Getting to the root cause of crime

IIPM, GURGAON

To keep people from criminal activities, Assam Police has come up with a community project with a difference. Hemmanta Phukan and Dulal Misra take a look at Project Prahari

In our country, between the act of committing a crime and the pronouncement of a sentence by the court, there is no provision to identify the reason behind the act. A look into such factors would indicate that some of these causes are so deep-rooted and guided by social prejudices like the practice of black magic, sorcery, superstitions, etc., that law-enforcing agencies are helpless in curbing the incidence of such crimes.

In the inhospitable and socially isolated terrain of the northeast, marked by communal and ethnic conflicts, mistrust and hostility towards law-enforcing agencies, the apathetic attitude of development agencies, a weak resource base, low level of skills and literacy, a community policing project called Project Prahari is trying to bridge some of the social and administrative lacunae that propel people towards criminal acts.
The turning point which set the law enforcement agencies thinking was the brutal killing of five innocent villagers for allegedly practising witchcraft in the beginning of 2000 in Thaigarguri village of Kokrajhar district. The society has witnessed several such killings of innocent people, especially in the tribal dominated areas of Kokrajhar, Goalpara, Darrang, Sonitpur, Golaghat, Karbi Anglong and Jornat districts, for allegedly practicing witchcraft. The victims are mainly economically backward, illiterate or widows who are targeted by the kabiraj or ojas, the local healer of diseases. When a villager suffers from an ailment, he prefers to go to the kabiraj instead of a hospital. To enhance his influence, the kabiraj enacts a nasty drama targeting an unfortunate villager or a family for bringing upon the disease. The kabiraj generally points to the economically or socially weakest family or villager. He also convinces the family and relatives of the sick person that if the family or villager termed as the witchcraft practitioner(s) could be chased away or killed, the patient would be cured.

It was to counter these critical situations that the Assam Police decided to delve into the root cause of criminal activities and bridge the gap between the administrative machinery and the villagers through Project Prahari. One of the major factors identified by the police behind such criminal activities was the underdeveloped condition of remote villages. In fact, most villages were not even connected by roads. The law enforcement agencies thus drew up a plan of community participation in development activities.

The brainchild of the Deputy Inspector General of police of the Western range of Assam, Kuladhar Saikia, since its inception in 2001,Project Prahari has been trying to hit at the root cause of social maladies so that law enforcement agencies can play a major role in preventing recurrence of such incidents. Though the project was first launched in violence-hit Kokrajhar district, its activities spread to other parts after DGP, Assam Police, declared the project as a state level police initiative. Starting from Thaigarguri of Kokrajhar district, the project now covers as many as 50 villages spread all over Assam. A village is selected under the Project if it is in an area which is either criminal or terrorist prone, communally sensitive or socially under privileged, backward and isolated.

Among its success stories is a motorable wooden bridge over river Kachua between Betbari and Charapara in Bongaigaon district built through community participation. This is the only link for village children to reach their schools. This has also provided a link for daily business activities between the villagers as well as police forays into inaccessible area where extremists were active earlier. A long abandoned Longa canal at Serfanguri was re-dug and repaired by residents of five villages. After the repair of the 4.87 km long canal, about 500 families of Kolabari, Pub-kolabari and Serfanguri villages benefit from irrigation facilities for their cultivable land.
By conducting community development activities through the Community Management Groups under Project Prahari, the Assam Police has succeeded in reducing the gap between the administrative machinery and the villagers. Simultaneously, emphasis has been laid on constant interaction between the local police and the villagers to create awareness against social prejudices like practice of black magic and sorcery.

The project's success has been appreciated all over the world. The Centre presented it to the United Nations in 2005. The Hyderabad-based SVP National Police Academy has documented the project in its ‘Compendium on Good Practices in Community Policing’ for emulation by other states. It has emerged as a significant community policing initiative that has strengthened people's involvement in deciding their security needs and also reoriented the principles of policing.

