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Champaben and me -
Village Immersion Program, India
By SHANTA DEVARAJAN*
At my work, she is a statistic—one of 400 million South Asians
living on a dollar a day. But for three days in the Kutch desert
of Gujarat, India, she was my host, my co-worker, my teacher, my
friend.
Champaben (the name of a beautiful flower) is an agricultural
worker who literally earns a dollar—50 rupees—a day. She lives
in a two-room house with her husband and four children. She gets
up around 5 a.m. to cook breakfast and lunch—on a wood stove in
an enclosed kitchen--before heading off to work in the fields at
around 7 a.m.
The house has electricity but no running water. After work, one
of Champaben’s chores is fetching water from a communal tap
about a mile away. Since I was going to be her houseguest, as a
token gift, I had packed the Gujarati translation of a report I
had done, “Making Services Work for Poor People.” But I never
gave it to her; Champaben can’t read.
She was my host in a village immersion program for World Bank
staff, organized by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)
an NGO based in Gujarat.
The purpose of the program is for Bank staff to experience how
poor people—our ultimate “clients”—live, so that we can better
serve them. I didn’t realize how much the experience would teach
me about development economics. I also didn’t expect it to be so
much fun.
At SEWA’s orientation before starting the program, we were
advised not to start off by asking too many questions, to allow
our hosts to initiate the conversation. For the first half day
after I arrived, Champaben didn’t ask me a single question.
[This was frustrating for me, as I had a ton of questions I
wanted to ask her.] When she did ask me a question, it was not
about my family or my job. It was: “What kind of trees do you
have where you live?” I suppose it was the one thing she was
sure we had in common.
Soon we were chatting like old friends. I joined her at work,
weeding an overgrown field. She told me to start weeding one
row, while she weeded the adjacent one. When I was half-way
through my row, I looked up and saw Champaben had finished five
rows. This was the only time when she spoke to me in English:
“Speed!”
I proudly told her that I was a cook, and would like to cook
with her. Shrugging her shoulders, she showed me how to make
rotilas or breads for dinner. While I faithfully followed her
instructions, at dinner she pulled out, from a stack of light,
fluffy rotilas, one thick, dense one that was almost inedible.
That was the one I made.
I was called “Shantabhai” (“bhai” being a typical suffix for
men, meaning “brother”, while “ben” is the suffix for women). In
the evenings, I would overhear conversations between Champaben
and her neighbors which would be a string of incomprehensible
Gujarati ending with “Shantabhai,” and then everybody bursts out
laughing. I didn’t dare ask what they were saying.
Every name has to have a meaning. They had no trouble with my
name, because it means “peace.” They did have trouble with the
name of my South African colleague Jeff Racki, because “Jeff”
has no real meaning in Gujarati. But it turns out that “Racki”
is the word for a string you tie around your wrist, so he is now
called “Rackibhai.”
The generosity of poor people is overwhelming. By almost any
measure, Champaben is extremely poor. Yet she spends most of her
free time helping those less fortunate than her. One evening, we
went to chop firewood for a very poor family whose household
head was sick. Another evening, we brought some vegetables to a
poor, Muslim family. One of the children was the size of a
one-year-old, but had well-defined features. In fact, she was
five years old and malnourished.
One of my colleagues, Junaid Ahmad, was supposed to do an
immersion in a neighboring village, but at the last minute
couldn’t make it. His host was so disappointed that she insisted
on bringing the meal she would have cooked for him to
Champaben’s house for me to eat.
The conversation with Junaid’s would-be host brought home to me
the fact that the government, which is supposed to help poor
people, was largely absent from their lives. This lady had been
seriously ill, and was complaining about how much money she had
to pay for treatment. When I asked her why she didn’t go to the
free public clinic, she looked at me as if I was some kind of
fool. “I had to go to the private doctor. The free public clinic
hasn’t had anybody there for years.”
Sometimes it’s worse. Champaben is the convener of a village
savings association that has leveraged some public funds to run
a day-care center for working mothers. Late one night, after the
kids were asleep, there was a meeting of the association at
Champaben’s house. For political reasons, the government grant
for the day-care center was about to be cut off. The center may
have to be closed. Every one of the mothers (and a few fathers)
spoke about the damage this would do to their lives. One of
their statements nearly brought me to tears: “We adults can
understand if they close the center. But how will we explain it
to the children?”
At the same time, there was an almost instinctive reverence for
the government. I asked Champaben whom she voted for in the last
election. She told me to ask her husband (this was the only time
she referred me to her husband). He said that they usually vote
for the Congress Party because they are supposed to help poor
people. But last time he voted for the rival party, the BJP,
because the candidate was from a neighboring village.
Late one afternoon, several of us were chatting in the area
outside Champaben’s house (which is also the village road). A
man walked by. Champaben, who had been speaking volubly,
immediately became silent and covered her head with the end of
her sari. After the man left, I asked what was going on. She
explained: he was the local politician.
I left Champaben’s house with a renewed appreciation of how both
markets and governments have failed poor people; how poor people
are essentially helping each other; and how they do so with
charm, grace--and humor. I want to go back.
* Shanta Devarajan, the Chief Economist of the South Asia
Region at the World Bank.
Since joining the World Bank in 1991, he has been a
Principal Economist and Research Manager for Public Economics in
the Development Research Group, as well as the Chief Economist
of the Human Development Network. He was the Director of the
World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor
People. Before 1991, he was on the faculty of Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The author or co-author of over 100 publications, Shanta’s
research covers public economics, trade policy, natural
resources and the environment, and general-equilibrium modeling
of developing countries. Born in Sri Lanka, he received his A.
B. in mathematics from Princeton University and his Ph. D. in
economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
 
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