From Jhabua
What is being written about the work, the newsletter we send out, and the longer stories — of the people who arrived as students and stayed, and of the villagers who became the leaders of their own development.
Coverage of the Halma, of the water work and of the people behind it. Each of these opens the original article on the publication’s own site.
राजा भागीरथ और झाबुआ की जलदेवी जाह्मा माता की कथा की प्रेरणा से मां गंगा को झाबुआ में आमंत्रित करने का संकल्प लिया गया। इसमें सबने सहयोग करने का भरोसा दिलाया और जल संकट से उबरने के लिए हलमा की यह परंपरा शुरू हुई।
Read at navbharattimes.indiatimes.com (opens on their site)
हलमा: सामुदायिक भागीदारी से सूखे का हल निकालते झाबुआ के आदिवासी साढ़ गांव के ग्राम इंजीनियर खुमान किहोरी बताते हैं, “हमने गांव में पानी के संकट से निपटने के लिए हलमा बुलाया था। इसी हलमा से सामुदायिक भागीदारी के तहत बिना एक पैसा खर्च किए तालाब बनाया गया। इस तालाब को 150 लोगों ने 45 दिन 72 करोड़ लीटर की क्षमता वाला तालाब बनाया
Read at hindi.mongabay.com (opens on their site)
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Read at rajwadajhabua.blogspot.com (opens on their site)
This festive season, how about lighting your way to happiness- with nature! Introducing Bamboo Diyas — beautiful, light-weight, and durable. Every set comes with four wax tealight candles. Prefer using traditional oil-Diya? Worry not; you could replace tealights easily.
Read at jhabuacrafts.com (opens on their site)In this negative time, we bring some positive news from Jhabua. From Youth & Women Empowerment camps to Plantation Training Camps to plantation of 1,25,000 plants to constructing 84 earthen dams, Shivganga is working on every dimension of sustainable rural development. And all this was not possible without your contribution — the contribution of donors and friends of Jhabua.
As we aspire together for a prosperous India, let us continue our commitment as ‘Partners – in – Change’.
One came from Karnataka for a fortnight and stayed for years. One grew up in a Jhabua village and now builds reservoirs. Neither story is unusual here.
Raichur, Karnataka · University Law College, Bengaluru
Sometime in July 2020, one would find a young man roaming the villages of Jhabua, trying to talk to people in broken Hindi with a Kannada accent. As we say, words are not a necessary element of communication — emotions are. The language did not deter Avinash. He spent months living in the village, learning both the tribal culture and the Bhili tongue.
Avinash first visited Jhabua during Halma 2020, in March. In July, just after finishing his Masters at Amity University, he made his way back, driven by the urge to work with the tribal community. It did not take him long to connect with people, and he began visiting the villages and spending days and weeks in them. From that stay he gained a real, on-ground reading of the economic condition — the vicious cycle of debt, the migration that follows, and the damage both do to the community’s culture and traditions. He also met the life values, the natural honesty and the Parmarthi nature of the Bhils of Jhabua.
Shivganga had already begun raising the question of Community Forest Rights in Jhabua, so it was natural for him to take it up. In September 2020, helped by Shivganga’s village volunteers, he started holding small awareness meetings. Villagers would go a long way back in memory to describe how the forest had been part of their ancestors’ lives. As the awareness grew, Shivganga began organising workshops under experts in the field. Enthusiasm is contagious: Avinash’s met the Vanvasi spirit of working selflessly for society, and the small informal meetings turned into village-level training camps.
Those camps were a remarkable moment for the community. It was the first time the traditional tribal knowledge of the forest — the flora and fauna, the boundaries of a village — was being written down as it stood. Whole villages, elders and women and children together, would sit and draw the map of their own village, marking the worship places, the old trees, the water bodies, the grazing land and the pathways. With Avinash as the bridge into formal language, five villages formed their Vanadhikar Samiti. In Bawadibadi, the villagers were able to take land from the forest department through the proper channel of papers and build a reservoir on it — a momentous step, and the beginning of a confidence they had not had before, that their rights could be won through the formidable tunnel of documents.
Today twenty-five villages have started the process for Forest Rights. The real change is that they can now put questions to the administration through a legal path, something they would not have considered earlier. They know they have a resource person and a friend in Avinash Mattur.
He is now project leader of Jhabua Naturals, which he leads with Vijendra Amaliyar — whose story follows.
Palasadi village, Jhabua · Gram Engineer
A young tribal student, working hard at his studies to lift his family’s economic condition, begins to feel that this is not enough — that it is not how he can contribute to society. He starts looking for a path by which he can bring change to every life in Jhabua and not only to his own household. Then one day he meets Shri Mahesh Sharma, and through him finds Shivganga.
Vijendra Amaliyar began attending Shivganga’s camps when he was fourteen. At that curious age, the Youth Empowerment Camp felt like the one place where his village’s actual pain and actual needs were being discussed — somewhere he could find a path that mattered. So he kept coming: to the Kanwad Yatra, to Ganeshotsav, to the empowerment camps. Those programmes exist to spark a thought in the young people of Jhabua, and to find the ones who want to work selflessly and passionately for their own society.
They strengthened his idea of working together to resolve the pain of the tribal community. In 2012, at twenty-one, he became a full-time volunteer of Shivganga and moved to the Dharampuri Gurukul. There he led Pashu Samvardhan, the dimension that aims to make cattle a real contributor to a tribal farmer’s livelihood, and took the advanced training to become a Gram Engineer. As an engineer he took on major projects: the reservoirs at Saadh (720 million litres), Navapada (450 million litres) and Surinala (36 million litres), and two Matavan projects, at Bochaka (1,000 trees) and Saadh (3,000 trees).
In 2018 he began leading Shivganga’s organic farming venture, Jhabua Naturals — tribal farmers coming together with the determination to make their soil poison-free and to bring fresh vegetables to the towns. Three years on, those farmers had formed an FPO under the name Jhabuanchal Krishak Farmers Producers Company.
A master of several trades, Vijendra also leads Shivganga’s metal and electrical skill-development workshop. There he designed a flour mill that does not burn the fibre of the flour or the pulses, keeping them more nutritious — much like the old hand-driven chakki — and able to produce different grades. While he goes on improving it, three villagers have already set the machine up in their own houses and sold quintals of pulses from it. His innovation is fostering enterprise in the villages.
With Shivganga’s other volunteers, Vijendra played a significant part in pulling rural Jhabua through the Covid-19 pandemic. At twenty-seven, thirteen years into the journey, he is a master trainer, a social entrepreneur and a social leader carrying Jhabua towards holistic rural development.
Nine hundred villages, and a story in most of them. The quickest way to understand it is to come and stand in one.