The man behind Project Prahari
Kuladhar Saikia, IGP (Border), Assam Police

What made you initiate Project Prahari?
When I was in Pennsylvania under a fellowship programme in 2000-2001, I got a chance to study the community development models of various nations. As part of the programme, I submitted a project to the World Bank. The project was appreciated and it inspired me to use the idea in my country.

How did you start Project Prahari?
After coming back to Assam, I took charge as the DIG of the Western Range of Assam. At that time, five innocent villagers were brutally killed for their alleged involvement in witchcraft in Thaigarguri village of Kokrajhar district. I found that the main cause of this incident was social and economic backwardness of the people. So, I took the initiative to mobilise the villagers by constituting Community Management Groups to create awareness against superstitions and involve them in development works. I consulted with the then DGP of Assam and he inspired me and asked me to go ahead. Thus Project Prahari was launched.

Did you face any bottlenecks?
Yes, I faced several problems as the village was in an insurgency-prone area. The outlawed organisations prevented villagers from associating with the project. But the police department took it as a challenge and changed the mindsets of the people and was able to win the confidence of the villagers. You may call this the first success story of Project Prahari.

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Feeding the hungry millions

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Tathagata Bhattacharya visits the Vrindaban kitchen of Akshaya Patra Foundation and experiences the workflow that characterises the world's largest free school children feeding programme run by a non-profit organisation

As Narasimha Das, a Lord Krishna devotee, sets out on his daily chore of overseeing operations in a free kitchen in Vrindaban, darkness is the only visible thing. His footsteps pierce the eerie silence of the nippy October night. At 3 am, the kitchen, run by the Akshaya Patra Foundation, a part of the ISKCON movement, is already abuzz with activity. Situated next to the main temple of the complex, the three-floor kitchen is spread over 2200 square feet on each floor. As the strong smell of freshly made roti feels my lungs, I enter the fully automated complex with its complexes of intertwined silos and heavy machinery. It looks like the perfect set for a sci-fi thriller.

On the ground floor, men, covered from head to toe, silently work on mountains of wheat flour and dough. Their task is gargantuan. They have just around five hours to make rotis for 1,69,379 hungry school kids. They lug huge mounds of dough onto a conveyor belt where it is flattened into a thin sheet. The flattened material then moves through a succession of conveyor belts and is cut into big rounds and roasted on both sides. The 30-feet-long machine churns out 40,000 rotis an hour. A qualified design engineer, Das was part of the team that customised a biscuit-making machine into producing 10,000 rotis an hour in 2004. Later in 2009, they upgraded the design on the model of a tortilla-making machine.

Meanwhile, two flights up, the curry cooking army is all steamed up with five industry-sized cauldrons bubbling with rice and dal with fresh vegetables. Kitchen supervisors keep a close watch, armed with nutrition charts and cooking thermometers. Each batch of dals cook for around 20 minutes after which they are sent down through channels at the back of the cauldrons landing straight into sterilised containers in the packing room on the floor below. To ensure hygiene, human handling of food is kept to the minimum. When the rice is cooked, a gear mechanism on the side of the cauldron tilts the rice onto a trolley which is then wheeled onto the mouth of the funnel, through which it lands into sterilised containers. They are then loaded onto the insulated delivery vans waiting outside. These vans will take the food to hungry children studying in over 1516 schools in and around Vrindaban.

In spite of the Indian middle-class's obsession with the country emerging as the next superpower, as if software, Bollywood and Brahmos will see to it, and a jingoistic media's chest thumping, it is a fact that 42 per cent of the world’s underweight children under the age of five live in this country. A recent global hunger index, released this year by the International Food Policy Research Institute, India ranks 67 out of the 84 countries in the fray. India launched the mid day meal scheme as early as in 1960s to address the issues of illiteracy and child malnutrition. The largest school lunch programme in the world is integral to addressing key millennium development goals. In keeping with its importance, the funds for the scheme increased from Rs 3010 crore to 4813 crore in 2006-2007. And Akshaya Patra, a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation, is its largest non-governmental partner with 17 kitchens across 8 states feeding more than 1.26 million children everyday. By 2020, the programme, the largest school lunch programme run by a non-profit organisation, aims to feed 5 million children. Das, head of the Vrindaban operations, tells me the kitchen makes 250,000 rotis, 4 tons of rice, 2 tons of dal and about 6 tons of vegetables everyday. Akshaya Patra’s menu is designed keeping in mind the needs of growing children and local food habits. It consists of rice or rotis and daal or kadhi with vegetables. Desserts come once a week.

