MGNREGA: Fostering Real Citizenship

Moving from ignorance and non-participation to active involvement in planning and implementing, the women in Kesla are determined to develop their villages, conscious not only of their rights and entitlements but also of their roles and responsibility in developing their villages

E arly in the morning on 16 August 2013, I received a call from Sunita Bai, a member of the Yashoda Mahila Samita from Dauri, a small village in Hoshangabad district, Madhya Pradesh, inviting me to attend a gram sabha in their village. This was a proud moment for me because the efforts of the struggle by the Narmada Mahila Sangh (NMS) had begun to reap results.

I rushed to Dauri with my colleague, Bharti. The gram sabha was organized to plan the panchayat’s annual budget for the financial year 2014–15. SHG members were submitting their family-wise plan to the gram sabha for approval and all the interventions in the Shelf of Project (SOP) of the panchayats so that in the coming year they could manage their labour, develop land, water and other infrastructure in the village.

I was happy to see that all Panchayati Raj Institution (PRI) representatives, the nodal officer from the district and about 180 villagers had gathered for the meeting; of these, at least about 60 per cent were women SHG members. At the end of the meeting, the panchayat secretary read aloud the interventions planned by the villagers, which were then thoroughly scrutinized by the participating members.

Radha Bai, a Federation member of NMS, informed the gathering that the same process was taking place in other villages such as Chipkheda, Dandiwar, Chartekara and Choukipura; and that SHG members in Jhunkar and Morepani had conducted this exercise a day earlier in their gram sabha.