Indian Diary The Health Minister Wore Pigtails
Thomson, Morgan
Indian Diary The Health Minister Wore Pigtails by MORGAN THOMSON The article below represents fragments from a travel diary by Morgan Thomson as he journeyed through India recently. Mr. Thomson,...
...But I would still rather have lived in the worst slums in London or Chicago...
...The know-how and the top technical direction came from America, but the Indians were proving keen pupils...
...They enjoy the only luxury which the village can boast— a modern swing and slide and climbing frame outside the little cottage schoolroom...
...Both are given an important place in the second Five Year Plan...
...His '1block" includes 242 villages with a population of nearly 75,-000 in an area of about 200 square miles...
...A sign of how much a project like Bakhra means to the new India is that there are few disputes or strikes, although the trade unions are well organized...
...When it is finished it will be 736 feet high, the highest dam in the world...
...Some of the housing I saw was worse than I have just described— three sided shacks, open at the front to the river...
...They showed me their homes— a jumble of hovels, huddled together in the shadow of some slum jute mills...
...Engineers with a university degree start at $15 and rise to $36...
...A great deal of social invention and new creative thinking has gone into this movement in India," said a distinguished American sociologist recently...
...If they do not brush their teeth," she said, "I make sure they do it right...
...For this reason union leaders tend to come up from the outside, and not from the ranks of the workers...
...With $300," said one union leader longingly, "I could run an evening class for a year to teach my members how to read and write...
...They tell you proudly how they have injected thousands of tons of liquid concrete into the mountainsides to strengthen the soft Himalayan rock, or how they have put the whole dam in a deep-freeze by running miles of pipes with ice-cold water through it to harden and strengthen the concrete...
...The people of India have an almost American joy in reciting their statistics of bigness and describing their technical tricks...
...Some that I met came from Madras, a sea voyage of 78 miles...
...He was an agricultural scientist, fresh from college with a university degree...
...And there is much they will want to change as they grow up...
...Lentils are the main source of nourishment...
...But the villagers had accepted only one hand-flush latrine (significantly in the school) and the new co-op society had died of bad management...
...It looks as if there is bound to be some cut-back as a result of the difficulties of the Second Five Year Plan...
...If surplus manpower is considered wealth, India is the richest country in the world...
...The question is the balance to be struck between them...
...Some of the housing was better...
...They recited them with bright-eyed pride—making sure the other children brush their teeth and comb their hair and wash their hands, looking after the school books and the little painted wooden models in the school "museum...
...Any bar based on color, caste, or creed has been declared illegal in the new India—on paper at least...
...But the poverty bar is still there—in a blatant form we have not seen in Britain in a generation...
...It is cleared by the .sweepers, who belong to the Untouchables...
...Long, dreary rows of one-room concrete huts built by a jute company for its employees...
...Now the maharajah is a democratically-appointed governor...
...There is fish sometimes from the holy, filthy River Hooghly nearby...
...My biggest shock in India came in Calcutta where the executive committee of one of the textile workers' unions were refused admission to the hotel where I was staying...
...Most of them earn about $3.50...
...The crane drivers are among the most highly paid workers...
...At present the team has a number of specialists covering a wide field...
...They tell you that this dam will produce a million kilowatts of electric power and will serve the world's biggest irrigation area...
...The villages were then persuaded to buy and plant coconut trees, which within six years will be producing a cash crop...
...There were eight irrigation wells where there had been none before...
...When these textile workers state their case, four separate groups of unions appear before the tribunal, with Congress, Socialist, Communist, and no party affiliations respectively...
...The development team's first job was to interest the chairman and members of the village council in the possibilities of the scheme...
...There is a cooperative officer who helps the villages to form co-op societies...
...But as a recent official report showed, there is still a long way to go before the scavengers of this primitive sanitation get equal treatment...
...In this case it was a rough roadway of broken slabs of stone between the low cottages...
...Their school has neither seats nor desks...
...Our big hope is the children," said the young and impressive economist who heads the civil service side of the Community Development program in Mysore...
...But the controversy goes deeper than that...
...It all means Change, and Change is the thing a tradition-bound peasant community fears most, because it is so unfamiliar...
...Twenty adults out of 350 had learned to read and write for the first time...
...Although on paper education is compulsory, it is not yet possible to enforce it, and the attendance varies from half to three-quarters...
...But there is now a report from an official committee that this is proving too ambitious...
...The adults are slowest to change their age-old habits, though steady progress is being made...
...They are being imbued with the religion of Change at the most impressionable age...
...It is hopelessly uneconomic, but it requires the patience of a saint to bring about a change...
