Most of us may have just about heard of Jhabua. We imagine it to be right in the middle of Jharkhand – but it is in west MP, on the MP Gujarat border. Though the Jharkhand connection is there – in the sense that 90% of Jhabua’s (and neighbour Alirajpur’s) 22 lakh population is made up of Bhils and other tribal communities. These original residents (Adivasis) have lived nomadic hunter-gatherer lives. British India saw the state make encroachments into their territories as forests got converted into teak plantations. 1855 saw the first rebellion by the Santhals, followed by many more – the last being the Naxal movement that exists even today. 

The administrative reaction to the Adivasi backlash was to pass legislation classifying tribal districts as ‘scheduled’ districts – allowing the British to bypass legal remedies to the Adivais while ‘managing’ these districts. This was followed by the Criminal Tribes Act, where entire communities were classified as hereditary criminals. Members were subjected to strict pass systems, forced to report to police stations regularly, and had their movements heavily restricted. After independence, our constitution enabled some affirmative action and granted recognition to 700 communities as ‘Scheduled Tribes.’ The Criminal Tribes Act was officially repealed after India’s independence, and the affected communities were formally “denotified” in 1952. Today we refer to these communities as denotified tribes.

In spite of all the affirmative action and reservations, education and integration into the mainstream still remain a challenge. 25 years ago, when the Sarva Shikkshan Abhiyan was launched, it cost Rs. 38,000 to make one tribal literate in Jhabua. Mind you literacy was defined simply as the ability for a person to sign her name. 

Folks at www.shivgangajhabua.org found this appalling – and decided to do something about it. One of the founders of Shivganga is Mahesh Sharma, often referred to as the Gandhi of Jhabua – partly because of the way he dresses. Mahesh became a full time volunteer of the RSS fresh out of college. He was asked to work with Saraswati Vidya Pratisthan, the tribal education wing of the RSS. 

In 1988, Mahesh was joined by Shivganga’s other founder, Harsh Chouhan, a tribal from Dhar, an alum of SGITS Indore and an MBA from IIT Delhi School of Management. Harsh’s father has been a 3 time MP from Dhar and Harsh himself has been the head of the National Council for Scheduled Tribes. Circa 1992, thanks to the political and social connections, Shivganga started setting up one room schools – and ramped it up to 150 villages across the district. About half of these later got converted to government run primary schools. 

Encouraged by this success, Shivganga decided to aim higher. They were looking at improving lives of the communities where seasonal migration and low incomes are the norm. The best change is the one that comes from within. So Shivganga looked at using community culture to help self-development. Each village has many young school drop-outs, but all are armed with native intelligence. 4 day training camps were held at villages. Instead of using self-selection, which could have resulted in selfish motives coming to the fore, the Shivganga team focussed on including young people who had demonstrated initiative in community matters. 

These camps discussed collective challenges faced by the village: Health related debts, migration and police atrocities. These camps resulted in an increased awareness of forest rights – and it culminated in a big rally in 2009 at the Jhabua district headquarters. Even today, a few lawyers are active full time volunteers who help communities understand and get what is their legal due.

After this initial success at mobilising the locals, Shivganga moved from activism to activities. One of the key reasons for migration was water. After the monsoon, thanks to extensive deforestation, water bodies would dry up. With no agriculture activity, locals are forced to migrate to cities in search of water and jobs. 

The Shivganga team attempted to solve the water problem through a local Bhil tradition called ‘Halma’. When a person can’t get out of difficulty after his best efforts, there’s a call for ‘Halma’ and people of the community come together to rescue, without any expectation of any return. A kind of community insurance, fueled by labour donation, if you will. And of course, the host has to arrange for dinner for all the volunteers, after the day’s work is done. Looks very much like the 14T volunteering model.

In 2010, a halma was called to help rejuvenate a local hill, the Hathi Pawa, by trenching. This practice continued over the years, and in 2017, 40,000 folks participated in the Hathi Pawa halma – drawn from the neighbouring districts in Gujarat and Maharashtra too. This involved a lot of canvassing across villages over the months that preceded the Halma. 60,000 trenches were dug in this halma. 

In the meantime, Harsh, thanks to his SGITS connections, got the civil engineering department to organise a Gram Engineering Training program to instruct folks on the basis of dams and pond construction.  Future halmas were then directed towards creating ponds – with some machinery and outside support supplementing the halma labour. The count – 180 ponds so far.

Jal, Jungle, Jameen, Janwar, Jan – are what define tribal life. So after Jal, it was the turn of the Jungle and Jameen. Water rejuvenation had resulted in neighbouring forests thriving – and local lakes seeing more water inflow. 500,000 trees were planted in the Hathi Pawa area. Here is where culture helped again. In Maharashtra, there is a concept of Devarais, sacred forests. On the same lines, Jhabua is the ‘Matawan’, forests of the Mother. Mother here signifies Mother Earth. Matavans are protected forest areas where tribals do not cut trees. 150 villages decided that locals would contribute personal lands to create matavans. 

And finally, was the time for Jan – Jan Samwardhan – the generation of social capital. By this time, Shivganga had developed a core group of 12 full time volunteers – professionals like doctors, lawyers and engineers – who had decided to give up city life to work for Jhabua. They could communicate in urban lingo and that helped bring stuff like telemedicine to Jhabua. Infosys donated community libraries – and even helped nurture a small movement of local budding authors. 

There is a plan to set up a rural university to assimilate local knowledge. And there is plenty of it. A full time volunteer, an MBBS from GMC Kolhapur, told us a story of a complicated delivery in a village. She went and found that the baby had turned inside the womb and was feet down. This would have normally called for a C section. She was wondering what to do, when a local dai walked in. She massaged the womb and got the baby down in the head down position – and a few hours later, a normal delivery happened – with both mother and kid safe.

