A Free Mud Bath, Plus Exercise

*I’m following Jeff’s lead and changing my blog post titles so that they’re actually informative; sorry they’re not as cute anymore!

Last week, Jeff and I went a two day jaunt to a nearby district to conduct field research, with one of my PI’s (Principal Investigators, the professors who are our bosses). The goal of the trip was to meet with a bunch of village leaders and other government officials to answer some of our questions about how development projects are funded. This was actually our fourth field trip, but we were so swamped afterward that we never took the time to write about the others; sorry! That’s also the reason why it’s taken me over a week to find the time to describe this trip. It was such a riot that I’m taking a bit of time now to write about the experience.

First, a quick rundown on the system of governance in India (and yes Jeff, Jim’s on the alert). This may be a bit tedious, but in order to understand our field visit, you need to know who’s who. There are five major levels of government (i.e. five levels that we care about; there are many more in-between categories that I’m ignoring b/c otherwise my head would explode). First, there’s the central government (a.k.a the Government of India, the Union Government or the Republic of India). Then, there’s the Bihar state government: led by the Chief Minister in the executive branch, Nitish Kumar (kind of like the governor) and the Members of the Legislative Assembly in the legislative branch (the crazy people who throw potted plants and slippers and such that Jeff is studying; note that there are normal, effective people in that role also, but they’re less fun). Then there’s the district level; the state of Bihar is split into 38 districts. Although I have a long way to go before I truly grasp how power is divided at the district level and below, two of the key actors are the District Magistrate (or DM, the top bureaucrat – i.e. appointed, not elected – in the executive branch) and the District Development Commissioner (or DDC, who appears to be the DM’s second in command, who’s also a bureaucrat). Then there’s the block level; each district is split into approximately 15-20 blocks. This is the level of governance that I’m probably going to be focusing on for my project. On the bureaucrat side, there’s a whole slew of officers, the most important of whom for our purposes is the Block Development Officer (BDO). There are also elected government representatives called Panchayat Samiti (PS) members; they come from villages throughout each block and sit on a council together. The indirectly elected head of the PS is called the pramukh. Finally, there is the Gram Panchayat (GP) level: each block has about 15 GPs. Each GP elects a representative called a mukhiya, who is kind of like a mini-mayor. Phew. Look, you just learned something! Please don’t ask about the different roles & responsibilities of the BDO, the PS members, the pramukh, and the mukhiya – I’ve spent weeks reading about it and asking people in those roles, and every source gives me a (slightly or dramatically) different answer…

OK, but you don’t read this blog so you can learn about Indian governance, so on to the good stuff. First, one highlight from our very first field trip that must be mentioned. A few weeks ago, we drove to a district about 5-6 hours away and met with the DM, DDC, BDO, PS members and mukhiyas (check it out – 5 minutes ago that sentence would have looked like complete nonsense to you!). We met with the DDC first, and he was so delighted to have foreigners interviewing him about his job that he immediately summoned the local press, who interrupted our conversation to interview me about what we were up to. On camera. Since “female empowerment” is kind of a touchy issue, when they asked me about our work, I said that we were “studying the government.” Somehow they figured out that we were focusing on the female reservation system (we probably mentioned it to the DDC before they arrived), and so they asked me what I thought about the effectiveness of the reservations (50% of the elected village seats are reserved for women, thanks to a relatively recent law). I said that I was “studying the government.” Basically, I repeated that phrase in answer to virtually every question, in an upbeat and eager tone of voice, in the hopes that they would think that I was awfully friendly but not so bright – which is much better than a maniacal white woman out to change the Indian social order. So perhaps on the evening news in that town, they had a special on that rather daft young American lady and her extremely vague research project.

