THE MAN OF MANY SIMPLICITIES
In a polity structure that has conditioned one to constant bigotry, finding inspiration to stay optimistic, really does need one to dig deeper – to find those who have barely been lauded by ‘progressive’ media and don’t possess an actively edited and re-edited Wikipedia account.
One such person is Bharat Lal Meena – IAS officer, welfare manager of the Karnataka Government, MD of Karanataka Power Transmission Corporation Ltd and a sole strong point behind ushering the ‘aam aadmi’ into taking charge of the results they want to see for themselves.
Bharat Lal Meena hails from a meagre household in Sundari Village, Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan and has grown seeing the toils of being a farming family in India. Maybe this in itself adds to his insight into rural development and how people are, after all, the crucial nucleus of growth in these regions. As he confesses, the study of political sciences and rural development, has undoubtedly added to his knowledge and expertise of the Indian power structure, the process of change and the intuition of what needs to be done here and now.
Since his uptake of office in Mangalore, Meena has seen several rural regions through milestones of success. Be it governing adequate electricity supply across focus regions or connecting water sources to almost perennially draught villages in Karnataka – he has most certainly used the various stages of power vested in him in the past decade and half, judiciously and impactfully. But among all this, the greatest target Meena has unlocked is the pioneering of ‘ApnaDesh’ – a social awareness and people’s movement that sees motivated individuals of a society striving for the change they want to see in their surroundings. The issues range from anything dealing with droughts to infrastructure and poverty alleviation.
The key notion behind ‘ApnaDesh’ is to spend minimal or no money in building awareness among the local society and get them acting into the process of development. It promotes We feeling over I feeling. “The idea is not to wait for the government to act or to leave everything to them or blame them for all the ills, but rather look at building an attitude and an approach among the people towards self-reliance; an attitude that was amply found earlier in villages, but went missing subsequently,” says Meena. The plan is to not wait for other external forces to take charge of what is lagging – it is to take onus of one’s own needs and achieving them via smart and hard work, that doesn’t require any monetary backups. An excellent example of success by this model can be seen listed in popular press, such as the India Today, as well. As the newspaper tells us – “The water tank in the Hunsinakatte village, on the outskirts of Shimoga, ran dry. The volunteers started working on desilting the water tank and improve water percolation and ground water recharge.”
The website –
www.apnadesh.org – gives several such accounts of success stories, along with a clear structure of the objectives that Meena and his workforce mean to accomplish.
Apart from these, Bharat Lal Meena has also made significant progress with power plants in the Karnataka region. India Today tells us that Meena, as the chairman of Transmission Corporation in Karnataka, upped infrastructure projects in Shimoga, that brought down transmission and distribution losses, saving the state almost a lakh and a half annually.
These milestones may have very well been achieved by Meena himself, but his long term goal remains to watch the larger socio-political structure adopting these methods of growth.
Call it what you want – a ‘rags to riches’ story or a liberalist approach – the moral compass of self-dependency that Meena has been encouraging in his tenure has slowly but surely restored faith among several people in rural Karnataka and continues to be a spark of optimism when it comes to good governance in India. One would obviously think that positive political aspects, as few as it may get, would also get its fair deal of ‘any time’ coverage – but I presume dissonance in democracy has gone a bit too far with the cynical nationalistic journalism in the country. However, whether by word of mouth or via poorly edited but well written websites, Bharat Lal Meena’s work continues to be acknowledged and the results appreciated by those who truly hold the privilege of doing so.
