Rann. I tried to start some conversation in Gujarthi with a mutual adjustment in my pronunciations with help of the guard who was accompanying us.

I learnt some of my lessons. One I understood during the long village walk was that to carry a water bottle secondly, wear a turban or a cap.
Third, and most important never write anything in notebook which generally alarm the villagers and make them speechless.
In third day we got good hospitality in Sarpanch’s house. We could sit with villagers and sketch out some PRA techniques but in short it was not so successful. But this visit was a good rapport building exercise in short.