OK, now, onto our most recent adventure. We left at 6:30am on Tuesday morning in a hired SUV Jeep that we rented (with the driver) for two days. In advance, we had figured out the criteria that we would use to choose particular elected reps in particular villages, and so by about 10am we were near our first village, which was quite a ways off the main (paved-ish) road. When we had determined our criteria, we decided that we wanted some “out of the way” villages (since villages near the main road would obviously be quite different from villages that are difficult to get to) – little did we know how big a difference even an extra kilometer makes…

Even though Bihar is experiencing a pretty severe drought, it’s still the monsoon season and there’s still some rain. Which means that the roads, which are a bit exciting in the best of circumstances, are chock full of mud sinkholes/potholes. Since I get pretty severely motion-sick, I basically gritted my teeth, gripped the arm rest on the door, and imagined that I was riding one of those 3D simulator machines at a theme park. It was actually quite fun, except for the nausea, and it made me realize why so many of the development projects that have been approved recently are roads.

After several kilometers on a road that gradually narrowed to slightly less than the width of our vehicle, some villagers we asked directions from convinced us to pull over and start walking. Of course, we were still about two kilometers away from the village, but we’re tough folk, so we started slipping and sliding our way through calf-deep mud ruts. After a little ways, we ran into two teachers who were heading in the same direction, barefoot, and they convinced us to take off our shoes and go barefoot. It felt marvelous – once you set aside the fact that we were walking through layer upon layer of water buffalo and cow manure. It was a million times easier to walk barefoot than in sandals, and we convinced ourselves that since people pay tons of money for mud baths, our feet must be benefiting from the experience. Unfortunately, I left my camera in the car, so we don’t have any photos of us hysterically laughing while we waded through the mud, or the perplexed looks of the villagers we passed.

When we finally arrived in the mukhiya’s village, we were plastered up to our knees in mud (which we had tried to wipe off in the murky pond next to the road), but in very good spirits. We asked around and were eventually directed to a small building, with an exterior staircase that we climbed up to get up onto the roof deck, where someone brought chairs and we waited for the mukhiya. It turned out that we were in luck – the female mukiya we were trying to meet with had a very overbearing son who we’d heard basically thought of himself as the mukhiya, but he happened to be away from the village. The son insisted on speaking with the JPAL staff member who was serving as our translator, who patiently explained who we were and what we were doing on a satellite phone that the mukhiya had someone bring. Finally, we were able to get down to business. We spoke with her for over an hour, drinking what was undeniably the best chai we’ve had so far in Bihar (her daughter-in-law’s special recipe) and eating little coconut-flavored cookies.

Although every village we visited and every rep we spoke with was a little different, there were some prominent patterns. For example, every village we visited during those two days offered us the same items: water (which we politely ignored), one tiny little cup of chai, and a plate of coconut-ish cookies. Sometimes the chai was withheld until the very end of the conversation, to use as bait to keep us there a bit longer, since it’s insanely rude to refuse chai. Also, every time we visited a village, we attracted a small crowd of curious onlookers, who followed us (children up close, adults at a bit of a distance) until we found the person we were looking for, and then they clustered around us while we conducted the interview. This led me to master the craft of the carefully staged interview space. Basically, I discovered that if you let people put chairs wherever they want, everyone and their mother will grab one and create a huge circle, and everyone who’s able to snag a chair will consider themselves authorized to speak. However, if you create a very small circle, with just enough chairs for us and the one representative we want to speak with, the background chatter calms down quite a bit. Of course everyone else still stands around, staring and listening intently (at one point in our first interview, I counted literally 25 villagers surrounding us), but at least we’re able to get answers primarily from the person we came to see.

After speaking with the mukhiya, we walked another kilometer or so to the village where one of the PS members (Panchayat Samiti members) lives. This time, we were invited into the entryway to the PS member’s home, which also served as a shed of sorts for her very large cow. We were clustered on a wide, low wooden table (which I know now is what people here often sleep on, in lieu of a mat on the floor) in the corner of the entryway, engrossed in our interview and surrounded by 20ish villagers, when suddenly the cow started peeing in an incredibly loud and messy fashion. A whole bunch of the villagers near us were getting urine all over their legs, but either that kind of thing happens often, or they didn’t want to give up their spots so close to the “action” by stepping away from the cow pee. Luckily, we were just out of range, but I was definitely thrown for a few moments, in shock that everyone was completely ignoring the cow pee everywhere.