Akshaya Patra, subject of a Harvard study in 2007, began feeding 1,500 school children in Bangalore in 2000, a year before the Supreme Court made it mandatory for the government to provide cooked meals to children in all government and government-assisted primary schools.

Soon, pleas started pouring in from teachers of other government schools. “When the letters formed a pile, we opened them to find requests to feed 1,00,000 children. It was an eye-opener as to what a meal, which we take for granted, meant to these children.” Chanchalapati Das, vice-chairman of the foundation says. The first Akshaya Patra kitchen was set up in Bangalore to feed 30,000 children.

An Akshaya Patra delivery van reaches the Gopalgarh Primary School, around 2.5 km from the central kitchen at around 11 am. The children in the classes are busy running through arithmetic tables as the huge containers alight. The organisation started its operations in Vrindaban in 2006 from this school. Laxmi Binodini, the Bengali-speaking head mistress, says that attendance has increased manifold after the meals were served in her school. An Akshaya Patra survey shows that since its kitchen started functioning in Vrindaban in 2006, the number of underweight children dropped from 38 per cent to 26. Binodini’s school had 120 children in 2006. Now she has more than 200. The number of girls has doubled. “Parents now have an incentive to send their girls to school. Previously they would be taken off to do household chores,” she says. The lunch bell rings, the children queue out.

Back in the kitchen, work is never over. The workers are busy, preparing for the next day. Akshaya Patra has received accolades from all around the world and request to intervene in other needy parts of the world. But the organisation is firmly focussed on India. “We have enough hungry children to feed here,” Dasa says.

The world's largest free school kids meal programme has been described by Barack Obama as a “powerful demonstration of what’s possible when people work together.” It is an example of the success of the public-private partnership model, with 65 per cent of its funds provided by the Centre.

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Narmada is not just the name of a river. It is passion and emotion personified.

Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri Dean Business School IIPM

Pronounce the word anywhere and you will hear emotional stories. Being a state with the fewest number of water resources, the Narmada should have been Gujarat’s lifeline

Within 340 days of being declared a separate state, on April 5, 1961, Gujarat's first chief minister Jivraj Mehta had called then PM Jawaharlal Nehru to lay the foundation of the state's lifeline. It was in 1946 that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was first struck by the idea of building a large dam across the Narmada. The project was aptly named after him. It also reflected Nehru’s policy of giving importance to large development work. It is worth remembering what Nehru had said while laying the foundation of the world’s largest drinking water project. He had said, “This dam has been built with the unrelenting toil of man for the benefit of mankind and therefore is worthy of worship. May you call it a temple or a gurdwara or a mosque, it inspires our admiration and reverence.”

Despite being the foremost state in the country in terms of development work, Gujarat has been cursed by irregular rains and drought. Gujarat, being a leader in industries and business, has only 28 per cent agricultural land where planned irrigation facilities are available; at many other places, irrigation is provided by wells. The latter is not reliable as most of the shallow wells are rain-fed. Moreover, the coastal regions of Saurashtra and Kutch have turned the underground water salty. From 1960 till now, Gujarat has faced a famine every 3 to 4 years. It also faces water riots every summer even though it ranks high on all other development parameters. Compared to other states, Gujarat stands at number 10 in irrigation.