...This game of "Playing at Parliament" is deliberate in these village schools...
...But it is something more...
...I visited the village of Arasinakunte where the operations began only three months ago...
...So far he has been able to bring the benefits of Community Development to about half his villages...
...But the children are clearly the V.I.P.s of India's plan for village development...
...The minimum pay for laborers is three dollars a week...
...But they still bore all the marks of poverty...
...First comes education—of both children and adults...
...In a corner, hidden by a torn piece of sacking, was an ancient dry lavatory with a hole in the stone floor, and a bucket underneath...
...There are jobless millions in the cities, and in the countryside there are more millions of peasants who only work a few months a year...
...The background to this debate is the biggest unemployment problem in the world...
...Both customer and craftsman escape from what I heard Nehru describe in a vivid phrase as the rapacity of the bazaar...
...So there was no room at the inn for them...
...Education in how neighborly cooperation can remove povetry and ignorance and disease...
...They have been liberated—again on paper...
...They sit, cross-legged on wooden planks, their slates in their laps...
...Jet black pigtails hung behind her back...
...They live in other parts of India...
...In another village I met the council and saw the results of two years of community development...
...Here one could measure the progress and the setbacks...
...I think the cross-legged children on the earth floor are going to do their best to make sure that Community Development is done right...
...the problems of separation can be imagined...
...Gandhi explained how the government was giving financial assistance to the cottage industries in India's three-quarters of a million villages...
...The sanitation and water supply were more hygienic here...
...Then there is the task of persuading the peasants to use their cow dung to fertilize their fields instead of burning it up as fuel in their primitive stoves...
...At lunch at the foot of the mountains, the engineers' wives wore a dazzling array of golden saris, and glittering, jingling hand-made jewelry...
...She was the most beautiful Minister of Health I had ever seen...
...There is the rural engineer who provides the technical know-how for wells and irrigation...
...At Bakhra Dam there is public enterprise of another sort, far removed from the patient hand-loom and the infinitely painstaking chisel of the wood carver...
...These stores are cooperatively owned, with government encouragement and subsidies...
...British managements grumble, but put up with union activities...
...His pay was $30 a month...
...Her eyes were as bright as the jewels which were embedded on either side of her snub nose...
...they receive from $15 to $30 per week, with free accommodation and electricity...
...At the doorways, the Sunday dinner was being cooked, beside open sewers running with the kitchen waste...
...This is how India's half million villages, containing three-quarters of her vast population, are painfully pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps...
...Thomson, a Laborite member of the British Pariament, zuas formerly editor of the Glasgow Forward.—The Editors Bangalore, India She said, "I am the Minister of Health...
...Will they succeed?^ I put my trust in my pretty little Health Minister...
...This is the heart of Nehru's plan for India—the power of the state harnessed to democratic cooperative effort in the villages...
...Filth everywhere...
...The government provides the engineering skill...
...As I approached the next shack there was a hurried scuttling from behind a half wall in front of the door...
...In all the big cities there are attractive shops selling the products of the cottage industries...
...He was a despot, benevolent but absolute...
...Some leaders use their unions mainly as means of political advancement...
...Its philosophy, its organization, and its approach are now being tried in India for the first time...
...She was standing proudly with her Cabinet colleagues, the Chief Minister and the Minister of Education, in the classroom of a village in the State of Mysore in South India...
...The prices are fixed and fair...
...These solemn-eyed elders attended a training camp for a few days and had the place of little Arasinakunte in India's great Five-Year Plan explained to them...
...Here we were pursued by a shrill jute worker, who denounced trade unionism and politics as a waste of time, and demended a return to the ancient Hindu gods...
...There were no windows...
...In due course they will provide the answer to the fateful question whether the slow unspectacular processes of parliamentary rule are to succeed in India...
...If they succeed they will have great influence in the whole world...
...Here are to be found not only breathtaking hand-loom fabrics, but delicate wood-carving, inlay work, furniture, brass work, and hand-made jewelry...
...How characteristically India, where all the politicians produce spiritual reasons for the most bread-and-butter policiesl There is a considerable argument going on as to whether the Second Five Year Plan does not go too far too quickly along the road of heavy industry...
...The infinitely slow task of persuading them to replan their use of land is now beginning...
...And there are two social education officers—a man and a woman—who do the general missionary work of getting the plan across...
...Jayprakash Narayan, the leading Socialist figure, believes the present speed of advance of heavy industry can only be achieved by so much central planning that real village democracy will be gravely damaged...
...Eight men lived together in a living-space of about six feet by six feet...
...The villages provide die labor...
...This is a vital economic decision...
