Chhavi Rajawat

#54/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

While most of us lament about the corrupt system and its loopholes impeding our country’s growth, how many of us actually think about taking a lead and dare to give it all up to work at the grass-root level?

Among those few faces who lead our society by example, Chhavi Rajawat, the Sarpanch of Soda village in Rajasthan is a woman who has indeed made a difference. With an excellent academic background including a management degree, Chhavi worked for leading companies but left it all to serve her village. Giving up a promising corporate career, she chose to go back to her ancestral village and run for the election of village Sarpanch.

Chhavi was born in 1977 in Jaipur, Rajasthan. She hails from a small village called Soda in Malpura tehsil, Tonk district. She is an alumnus of Rishi Valley School (Andhra Pradesh), Mayo College Girls School (Ajmer), Lady Shri Ram College (University of Delhi) and has completed her MBA from Balaji Institute Of Modern Management, Pune. After doing her MBA, Chhavi worked for companies such as Times of India, Carlson Group of Hotels, and Airtel, before she realised the need to bring about a change in the grass-root level, if she wants to bring about a real difference. Her decision to contest elections was made after a group of people from her village approached and requested her. Quite naturally, the education and exposure that Chhavi brought along, caught the attention of village residents who voted in her favour. In 2011, all in her early 30s, she went back to her village, Soda, in Rajashthan’s Tonk district to become India’s youngest Sarpanch, the first woman Sarpanch and the only Sarpanch to hold an MBA degree. “As the post of Sarpanch at Soda was reserved for women in 2010, villagers wanted me to contest elections. Since I was regularly visiting Soda, I developed a special affection for them. Owing to my upbringing, I always wanted to payback something to the society. As I decided to leave my corporate career, my parents backed my decision to pursue social work,” she said. She now divides her time between her village, Soda, and Jaipur where she lives with her parents. Since her election as Sarpanch, she has been working to bring better water, solar power, paved roads, toilets and a bank to her village. She rues that the modern-day education system is pushing youngsters towards a rat race, leaving them hardly concerned about the society.

Soda is in a remote corner of Rajasthan where the houses are made of mud, electricity supplies are erratic, literacy levels are below 50 per cent and the fear of drought is never far away. The villagers said there had been no progress since Chhavi's brigadier grandfather, now in his 90s, had served as Sarpanch two decades ago and they wanted someone else in the family to take on the role.

In a span of 4 years since she got elected, Chhavi has worked to ensure regular supply of drinking water in the village households and construction of more than 40 roads. In the small village of the desert state, toilets have been constructed in 800 houses out of the total 900 that exist. She claims to have worked for enhancing electricity supply from four hours in a day in 2010 to 22 hours now. She also got a soft drink company to invest into cleaning a pond, the only source of drinking water in the village. The village of Soda has undergone a radical transformation under her leadership and is popular as one of the finest villages in India. But change did not come easily and she faced many challenges, including no support from the government at times. Despite being an elected representative, Chhavi is not affiliated to any political party. “If India continues to make progress at the same pace as it has for the past 65 years since independence, it just won’t be good enough. We’ll be failing people who dream about having water, electricity, toilets, schools and jobs. I am convinced we can do it differently and do it faster,” Chhavi said in an interview with NDTV.

She is swarmed by villagers as she walks down the road and she greets them by name as they share family news and pepper her with questions about progress on various projects. “Nobody has been able to do what she has done - no other Sarpanch has done as much,” said 30-year-old farmer Jai Singh. “I didn't have a choice,” said a smiling Chhavi, who represented India at a recent UN poverty summit. “The villagers broke all caste, gender and religious barriers to elect me,” she adds, a glamorous 33-year-old whose 10,000 constituents are mostly farmers and labourers largely untouched by the country’s economic boom. Her story reveals the potential of good grassroots leadership in making a difference in a country plagued by corruption and inefficiency.

As she planned an IT centre on the common land of Soda by utilising the central funds, few land grabbers who were eyeing the land, allegedly attacked Chhavi, her father and few others with sticks, iron rods and stones, after which she suffered a fracture and other injuries. However, the entire official machinery did not come to her support here as she was not affiliated to any political party, she says. “Even as I was an elected representative, the previous (Congress) regime did not support my ideas of social welfare and empowering ruralites. Development plans were stalled and the then establishment turned a blind eye on our woes. When I was attacked twice by the unsocial elements who were unhappy by my kind of transparent governance, the police officials did not act on my complaints. As I suffered a fracture, doctors at the local government hospitals refused to issue a medico-legal report (MLR),” she said while alleging that people at various levels connived with those who wanted to encroach land. Chhavi said that she faced the hardships with the active support of her parents and the villagers. However, she said that the support of her village made the government authorities realise the activities of the erring officials and support of the authorities. “It’s a huge opportunity for them to get some skills - there was nothing before,” said teacher Mohammed Sadeek, 25, about the youngsters who are all out in support of the IT centre.

When she constructed a drinking water reservoir that has created a shimmering blue lake in the middle of the village, she got her first taste of the bureaucratic hurdles that have repeatedly thwarted her. “I was told we could not use government machinery to clean up reservoirs. Finally, they (the government) told me to do it on my own,” she said. And that’s what she did - raising money from friends, family and companies to fund many of her projects. A soft drinks company invested Rs. 20 Lakhs in the project.

The Times of India, a leading English newspaper in India, credits her as the changing face of rural Rajasthan. On 25 March 2011, Chhavi Rajawat made a well-received address to delegates at the 11th Infopoverty World Conference held at the United Nations. Chhavi was also honoured by the late President of India APJ Abdul Kalam at the Technology Day function at New Delhi. She was also honoured “Young Indian Leader” by IBNLive.

Determined to bring about a faster and sustainable growth in the society, the young Sarpanch believes that a technology-driven system can be used to the advantage of common people in curbing corruption and maintaining transparency. She has not decided whether she will continue in development work once her five-year terms ends, but she is hoping her example will inspire other educated young people to take time out to serve their communities. “Your roots are your foundation. You have to start at the bottom to make a difference -- and there is so much left to do.”

Chhavi Rajawat is a one-woman whirlwind as she seeks to drag her impoverished ancestral village in the desert state of Rajasthan into the 21st Century. The fact that the denim-clad lady of urban India has heartily been welcomed and accepted at a village where women still veiled their faces in ghoonghat says a lot about our country’s people’s will to walk the path of development. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

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