Self sufficient development practices in rural settlement case study of ralegan siddhi, Maharashtra

Abstract

The idea for this research came with a small question in the mind – what if cities will keep growing. What if ever expanding urban areas will eat up the hinterland? What will happen when we will have nothing to call ‘countryside or rural’. Everywhere the chaos of cities, noise of vehicles, pollution and we will not be having any place for retreat. And obviously, how the population will survive if there will be no rural areas and nobody who is indulges in agriculture. Just a thought of it was enough for me to push myself and try to identify what are the possible measures which can be adopted not stop but to tackle this phenomenon of urban sprawl. With this question, I started my thesis. To formulate possible measures it was necessary to know the real cause of problem. And after studying and consultation, it was right in the front of my eyes - increasing population in urban areas. And the interesting part was the major chunk of population growth was from migration, which obviously happens in rural areas. Agriculture is now becoming secondary occupation for rural India. Large chunk of rural population is migrating towards urban areas in search of better education, health and employment opportunities. And this is all happening in shadow of poor basic infrastructure i.e. health, education, sanitation, etc. The nature of poverty in rural India is changing its nature from seasonal to chronic. Irregular monsoon, ineffective implementation of Government programmes and economic disparity is adding to the misery. But under this dark shadow, there are many examples of hope which are flourishing and showing the righteous path which is to be followed in order to avoid this graving situation. Many examples like Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra, Tilonia in Rajasthan, Ankapur in Andhra Pradesh has proved that if methods of local resource utilization, community contribution, transparency, equality and ethical education are to be applied, they can give amazing results. So I focussed my dissertation in analysing a case study of Ralegan Siddhi in order to understand the real formula of the transformation and its sustainability of its model over the period of time. And try to identify lacunas in the model if there are any. Under this, I will also study some other similar models and will try to incorporate those ideas in order to have improved model.