A village despised by everyone, now walks with pride!

    What did they do that government couldn't?

    Pachghar is a village that surprises the visitors first with its remoteness and then with its beauty. Not only the village is situated at an unimaginable location, but also it features characteristics that someone staying in city would hardly ever have imagined. It taught me what is being smart in real sense and also inspired me to try out new things which take courage to do.

    How much isolated a village can be from mainstream?

    One has to cross literally a huge hill, few river streams and jungles so as to reach there. No wonder, government officials hardly came here. Fortunately, taking advantage of this, the villagers aptly preserved their unique Warli culture which is indigenous to this part of the country.

    Unless you are rich, this is a common mode of transportation -

    It takes a while to reach the village once you leave the main road. But it’s worth the efforts when you have a first look at the village!

    The discarded plastic bottles are creatively used to nurture small plants which will be delicately shifted to ground once they grow up. It has dramatically eliminated any plastic garbage on roads. Also, there is one more reason for the same-

    Home-made dust bins which require nothing more than a cardboard, 10 minutes of time and feeling of love for your environment. They serve quite effectively to attract plastics and other non-biodegradable garbage into them.

    On a side note, the most important element in the entire chain that has made the process effective is the willingness of people to change. Because, it takes few hours to show the right thing. But it takes years to imbibe them into the minds of people.

    Every house is given fencing. The specialty of it which is quite noticeable is that they have avoided the convenience of using metal or plastic wires here. The locally cut wood sticks easily serve the purpose and are easy to obtain.  

    The local huts are beautiful and cool (literally, as they maintain temperature by having walls made of mud).

    The smallest of the lanes in this village are kept clean. The credit goes to every villager. I can imagine someone waking up early in the morning and cleaning these small roads with a broom in hand. It takes courage to clean the garbage of others. But I’m sure there would not have been much garbage on these lanes, as they believe in taking responsibility for the cleanliness.

    The roads in this tiny village are unexpectedly shining. Moreover, they are daily given a coating of cow-dung which is generally used in rural houses for coating of the floor and walls.

    A cheerful young man Kishor (who is an electrician, an artist as well as an enthusiastic reader) has taught Warli painting to his peers in the village. Together, they have created these beautiful pieces of art all over on the walls. Also, they have opened a library for the young kids, where used books donated by nice people are kept.  

And there is much more to this.

    The place in the picture is a community center which is used to organize village meetings, cultural functions and also to watch cricket matches when Indian team is playing. (We are longing to join them in this)

    The center is made with the ‘permission’ of forest department, as there was supposed to be a government- sponsored community hall to be built at this place.  But the villagers decided to drop the idea of forest department building it for them. It’s when it became clear that contribution in terms of manpower is inevitable and no help from government can be expected.

    A shocking thing about the village Pachghar is that it didn’t have electricity connection till the year 2015. Only recently, they have got MSEB poles installed here. The wirings and circuit connections are still in progress. How do they manage to do anything during the night then?

    These are the solar lamps gifted by TERI and Thane district council to the village. A handy and affordable way of lighting up houses after the sun sets in the evening. They are just supposed to be charged under the sunlight during daytime at one particular place (here, at Kishor’s home). Then everyone takes their own lamp to home so that their family members can study, cook or work.

    A village where there is not enough water to be used for domestic and agricultural purposes simultaneously; it is commendable that they have developed their own water supply system.

    These are solar panels installed outside the village near a community well. They produce enough electricity when on-line to run a pump, which transfers water from the well to a distant tank located uphill, behind the village. The water purified by solid powder there is then distributed by underground network near every house! Amazing, isn’t it?

    And they close the water supply when they are done using it. A smart thing to learn for ‘citizens’.

    

    Every year when the summer arrives, the scarcity of water is felt at usual water sources, as the water table goes down. Harvesting the water is still expensive for them considering very low per capita income. Big dam? That’s not an option. They had to use something indigenous. So they used the scrapped cement bags filled with local mud to build this temporary dam.

    It works well for a single season, is quite tough and stores enough water to be used for domestic purpose.  The amazing thing is that, the dam seen in the picture was built in a single Sunday morning, that too by the energetic youth of this small village!

    This is a house built with the help of ‘Indira Awas Yojana’. The funds allotted under this scheme are shockingly low (70k for plain and 75k for hilly areas). It is impossible to build an inhabitable house in such a low amount. But fortunately they had courage to invest some money on their own and build these beautiful houses.

Nonetheless, the houses build using the previously smaller amount too are nice.

  

    The water distribution system is smart enough to have these community water taps on every street.

  

    Sanitation is a big issue especially in villages where open defecation was considered ‘healthy’. Many times, the weakest link in the chain is making people use the toilets. But here, I saw the willingness to construct their own toilets whether they receive government funding or not. A closer look reveals that their design is way smarter than what government officials would have ever imagined.

    The toilet in the picture is made of local wood sticks, mud and pots procured from a company in Ahmedabad. According to philosophy of sanitation believed here, the biological degradation of excreta is most important part of it. The remaining construction is to be done according to everyone’s financial capacity.

    For this, they have constructed a pit as shown in the picture. The walls made of mud-bricks are porous enough to make the collected excreta dry. After a long period of 6-7 years, the toilet outlet is to be shifted to another pit and the first pit is kept for drying for another few months. The fecal material then is compressed on its own into a non-stinking rock which can be removed and used into compost.

    The beauty of this construction is that the water that will percolate into soil will not reach more than 3 feet around this pit. So you can have the next one right beside it and the whole construction won’t take much space.

    

   A few highlights apart from the ones already mentioned above-

    Kishor, apart from Warli paintings, also makes beautiful crafts using recycled paper pulp as raw material. One of them is this-

    Amazing isn’t it?

    Solar panels on each roof.

    One gentleman from the village has voluntarily given his house to be modified as tourist center.  The seemingly different shades of mud on the walls are in fact two different types of mud found there!

    There are sock pits made which are invisible under the ground and help avoiding any effluent water lying above the land surface.

    There is a single jeep in Pachghar that serves one trip per day, to and from wada, a local market town. This is important, as no other local vehicle is ready to come to such a remote place. In response, another person in the village too has bought a similar jeep. The number will definitely go up once tourism flourishes here.

    In a nutshell, the villagers didn’t wait for the government schemes to come and do the work for them. Rather, they created their own ways.

But then, a few problems that are rather serious still persist here.

    Unemployment

    Vasant was a young villager who met us on our way to village. He was going for work where young boys are supposed to dive into 50 ft. deep water for sand mining. Many of them have lost their hearing capacity due to high pressure at this depth and shockingly, there are few who have lost their lives too!

A few local community members were trained, with the help of charitable funding, for making special types of papad. They had tried selling it in Mumbai quite successfully, but a permanent distributor for them in not available, considering the difficulties they face in transporting it to the nearest town.

Can we do something to get them year-long employment?  

    PHC

    The village lacks a primary health center. A government doctor is supposed to visit the patients here every day. But it is not being done. Considering the long distance of this village from any approachable road, it takes time for the doctor to reach the place in case of emergency.

Can we do something to ensure timely healthcare service to them?

    Agriculture

    It is seasonal and depends entirely on rain. As mentioned earlier, the ground water is insufficient for agricultural use. So it cannot be diverted here without domestic use of water getting seriously affected.

There are a few varieties of vegetables found in jungle around the village, but those too are seasonal. Plus, the quantity cannot be sufficient as they grow only naturally. So commercializing them is really challenging.

Can we do something to have productive agriculture here?

The visit ends and a lot of ideas start bouncing in the mind. Now it’s time to catch them up and bring about them in reality.