The Transformation of Camp 5 - India Together re-publication

**The transformation of Camp 5.**Latha Jishnu writes about how a once desolate village, Camp 5, has become a symbol of hope for Madhya Pradesh and deprived communities the world over.

[Editors’ Note: This article by Latha Jishnu was originally published in Grassroots, Vol.1 No.1, May 1999]

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If you didn’t have a local guide you would probably not find this village. For one thing it does not have a proper name. It’s still called Camp 5, the number that was given to one of the refugee settlements that sprang up in the wake of Partition. For another, there are no visible roads leading to this cluster of 34 houses in what even today appears to be dusty bivouac in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district. Camp 5 is almost a two-hour drive from the state capital of Bhopal, a journey of constant bumps and jolts through the rutted lanes of Obaidullaganj tehsil. Clouds of dust make it impossible for visitors to discern the lay of the land, and there are no distinguishing landmarks. But for all that, it’s a village that has the ability to turn the stray visitor into a friend and, in many cases, a friend who returns often. “We are a poor people who have very little to offer visitors,” says Gyanchand, a handsome village elder in his seventies. That may be true in the material sense. It’s a community that scratches a living from the inhospitable land through farming little plots of land given as a resettlement package five decades ago. For families that have grown three fold in the past decades the one-to-three hectare plots provide little sustenance. This is more so as farming is dependent on the rain gods, there being precious little irrigation in the region. The men usually hire out as daily wage labourers in neighbouring towns like Sultanpur to make ends meet. But camp 5 has abundance of another kind to offer: the richness of the human spirit. It’s ability to overcome depressing and debilitating circumstance has been discovered only recently, but already, the once desolate village has become a symbol of hope for Madhya Pradesh and deprived communities the world over. And no one is more surprised than the extraordinary people of Camp 5 themselves. To understand the change, a little bit of its history is essential. That’s something the old-timers like Patel Baba, as Gyanchand is known, and Shyambai, a weather-beaten woman in her sixties, will provide readily. Along with Meerabai, a member of panchayat, these two lend certain eclat to this outpost. They were the leaders of a group of 20-odd families who came from distant Bahalwalpur in Pakistan’s Multan province to this unknown spot 51 years ago. And they do not need much coaxing to begin recounting the saga of their long trek to safety in the bloody aftermath of Partition. Recalls Shyambai : “We travelled by train, foot and finally in an army convoy to reach this place. We came through Ferozepur, Kurukshetra and Rambha. None of us had any idea where we were going. all we wanted was a place we could call our home.” The tragedy is that although the refugees were resettled with land, little else was done for them. The government just forgot about Camp 5 and thousands of other villages like it across the state. No attempt was made to provide that most basic and crucial of inputs : educational facilities. As for the refugees themselves, they did little to make the place a home in the true sense or to improve their lot. Apathy set in along with bad habits and till a couple of years ago, it was a place everyone preferred to forget: Neighbours, officialdom, and even the police after sunset. It had turned into a village of layabouts who brewed illicit liquor, confesses Meerabai. ‘People got into brawls with one another and with any outsiders who ventured too close.” In short, it was a place that most people took care to avoid. That is, till four years ago when Madhya Pradesh launched its path breaking Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission (RGSM), an attempt to provide universal primary education and initiate a total literacy campaign (TLC) in a mission mode. That brought schooling to the 73 children of Camp 5 - and to 4.3 million other’s across the state - after nearly give decades of independence. And with it a dramatic transformation of the community also. Remembers Kamala, a mother of three, who has since learned to read and write: “Earlier, most of the children just roamed around wild, getting into mischief, only the very earnest ones went to school in Sutanpur. But when the school was started here, everything changed.” The school was a circular thatched hut that was built by the villagers themselves and it was there that children between the ages of three and 14 began learning the three Rs and values that began to change their outlook on life. Within months, the children, strongly supported by their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and elders began a campaign against heavy drinking and the illicit liquor trade of their fathers. Recalls Meerabai : “The children succeeded where we had failed. One morning they went where the pots (of liquor) were kept and smashed them all. It was a courageous step many of them got severely beaten for their pains.” But their efforts did pay off. Most of the men have given up the liquor trade and are no longer drinking themselves. Much of the credit for the transformation of villages like Camp 5 goes to the kind of people the RGSM has brought in to spread primary education and literacy. It has employed people with disparate backgrounds but people with a record of commitment to the community. There is for instance, Anant Gangola, a research scholar who has lived for the past decade lived with the tribal communities. Gangola who is now the district project coordinator for Raisen looks after the components of the RGSM initiatives. These include the new primary schools. education guarantee scheme schools, alternative schools and the preschool centres known as Shishu Shiksha Kendras apart from looking after the cluster resource centres setup for teachers to tone up the quality of teaching. There are others like Richa Mishra, block coordinator for the Rajiv Prathmik Shiksha Mission who is in charge of activities in Obaidullaganj. That’s nearly 210 schools and Richa keeps tabs on all of them through continuous inspections that keep her on the move all six days of the week, and Sundays, more often than not, when VIPs come calling. But for Camp 5, Mahesh Odh, 28, school teacher, has proved to be its saviour. “Bhaiya (brother) showed us the way,” says perky little Asha, 11, one of the bright-eyed girls who never miss a day of school since it opened. Mahesh spends all morning teaching his little wards - there is only one teacher here - and then takes literacy classes till late in the night for the adults of the village. All this while studying privately for his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. “I want to teach here. If I go away who will look after my village ?” he asks simply. And thanks to the RGSM’s insistence on involving the community in the education programme an active village education committee, or VECs as they are known, has come up in Camp 5 too. The committee has ensured that the school has a spanking new building, the result of shramdan (voluntary work) and donations from the villagers themselves. Says R.Gopalakrishnan, sercretary to chief minister Digvijay Singh and coordinator of the various Rajiv Gandhi missions set up by the state to accelerate development in select social sectors : “Madhya Pradesh has shown that it’s the people themselves who are the best agents of change. All that the government has done is to provide an enabling environment.” For officials like Gopalakrishnan and Amita Sharma, director of the RGMS, Camp 5 is proof that their efforts over the last four years are paying off. Because what camp 5 holds out is both hope and a promise. The hope lies in its children who have suddenly found a new world opening up for them after decades of neglect. And the promise lies in the new course that the villagers have set for themselves after a half century of apathy and indifference. Latha Jishnu May 1999 About Grassroots Grassroots, an initiative of the Press Institute of India, presents a selection of reportage and related comments on the human condition. Some have appeared in, or are translated from, newsjournals. The project is supported by a grant from UNESCO’s Programme for the Development of Communication. Grassroots is a monthly journal. Editor: Ajit Bhattacharjea Grassroots Press Institute of India Sapru House Annexe Barakhamba Road New Delhi - 110001 Tel: (011) 335 4809, 331 8646, 331 5260 Fax: (011) 331 1975 Email: [email removed], [email removed] The cost of subscription of Grassroots in India is Rs.180 and for foreign subscription is US Dollars 10.00 for one year. To subscribe send a Check/DD/MO drawn in favor of “Press Institute of India / Research Institute for Newspaper Development’ and send it to the address given above.

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