Why has Gujarat not become self-reliant in irrigation after Nehru's initiative to bring an end to the state's woes by constructing the gigantic project on the Narmada? One reason could be that there has not been a sincere effort by past governments to ensure that each and every household in Gujarat gets the benefit of the river water. Given that Gujarat is now celebrating its golden 50 years of development, and given that Narendra Modi has steadfastly focused on making Gujarat a better state, this could well be the appropriate time for the Modi government to have an enstrengthened focus on effectively utilising Narmada's waters in a planned and structured manner to reduce the water scarcity across the state. An immediate step could also be to include a bold focus on the Narmada in the current Swarnim Gujarat celebrations – though this would seem purely lip service, it would serve a bigger objective of telling various bureaucratic departments about the government's clear intent.

In 1979, after the final word by the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (NWDT) on the Narmada dam oustees, it was believed that Narmada's water would reach each and every household in Gujarat. To its credit, Gujarat has rehabilitated most of the Adivasi oustees in its area according to the guidelines of the Supreme Court – unlike what has happened in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Yet, a final date for the project completion still seems afar.

“In 1979, then agriculture minister Keshubhai Patel had declared that the Narmada project would be completed in 12 years, but 30 years have gone by,” says Shamjibhai Antana, member of the Gujarat Ecology Commission and veteran water expert. Antana says he looks forward to a day when the project would be completed.

People like Gautam Thakar, secretary of the Gujarat unit of People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), also share Antana’s views. To assess the present situation of the Narmada project and its future, PUCL got together with other non-political associations and organised a Peoples’ Inquiry Committee that prepared a huge report titled 'Narmada Project: Unfulfilled Dreams – The Implementation of the Project Report By the Public Association'. According to the report, under the Narmada project, during 1961-2010, Rs 29,000 crore has been used; yet, only 29 per cent success has been achieved with respect to towns and cities getting water; close to 50 per cent success has been achieved with respect to villages; 8,215 villages and 135 towns and cities were to benefit; but still, 37 cities and towns and 3,962 villages have not received any water. When it comes to getting drinking water (as opposed to just normal use water), the committee points out that only 11 per cent success has been achieved in villages. On an average, only 3 per cent of the project objectives are met every year.

Again, under the project, 66,000-km long canal-ways were supposed to be built to distribute water to each and every household and agricultural field. Even if one goes by the estimates given out in 1987, it was said that while only 29 per cent of the work had been completed (till then), the full project would take another 31 years. Thankfully, those figures have been revised for the better.

Interestingly, it has also been regrettably noticed that the canals which were to irrigate farmlands have in some cases actually destroyed them. Till now, a total of 308 big and small breaches have happened. Another issue is about the fact that even those cities that receive the Narmada water many a time do not receive the same at the proper pressure.

There are societies in Ahmedabad where members have paid thousands of rupees to the municipal corporation but are still waiting for Narmada water. Farmers of Surendranagar district have paid Rs 1000 each to the government but they do not get Narmada water.
What is the situation in 2010? The Modi government had proactively first declared that the project would be competed in 2010. Due to various delays, the deadline has been extended to 2014. Currently, the government is apparently allotting Rs 2500 crore for the final phase of the project. One suspects that that figure might not be enough to speed up the completion of the project.

In summary, the fact is that the Narmada river can be the basis for resolving almost all water issues within Gujarat. One hopes the government now works double time to this effect.

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IIPM, GURGAON

Sportsmen from Haryana are a breed apart as is evident from the string of successes that they have had in the international area.

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Syed Khurram Raza delves deeper into the phenomenon

Sportspersons from Haryana are burly, brusque and brassy. The character of Komal Chautala, portrayed by Chitrashi Rawat in the Shahrukh Khan starrer Chak De India, would give a fair idea about Haryanvi sense of humour to those who have not come across this breed. At the same time Komal's on-field performance that helps India win the final match in the movie, is as close to reality as her curt manner.

Sportsmen from Haryana have always excelled in sports. In recent years, however, their representation in athletics has increased, fuelled by the success of sportsmen such as Vijender Singh, Akhil Kumar, Jitender and Yogeshwar Dutt, who have all been inducted into the state police force after their excellent showing at international events.

