Have an ear to the ground

The Institution of District Collector was born in 1772 by an official order of Governor General Lord Warren Hastings. District has always been most convenient administrative unit. In 1922, the Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Lloyd George, described the British civil service as steel frame. We know that appointments to Indian civil services were undertaken under the Government of India Act 1858. It is members of this elite service that were going as the District Collectors and their role then was only regulatory that too in defence of British crown and to exert pressure on the Indian subjects to get their compliance.

India lives in its districts.

District, therefore, became the crucial unit of administration. Over the last three centuries, the place of district administration in the hierarchy of authority remained unchanged. Several attempts were unsuccessfully made in independent India to jettison the institution and the expression of ‘Collector’ citing its colonial past. Even the conclusion of Second Administrative Reforms Commission (2005) headed by Veerappa Moily examined this issue whether there is any need to retain the office of District Collector in its present form. In this exercise, the commission submitted in all 14 reports.

In its report on ‘local governance’, the commission made the following observation. “He is the functionary who would provide overall leadership in the district in the task of nation-building. Hence, the Collector would remain a key figure in the scheme of administration at the field level.” It is, therefore, pertinent for governments to give all the training opportunities that are available to young recruits to enable them to don the mantle of District Collector in a capable manner.

‘Palamur’ was the name of this district before the reign of Nizam. The age-old sobriquet of the workers from the district was ‘Palamur labour’. Since the irrigated area was so sparse, a large number of households depended on monsoon for their farming success. They have a few tanks in the district that enabled a single crop of paddy. So, after harvesting of paddy, most of these families migrated to urban areas or to project sites where manpower requirement was huge. I was told that these labourers would spread all over the country, leaving behind the old and children. I prepared a project report to create wage employment in the district and forwarded it to the ministry of rural development for funding.

Around same time, Sandhikar was posted to the district as Joint Director of Agriculture. It goes to his credit that he started galvanising his staff in a fitting way and helped in preparing a vision document for 10 years to improve agricultural yields and to contribute to improving the economic status of those families. He actively collaborated with campus of agricultural university at Palem. This vision document was very helpful to prepare district credit plan by the lead bank officer, besides the help it rendered in creating training programmes. He took initiatives to enrich soil with distribution of blue green algae.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) played an important role in reaching benefits of development planning to the needy besides empowering them. There were more than 30 to 40 of them spread over the district. Several of them received grants from overseas and were “well off”. It was a task to know about these organisations. DRDA PD was in the know of things, though not in any substantial way. In a conversation with an NGO called ‘Villages in Partnership’ (VIP) ably led by Dr T Nagendra Swamy, I realised that the NGOs were desiring to have interaction and association with government departments. We soon formed an association and called it ‘Confederation of Voluntary Organisations of Mahabubnagar (COVOM).’ It was agreed that on a day fixed every month, the Collector and his team of district officers would visit an NGO and spend time with that NGO. In that interaction between the NGOs and the government, the host NGO would make a presentation of their activities in forenoon. Then after a common (frugal) meal, all of us would visit the areas of activities of the host NGO. The interaction was improving awareness both in NGOs and in government officers including Collector. The haunting suspicions in the air were also dissipated due to this regular interaction.

Another exciting programme that I fondly recollect was the total literacy campaign (TLC) that we launched in the district. Special mention must be made of Lakshmidhar Misra, IAS, National Mission Director, who was spearheading this programme in an admirable manner. Several districts like Chittoor, Visakhapatnam, Kurnool, Kadapa, Medak, Hyderabad etc., took up the programme. My good friend M Nagarjuna, the Collector of Chittoor, spoke to me and motivated me to prepare a proposal. I was scared to even think of attempting cent per cent literacy having the lowest literacy levels in the state. But I yielded to peer pressure.

In conformity with the ground reality, I proposed to take up the campaign in two municipal areas of Wanaparthi and Narayanpet and in seven rural mandals. I got proposals ready but could not go to the meeting in Delhi due to some law and order problem that suddenly erupted. It was Appa Rao as the Collector of Kurnool who took my proposal and presented it in a convincing manner. Misra knew the situation in Mahabubnagar district and he made an exception to fund a partial programme and approved the same.

The untiring efforts of Madhusudan, Deputy Director (Adult Education) and Vijay Kumar (School Education) made the efforts successful. Almost for 6-7 months, I had to tour every day from office or after my inspection in any other place to these places for TLC late in the evenings and join chorus in singing songs composed under banner of ‘Akshara Kiranam’ besides visiting centres where this learning was going on.

The tensions caused by left-wing extremism notwithstanding, the tours to those distant mandals became a regular feature. There were interesting narrations heard about the altercations between anti-social elements and villagers especially when I was travelling to villages in darkness. The incident in Remaddula village in Panagal mandal is still fresh in my memory. I never directly had a single face-off with those elements or had any ‘encounters’. I was so happy that my father, too, travelled to some villages on one of his visits and it seems he felt proud of that initiative. He saw first-hand the challenges in altering rural eco-system to bring many to the portals of university where teachers like him were available. The sight of high school children teaching alphabets and numericals to adults with primers in their hands was verily a nation-building exercise.