NRIs largesse does the trick

Palahi in Punjab is probably the only village in India with everyone has an e-mail

Take a walk through village Palahi in Punjab’s heartland and call out to the humped old man working in his fields with a hoe, and ask him his name and address. “Baba Tharra Singh... and I can give you my e-mail address if you want,” he said.

Address in Palahi means an email id. Every villager has one. This back-of-the-beyond village in Punjab shows just how easy it could be to slay the Chinese dragon in no time. Palahi, near Phagwara in Kapurthala district, made news years back when it became India’s first village to be linked to the internet. It soon made news for becoming the first remote village in India to have an underground sewage system.

When the community biogas plant project failed in Punjab, Palahi made news because it ran the solitary plant that kept functioning. Years before private engineering colleges started dotting Punjab’s countryside, opening shops-cum-educational institutes and imparting arguably sub-standard education, Palahi’s Community Polytechnic showed how it should be done.

When Palahi felt its youth needed computer education, it did not think of anything less than the British Council Division to help start a training course and then received recognition not from any nearby university but from Cambridge.

By then, it stopped making news. Excellence and innovation were now expected as a matter of right and priority from Palahi. Thousands of Punjab’s villages have separate cremation grounds for higher castes and dalits. Palahi was almost automatically not expected to do any such thing. In fact, cremation grounds at Palahi are more serene and well kept than any you would have seen in an idyllic London village.

Even if there was a single Muslim family in the village, it was expected of the people of Palahi to build a mosque for it by spending a few lakhs. Palahi shocks in its own ways. Doaba region  is known for its people who emigrated abroad in trying circumstances  but made good by their enterprise and hard work. Years later, Palahi needed them. As militancy raged and state virtually withdrew its role of being a development facilitator, Palahi called out to her sons and daughters.

 Those who had flown over the cuckoo’s nest decades earlier to find greener pastures abroad responded like men and women possessed. Jagat Singh Palahi, a well-to-do businessman-turned-philanthropist, jokingly narrates his ability to turn into an ‘international beggar’’.

Palahi’s NRI sons and daughters wanted to see blueprints, plans, management roadmap and draft reports. With a population of about 3,800, this village has a 1500-seat auditorium, string of schools built with NRI funds, a swimming pool, every villager with an e-mail ID, rainwater management, two well-stocked libraries, alternative energy almost a norm, the list goes on and on.

Villagers set up a National Rural Development Society in 1983 which started the Community Polytechnic. It built the best in the district auditorium with all acoustic features and a seating capacity of 1500, a Rs 20-lakh school building, a
Rs 30-lakh community hall, a Rs 5-lakh mosque for the sole Muslim family in the village. Soon the British Council Division was running computer classes and Cambridge University recognised the diplomas.

The synergy between the Polytechnic Institute, the panch­ayat, the National Rural Development Society and each individual villager worked like an organic livewire connection. Take this little example. As village ponds are fast disappearing in Punjab, Palahi’s panchayat decided that a pond was a must and should be used for water harvesting. Rain water was harvested, and water drained out from the nearby gurdwara’s pool was diverted to this pond.

Into this, fish seed was introduced, giving the panchayat a regular income, a preserved pond, good use of drained out water from pool, and of course the solace of environment conservation.

Gurmit Singh talking to Deccan Herald said he got NRIs to contribute money to open a gym next door. As women seemed less interested in the library, NRIs pooled in more for a ladies-special gym next to the library. Since children also started dropping in with their moms, the library was quick to add more children titles. Seeing all this, the British Council Division gave a grant of Rs 3 lakh for computers and library.

Gurmit Singh retired from the polytechnic about a year and a half back. A restless soul, he is worried about the state of affairs. Gurmit appeared crestfallen. “Our community polytechnic is facing a resource crunch. Private colleges are luring away students with false advertisements and good media management,” he lamented.

Clearly, Gurmit has found a new war to fight. “My village too is becoming a victim of factionalism, petty politicking. The biogas plant is not working. The solar lights have gone kaput,” he said.

Minutes later, he comes up with a piece of good news, characteristically Palahi in nature. “You know what, we have inst­alled new CFL-based street lights all across the village, and unlike the cities, we have kept all wiring underground,” he says. And the money? He says, “Oh, Palahi's people contributed Rs 4 lakh, the panchayat managed the rest. Charanjit Kaur is a very good sarpanch”. The community owns the village and everyone has a stake. Palahi fills people with pride. The village makes you think big; it makes you feel small. This village surely knows how to dream.