Satyendra Pratap Singh was a village chief for 25 years. | Photo by Matthew Masin
Story by Lorena Carmona and Fahad Saeed
The writing on the wall in Vijaypura village in the Indian state of Rajasthan does not show the mark of graffiti but the mark of transparency.
Kaluram Salvi, a former village head, worked to improve the conditions for his villagers through the Right to Information Act. He tried to stop corruption within the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). He painted the information on the walls of his office, making all the information available.
“(NREGA) is not being implemented properly,” said Satyendra Pratap Singh, ex-chief of Rampur-Mathura village.
NREGA is a government plan that guarantees 100 days of wage-employment in a financial year to an adult doing unskilled work, such as digging ditches and making roads. The act was enacted in 2005, according to a government website.
Story by Christina Condreay | Video by Ryan Bramhall
A shopkeeper in a small Indian village answers his cellphone to a familiar voice on the other line: Priya Gupta’s 18-year-old voice is unwavering, her stories direct and meaningful. This 30-second voice message tells the story of an upcoming vaccination clinic in the village.
The young journalist delivers hyper-local news reports in a local dialect of Hindi to 250 of her neighbors as part of Gon Ki Awaaz, or The Village Voice, a mobile phone project that sends out news reports to villagers living in Rampur-Mathura and the surrounding area. Villagers pay 10 rupees a month, about 25 cents, for the twice-daily updates that come as phone calls.
Before cell phones, news traveled slowly. Priya’s reports are the first mobile media to reach this part of rural India, said Sunil Saxena, the founder and technician of the project.
Even though many homes lack electricity and plumbing, battery charged cellphones go off in even the smallest of mud huts.
“The mobile is a powerful media,” Saxena said.
Residents relied on outdated newspapers for their information before the Village Voice, said Rekha, a subscriber of the service. Others can’t read Hindi. Now, all residents hear Priya’s voice within two minutes of her recording it on her own phone.
The papers also rarely covered news specific to the area, Priya said.
Priya’s talent for writing and public speaking, along with her self-confidence, caught the eye of Saxena a year and a half ago.
She wasn’t planning on being a journalist and had to spend time with her former teacher and current reporting partner, Dioyakar Pratap Singh, to learn what news was.
Her quiet confidence and writing skills have developed as the project has gone on, she says, along with her local celebrity.
She says that young girls look up to her. Being one of the only women who works outside the rice fields makes her feel as though she is a role model.
The other villagers have come to know and respect Priya because of her stories, she said. They are open to talking with her as she reports and approach her when they have news of their own.
Polio vaccination clinics, along with other healthcare news, are Priya’s favorite to report because these stories are important to the entire community, she said.
Saxena sees Priya as the future of journalism in India, where few people can read newspapers and no one has a computer, but even the poorest farmers have cellphones.
The Singh's carrot field stands just outside the edge of rapidly expanding Delhi. | Photo by Christina Condreay
Story by Ashley Burns
The heat index soars over one hundred degrees and the humidity approaches 100 percent as Supal and Riki Singh work bent double in a small field outside of Noida.
This area of Delhi, called Chilla village, is owned by the government and serves as a source of income for many farmers like the Singhs and other small time entrepreneurs.
The people who work out here are not allowed to live on the land, only farm it. Most of the farmers who work this area live in the slum about nine miles away.
Out here the air is moist and hot. The constant drone of bugs and the persistent chug-chug of a diesel engine running an irrigation well sets the rhythm of the Singhs’ work.
Farmers still use hand-tools here, like a square blade that looks like a shovel and that is bent at a 45 degree angle to the handle. They are too poor to buy tractors or even oxen, so they rent these from the farmers who can afford them. This can cost upwards of 800 rupees, about $18, an hour.
The Singhs are one of these farming families. They have been working this land for more than 30 years. This season is white carrots. Supal is a sinewy man with sunken eyes. He doesn’t like to take breaks during his work day.
Supal Singh explains how his fields flood each year. The floods leave Singh without crops and without a means to support his family. | Photo by Christina Condreay
Singh doesn’t remember when he started working these fields. He simply says, “Since birth.”
His son Riki, though, talks animatedly. He wades through the water that irrigates the fields and plucks a carrot out of the ground.
In America, these carrots would be grown as a heritage variety and retail for several dollars per pound in specialty markets. But here in India, they bring only pennies. Singh says that on a really good day he can get 15 rupees per pound, or about 33 cents.
Singh and his family walk here every day.
Food vendors come here to sell food to the farmers and other agricultural workers.
In the near 100 percent humidity and the blistering heat, they labor over hot oil instead of shovels and spades in the fields.
Food vendor fries jelebi, a sweet Indian street food, for urban famers at Chilla Village on the outskirts of urban Delhi. | Photo by Ashley Burns
Others are business people like Gyan Chand, who runs a wholesale nursery business.
Chand is rail-thin with black hair and a sparse goatee. He has the same deep sunken eyes the people around him share as a common trait. He has a long face and pointed chin. In the heat he rolls his shirt up to his chest to keep cool.
He spends his day crouched over, potting plants and pruning the evergreen trees to shape them. He pulls off small branches to encourage the tree to branch out and not up.
There are no greenhouses here. Instead, huge plastic tarps and PVC pipe are used to form a structure that serves as a greenhouse.
Chand says that he employs five men to work in the nursery as well. He pays them $160 a month.
Though still poor, he is better off than many of the farmers who work these fields. And although he still uses many of the traditional practices, Chand also embraces several more modern ideas for plant propagating including using a rooting hormone to start new plants from cuttings of existing plants.
Chand tends and prunes his plants to keep them looking healthy. | Photo by Christina Condreay
Supal Singh will eventually take this batch of carrots to markets in Delhi. And Chand will sell his plants. But the work will never end for either of these two or their families.
These people are poor but this is the life that they know. Few of them have other trade skills.
Gritty urban Noida serves as a backdrop for this pastoral slice of time. Multi-story buildings and a hazy sky rise above the green of the fields. Supal Singh continues his work, using his hand to pull weeds from around his carrots.
India is a rapidly developing country, often those who do not embrace the change are left behind and others are pushed out. Some of these people who are being forced out are farmers who have worked the agricultural land on the outskirts of these 21st century cities for innumerable generations. Recently Greater Noida, near the capital city of New Delhi, has fallen under scrutiny after unscrupulous business people forcibly bought up large tracts of farmland at far below market prices. Now the Supreme Court of India has ruled that this act by several large businesses in the area was a wrongful act and has awarded the land back to the farmers. Read full story here
College students learn to overcome language barriers between Indian school children living in a small village. Through the power of dance, University of Nebraska-Lincoln students find a way to connect with the people living there.
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