This week has already been one of the most informational and eye-opening in my life, and it’s only halfway over. The water situation in India, and around the world for that matter, has apparently been the elephant in the 16 x 9 dorm room; it is simply astounding how much this discussion should be a part of everyone’s lives. Water encompasses everything. It is a poverty issue, it is a women’s rights issue, it is an education issue, and it is a development issue. Even in the valley we are working in, there are complexities upon complexities upon complexities. It could take an entire career to scratch the surface.
Enough stating the obvious. We’ll see what we can cover in the short weeks we have.
I arrived on Saturday to the warm hospitality of Anat and everyone else at MUWCI. My travel plans apparently weren’t communicated clearly, yet they quickly sent a jeep down to Paud village to come pick me up. A couple of hours later, another mixup of times and appointments, I rode back down the hill with Maya and Samir of the Comm-d team to meet with Medathai of Sadhana Village.
Our meeting went much better than I expected, maybe again because I didn’t know what to expect to begin with, and conversation flowed, well, like water. The first topic was on how well the survey groups went, and then we drifted towards designing the focus groups like a ship to rocks. The challenge was not a conflict of opinions, rather it was a lack of understanding of the valley. On my part. I could not voice what groups we wanted to include in discussion nor what answers we hoped to come of the meetings.
The following couple of days were then partially dedicated to developing a plan of attack. We needed questions which would preferably follow up on issues raised during the survey but would also provoke discussion, not responses of two or three sentences. Our goal was and is to inspire passionate debate about water access.
For the most part, the focus groups have been a mixture of both, a nice broth of success I could’ve guessed would happen. In order to ask the bigger questions about a community dynamic, we need to first understand how the community works. How it functions. Where they go for their milk. The format to achieve this, or at least what we’ve learned over the previous two days, is as follows: the participants, a Marathi speaker to lead discussion and ask questions, a few note takers, and a couple more observers to create inane questions to ask. In all honesty, the afternoon sessions we’ve conducted have been thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. The villagers appreciate us asking about their water situation, and we wonder at the marvelous insights the responses offer.
A question has been raised as to whether we are actually conducting focus groups or just holding interviews. For instance, the very first conversation we had was with the pipe manager from Chikalgaon. He is paid to turn the pump on and off every morning. To begin to understand the issues faced by the village, we had to first know how the distribution system works. The bulk of our discussion with him revolved around these specifics, as opposed to questions like, “How do you rate water issues compared to kid’s education, healthcare, women’s rights, etc?” Yet, at the same time, we gained far more practical, useful information from the dialogue than if we had forced an abstract subject. It illustrates the most pertinent issue, too; because water access in the valley is an everyday challenge, the things the villagers are most worried about are the simple details.
When I met with Ashwin of Gomukh on Monday, we spent a bulk of our two hours talking about the project’s established focus, the “cultural, social, and religious constraints to Appropriate Water Technology.” His argument, if I can try to paraphrase and summarise it correctly, is that the sentence itself seems to imply there are faults within Indian culture, society, and religion themselves which are the sources of issues related to water access. In this hypothetical scenario, for instance, religion would say only specific castes should have access to a certain water source. In reality, this is not the case and it is the complex social institution I am at no liberty to try and describe which causes these injustices. Seeing his point, I now realise it is difficult to delineate between his reading and our intended presentation. I think this type of misunderstanding will be the topic of a few pages for the report.
The dirtiest task I’ve had to take the lead on while at MUWCI is digitizing the data we’ve collected. Results from 141 surveys need to be painstakingly hand-typed into the ad-hoc spreadsheet we’re using for storage at the moment. As I write this, there have been two Comm-d students working beside me for the past hour on one a piece. Needless to say, it is somewhat of black hole. They aren’t the only information which should be put online either, there are now pages of notes from the focus groups in good ol’ fashioned handwriting. After finishing Natural Capitalism, I’ve prided myself in being able to look at systems and find easier and more efficient ways to achieve the same aims. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a method of dodging grunt work.
And to think the rest of the team was worried they wouldn’t enough work to do. The next week and a half will be filled with even more discussions, testing, and data compilation than the past few days. I guess we’ll write the report when we have time, eh?