Deep inside India’s rural reality

Deep Joshi (62) thought as early as in 1983 that young Indians should opt for rural development as a career option. But, there was no institution to equip them to meet the challenges of that profession. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 5, 2009, 24:19:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Deep Joshi (62) thought as early as in 1983 that young Indians should opt for rural development as a career option. But, there was no institution to equip them to meet the challenges of that profession.

Joshi thought of giving students a chance to work in rural India and that was how the non-government organisation, Professional Assistance for Development Action (Pradan), was born.

The Delhi-based social activist started hiring educated youngsters from different university campuses to work as apprentices in rural India for a year. More than 26 year’s later, his idea — implemented in seven states — attracted global recognition. And he has been awarded the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay award for his work in rural development.

The citation says he has been recognised for “his vision and leadership in bringing professionalism to the NGO movement in India, by effectively combining ‘head’ and ‘heart’ in the transformative development of rural communities.”

Joshi, however, told HT a day after receiving the award: “It (the award) is not about an individual. It is the celebration of an idea of transformative development of rural communities.”

He said, “We have IITs for producing engineers. But, don’t have a single university for teaching our students the ways to transform poor rural communities.”

Born and raised in rural Uttarakhand, Joshi said he could not figure out the need for sending a mission to the moon when one third of India’s population lives in abject poverty.

Joshi, who has double masters degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in management from the Sloan School in the US, said, “I first saw a sanitation project in 1977 and somehow after that I was drawn to the development of the rural population”.

For him, India had the best social sector programmes. “Look at the rural health mission and the employment guarantee programme. They are the best,” he said, “But challenge is in implementing them...”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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