Smart villages on the Net

If you haven't yet visited Hansdehar, a village in the Haryana state, here's where you go for a glimpse. More villages will come online says the Smartvillages.org website. The initiative by Samanvay Welfare Society (I can't find a link. The link at Smartvillages.org is broken) is a smart one. The issues facing villages are manyfold. The more eyeballs we can get to look at them, the more potential there is for smart solutions.

I particularly like the local facilities page on the website. I know those people a lot. For the first 15 years of my childhood, I lived in a small town called Jolarpet and went back to my parent's native villages for summer school vacations. These pictures bring back memories of those days when I would go to the local tailor and ask him to make my half-pants (we called them trousers) with more fleeces and extra inner pockets for secret marbles storage. While this was fun, there were other things that were not. Every summer, the water well in our dingy apartment complex (6 houses with 4 common toilets) would dry up. That meant that I would put two cans on the back of my bicycle and go to the nearby railway station water pumping houses for water. These pumping houses purified water for the trains passing through Jolarpet (Jolarpet had a relatively big railway station. A british legacy). My mother, on her part, would get in line for the local water supply tap which supplied drinlking water for an hour or so everyday. People would leave placeholders in the line with cans, buckets and even tiny little pots. Every day a big fight would erupt at the tap about who came first and such. Apparently, it left quite a mark on me as my memory of those events are not nice at all.

Well, I shared that to impress upon you the fact that what I saw then does not even begin to explain the plight of people in small towns and villages in India. If you had run through the Hansdehar website, you would notice the page on Infrastructure. In it, the sewage is marked as 'No'. I'll leave you to imagine what that means.

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