During the recent Commonwealth Games in the Capital sportsmen from Haryana could often be heard repeating the slogan “doodh dahi ka khana hai, apna desh Haryana hai” with a certain degree of pride. Their medal tally betrayed their mental and physical strength as they won 30 medals between them. Rich diet does play an important role in sports, but this is not the only reason behind Haryana producing champion after champion. There are other factors too which ensure that sportsmen from a state with a national population share of just over two per cent constitutes about 16 per cent of the total number at the Beijing Olympics.

Retired Sports Authority of India (SAI) football coach and project officer of the Panchayti Krida and Khel Abhiyan (PYKKA) Rohit Parashar says, “Socio-economic conditions play a very important role. It is difficult for any sportsperson to excel if he or she does not have a sound economic background because commitment and passion alone can't take you very far.” He adds, “As Haryana is quite well off, youngsters can afford to chose sports as a career.”

Analysing the phenomenon, Arjuna Award winner and two-time Asian Games boxing gold medallist Rajkumar Sangwan says, “This has not happened in a day. Earlier agriculture was not very good in Haryana and a large number of youths would go to the Army. There these youth would generally participate in every sport where height and physical fitness counted and brought laurels to the Army and the country. Captain Hawa Singh, Balbir Singh Ballu, Bhim Singh and Captain Udai Chand excelled. After the retirement, they started coaching youngsters in their areas and created a new generation of sportsmen.”

Till the1970s it was Punjab that shone in sports. But terrorism and then a trend among the youth to migrate to the West dealt a severe blow to the sports scenario in Punjab. Their absence made Haryana sportsmen more conspicuous. Geographical factors also play a role. “Haryanvis are tall and strongly built. Besides, we use less fertilisers in farming, so our food is free from toxins,” explains Sangwan.

The general inclination among the masses towards sports also helps. “Family and community encouragement play an important role in promotion of sports in Haryana. When my elder brother Sukhbir won an international kabaddi match against Pakistan the village gifted him 21 kg of pure ghee,” says Sonepat native Jitender Joon, officer on special duty to Delhi Assembly Speaker Yoganand Shastri.

Bheem Stadium in Bhiwani does not have basic facilities such as a track for the athletes or a hockey or football turf, but that does not douse players' enthusiasm. Virtually in every sport, boys and girls participate in large numbers.

Coaches are seen taking extraordinary pains to train their wards. Wrestling coach Zile Singh Bagri was busy giving tips to Commonwealth Games gold medalist Anita and potential medalist for the 2012 Olympics, Kavita. He says, “Earlier there used to be very few players but now the overnight success stories of all these medalists have attracted the youth to sports. Now even the parents find a career in sports more promising for their children than them being doctors or engineers.” Anita, whose grandfather was a wrestler in the Army, gives credit to her mother, “It was my mother who encouraged me to take up sports and there was no opposition in the family.” Kavita's mother, too, supported her all the way.

SAI hostel in-charge and wrestling coach Brish Bhan says, “Providing jobs to sportspersons has played an important role in the promotion of sports in the state. More and more young people are taking to sports. About 14 players have been recruited as DSPs in Haryana”. Brish Bhan feels that if training facilities of international standards are provided, more medals would be a certainty. District sports officer at Bheem Stadium, Caju Ram Goyat, says, “The government has played a key role in nurturing sporting talent. It has launched a talent hunt under which competitions would be organised in schools. The schools have been instructed to take this very seriously.” According to Goyat, seven lakh students have already registered online and a lot more are expected to register.

Medalists are not only getting good jobs but also handsome cash rewards. A medal turns around a player's fortunes overnight. Boxing champion Vijender’s big house in the small village of Kaluwas is proof enough. Jimmy, a Germen Shepherd dog, greets visitors at the gate. Vijender’s two nieces, Nikita and Kavita, sit on the lap of their grandparents and listen to the stories of their sportsman uncle. “Vijender was inspired by his boxer grandfather who was in the army,” reveals his father.

Be it the martial traits of the people of Haryana, community encouragement, the lure of jobs and money, inherent passion or government policies, the fact is that today Haryana is teeming with sportspersons, and many of them are already world-beaters. And many more are in the making.

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