After that, we headed to the headquarters of the block that we were in and tried to meet with some officials there, but we were out of luck – it was 3:20pm, and work hours here are 10am-3pm, if you’re lucky. To be fair, Saturday is a work day. So we decided to grab some lunch, and headed to a dhaba to eat.  Since Jeff just described dhabas, I won’t bother repeating him. Since we had attracted a pretty sizable crowd by walking the length of the little town to find a good looking dhaba, we tried to find a place to sit that was a bit off the road and inside the dhaba. Unfortunately, the only table that fit the bill was a long, narrow one, so all four of us ended up sitting in a line, facing out toward the growing crowd that was staring at us. So we ate the very simple, very tasty thali while strenuously trying to ignore the crowd that slowly trickled to a dozen people, planted right in front of us. Then we headed back to the district headquarters (which is a real town, with several decent hotels) to spend the night – our hotel of choice was the Park Plaza, a pretty grandiose name for a fairly modest place – clean and perfect for our needs, i.e. a bed and shower.

We got up not too early the next morning and tried to find the mukhiya we’d selected who was “close” to the main road. We did manage to drive most of the way there (at one point, an enormous water buffalo who was completely flipping out decided to jog just slightly ahead of us to try to get away from the scary large predator that we apparently represented. It was pretty adorable, since they have these huge floppy ears and are quite clumsy). We selected the village because according to our records, a new road had been built, which ended in front of the mukhiya’s home (so we followed the red brick road to find him). Although it was quite straightforward finding him, later on in the day we tried to track down another mukhiya, only to find that large sections of the raised dirt road had crumbled away, leaving just enough space for a motorcycle – and we were told that the mukhiya’s village was somewhere between two and six kilometers away. As much fun as we’d had the previous day walking through the mud, since we were on a bit of a time crunch, we headed back to the block offices and try to interview some officials.

We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We ended up getting a wealth of information from about a half dozen men in a bunch of different roles (bureaucrat and elected) at the block and GP levels. We started out by interviewing one guy, a mukhiya with a B.A. (which is very unusual) in this tiny little side room filled with paper records that were quite literally rotting on the shelves. We were then joined by first one, then two, then three PS members, at which point we had quite outgrown the little corner we were using to conduct the interviews, so we moved to the largest available space – the office of the Block Development Officer. The BDO is like a little monarch in his block, with enormous influence on how development projects are selected and funded. Although we left his (larger, more ornate) chair empty and crowded in around it, we were still using his office without him there to interview a whole bunch of people about their opinion of the funding process, which left me a bit uneasy. I became all the more so when the conversation morphed into a diatribe by the elected officials against the corruption and unlawful usurpation of power by the bureaucrats (of whom the BDO is a prominent figure). I’m sure that at least one of the guys in that room reported every word back to the BDO, and although we stayed as neutral as humanly possible while still encouraging detailed answers to our questions, I really hope we won’t be run out of the block office the next time we try to visit!

Our very last interview of the day was in the village of a female PS member, who was quite wonderful (eager to improve her GP and honest enough about her own lack of prior experience that she said she goes regularly to the block officials to ask for help and advice with her job). Unfortunately, partway through the interview, a very visibly drunk guy staggered up to our little cluster outside the PS member’s home, shouting at us. Although we didn’t understand Hindi, some messages cross all language barriers, and it was pretty clear this guy was hostile to us. Our Hindi-speaking colleague told us later that the guy had been insisting that we direct all of our questions to him, rather than the PS member, since the PS member was his sister-in-law and he had gotten her elected (Nikhil assured us that he’s had to deal with plenty of drunk villagers in field visits before, and that the guy wasn’t insulting him personally, even if it sounded like he was). Nikhil handled it like a champ, gently but repeatedly asking the guy to calm down so we could interview the PS member. Finally, it was clear that things weren’t getting any better, so we asked some softballs (“Do you like being a PS member?” etc.) and hightailed it out of there. It was a bit of a frustrating ending to what had otherwise been an extremely productive trip, but it certainly gave us plenty to talk over on the long drive home.