...We asked the Minister of Health and the Minister of Education what their duties were...
...Within a few weeks India had trained her own people to take over...
...Bakhra Dam is exciting proof to those who work on it that India can tackle the most advanced technological tasks, and that nothing in the long run can prevent India becoming a great industrial nation...
...My journey through India included a visit to New Delhi...
...They go home once every year or two...
...Some Indian employers use labor spies and thugs to kill trade union agitation...
...This arises partly because India has run into both a shortage of foreign exchange and shortage of food...
...A mechanical assembly line of great ingenuity was bringing rubble seven miles up the mountainside, automatically sorting it, and mixing it in the correct proportion in a devil's kitchen of great concrete vats...
...And down in the villages of red mud huts even the children are learning to make democracy work...
...Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter and his official hostess...
...One of these women told me that these lovely hand-made things express the real soul of India, and added color and richness to all their lives...
...She was exactly ten years old...
...Their teachers have never been to a training college...
...I was shown around by the local village worker who has about a dozen villages to help...
...It means new methods of cultivation, new ideas about looking after animals, new notions of sanitation...
...There is the block development officer as captain...
...Six hundred tons of concrete were being laid on the dam every hour of every day...
...A member of the village council promptly produced for me a well-worn map showing how the peasants have little strips scattered all over the place...
...Half the workers do not have their families in Calcutta...
...The labor unions face great apathy among the poverty-stricken workers...
...It is now being revived...
...I watched the great cranes depositing eight tons of concrete on top of the dam every three-quarters of a minute...
...The human resources are being spread too thinly on the ground...
...even at mid-day the bright sunshine did not penetrate, and the place was three-quarters dark...
...Meat is too expensive...
...It was encouraged by that remarkable American ambassador, Chester Bowles...
...Next morning I went to see the Bakhra Dam which Indian public enterprise is building in the foothills of the Himalayas...
...Some people argue that there should be more concentration on an American-type agricultural extension service at the expense of the social development side of the plan...
...These trade unionists had dressed as well as they could to meet me...
...He persuaded the Ford Foundation to do some of the field work from which the present nation-wide scheme of rural renaissance has grown...
...The government is providing a team of gifted designers, and the dresses we saw certainly make the products of our mass-production civilization seem austere and drab...
...And there are big divisions within the unions...
...This eager, intelligent young man is responsible for 10,000 villages with a population of six million...
...Wages have improved a lot since independence, for government wage tribunals have been interfering with the freedom of the tough jute employers...
...Official figures show the average family in debt to the extent of ten weeks' wages...
...A woman clutching some rags about her slid like a frightened mouse into the black hole of the room behind her...
...Somewhere around these exquisite hand-made fabrics and this magnificent machine-made dam lies the key to an understanding of modern India...
...They always need some simple and visible project as a start...
...Mrs...
...The plan owes a great deal to a more enlightened period of American diplomacy than exists at present...
...It is only in India that age-old craftsmanship and modern technology could go hand in hand in this way...
...The target for the Second Five Year Plan ending in 1961 is to reach every village...
...I had disturbed her Sunday morning bath in a pail...
...The hotel which turned them away cost about as much for a day's stay as one of these workers would earn in a month...
...Even now, however, wages of the leaders of the jute union—experienced workers in the finishing departments of the mills—varied between $190 and $240 a year...
...Both subsidized village handicrafts and heavy industry are needed to meet that problem...
...There is none of the usual haggling and bargaining...
...By combining handwoven saris and modern steel works the Indians are engaged in the intriguing attempt to adopt Western industrialization, while preserving their traditional values and arts from Western commercialization and all the dangers of large-scale soulless organization...
...One night I went to see a fashion show of hand-loom saris, introduced by Mrs...
...It is part of the Indian government's great community development plan which aims to give the peasants the means to transform their own lives...
...When the cranes were first erected not a single Indian worker could manipulate these difficult and delicate machines...
...One reason for these fears is that the industrialization that took place in India under the exploitation of British capital in the Nineteenth Century did little to make the Indians love the factory system...
...I met the all-round team the government sends into the villages to teach the peasants self-help...
...Three hundred trees had been planted, a new school built (the villagers had done the work and paid for one-third of the cost), twelve compost pits dug, and a dozen farmers persuaded to practice the Japanese method of making little land produce much food...
...Such are the extremes that still exist in India today...
...Everyone works round-the-clock shifts and a 60-hour week...
...Out of the union executive committee of 25, only ten can read or write...
...There is an agricultural officer who promotes better cultivation and animal husbandry...
...Before independence Mysore was ruled by a maharajah who lived in a fairy tale wedding cake of a palace...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