Thanks to its RSS roots, Shivganga uses religious nomenclatures to good effect. The name itself comes from the NGO’s water harvesting efforts being compared to Shiva’s efforts to get the Ganga down to the parched earth. They organise Kavad yatras, where the theme is Mera Gaon, Mera Teerth. And they call their plan periods Maha Kumbhs. 

At times, local culture does not fit in with Shivganga’s ideals of culture. Case in point is the annual festival, Bhagoria, that happens around Holi. Those of you who understand Hindi would know that Bhagoria has some naughty etymology. The festival traditionally has provided an avenue for young people to elope. If a girl smears gulal (colored powder) on the forehead of a boy she likes and he reciprocates, the couple escapes to the forests and is later accepted by their families as husband and wife. Shivganga likes to call it a harvest festival. Bhagoria has now been remodelled after the Ganesh festival of Maharashtra.

The real success though of Shivganga has been with water and forests. This has been complemented by a movement to have more fruit trees in the villages. The assumption is that some of endemic nutritional deficiency issues could be tackled by such measures. So like our 14 Trees, Jhabua started a 15 Trees movement – where 17,000 families were gifted 15 fruit tree saplings each to plant around their house. The word gift is not entirely correct – out of the total cost of Rs. 850 for the saplings, Rs. 100 was paid by the family – and Rs. 750 was raised through CSR. The women of the family took responsibility for nurturing these trees. 

A visit to Jhabua should tell us the story of how the Hathi Pawa forest and 15 Tree plantations are doing. Ideally, I should have gone to attend the Bhagoria festival – but the wife is reading this blog and has warned me to concentrate on saffron and not gulal. Ahh. She tells me that there is a Jhabua darshan organised on 10-12 Jul, 2026. Am going for the Halma, what about you?

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Cut to 9th July.

Roopali B called me at 1400 hrs. The Daund Indore express, on which we were to travel to Jhabua, had been re-routed through Manmad and Jalgaon to Surat. It would not be touching Pune. In under 3 hours, it was to depart from Daund. Daund is 70 km from Pune. We had 5 min for a literal GO-NO GO decision. I was already in vacation mode, so I asked myself why not just try to reach Daund & check. 

I grabbed my backpack and went auto hunting. As soon as I reached SB Road, I looked at the traffic and realized that an auto may not be the fastest mode of transport, the Tukaram Palki was set to enter Pune a few hours later and all major roads were closed to vehicular traffic. Jumped into a bus going to Deccan and boarded a metro to the railway station from there. In between, I had co-ordinated with Parag, my COEP classmate and fellow Jhabua yatri, who had managed to convince an auto wallah and they adventured their way to the railway station successfully. At 1445 hrs, we were both at the station.

The Daund local was scheduled to depart at 1500 hours. It would reach Daund at 1650 hrs 10 min after the scheduled departure of our train. The other option was the Hadapter Reva express at 1515 hrs, but that would take you to the Daund chord line, which was a 2 km walk from the main Daund station. Reassuringly, an announcement was made on the Public Address system that the Indore train would depart only after the arrival of the Daund shuttle. We finally left Daund at 1800 hours. 

We had a pre sunset dinner at Daund railway station before our departure. We woke up next morning to discover that in the previous we had covered only 350 km – and we were still very much in Maharashtra, at Jalgaon. The train had some really long halts at night, as the regular route trains were given priority. As we waited at stations, the empty compartment would fill up with unreserved passengers, the winged insect variety. With only 5 human passengers in the entire compartment, our mosquito friends didn’t have too much to choose on the menu. I hope they found my haemoglobin to their taste.

The track from Jalgaon to Udhna is quite scenic. After a customary one hour halt at Udhana, Indian Railways surprised us as the train picked up speed. Probably, the third track on that route did the trick. We were eager to see the sunset at Jhabua – but fate intervened again. The train ran over a person, 5 km before our destination, Meghnagar. We had to wait an hour for the local police to arrive and do a panchnama. At 1950 hrs we finally chugged into Meghnagar, The Shivganga team had sent a car over to drive us to Jhabua, about 18 km away. 

I was unpleasantly surprised that we were staying at a city style AC hotel in town. Parag was pleasantly surprised. We had a morning yoga session – which was done quite well by one of the volunteers. I later on learnt that she had done her Masters in Yoga. Breathing is the most critical part of yoga. Her advice to me over breakfast, you can, like powernaps, do breathing exercises anytime during the day. 

Jhabua is a district in MP, bordering Gujarat. 90% of its population is tribal, primarily Bhils. The name “Jhabua” itself is derived from the local Bhil dialect, meaning “a place of abundant resources.”  Jhabua was bifurcated into two districts in 2008 – with 6 tehsils in the southern part of the district being carved out as Alirajpur. The Narmada flows through Alirajpur – and because of its relative remoteness – Alirajpur continues to still have good forest cover. Some of the Bhils there still continue their old hunter-gatherer lifestyles. About 200 villages in this area have been submerged by the Sardar Sarovar dam – and Alirajpur was the base for Medha Patkar’s Narmada andolan.

The region mainly consists of 3 tribes Bhil, Bhilala and Pateliya; Bhils being the more populous tribe. Bhili, the language – in its original form has been lost. The current dialects borrow from local languages. The Bhil dialect spoken in Jhabua borrows a lot from Gujarati. The terrain is hilly and undulating. There are a lot of ‘mahua’ and ‘taad’ trees in this region. Forests were the main source of livelihood for the tribals before the forests act of 1865. Forest cover has fallen sharply now. Matavans, symbolic forests dedicated to gods, still continue to survive, though with very few trees. Matavans are a social forest whose wood is to be used only for communal purposes. 

Bhils primarily consider Mahadev (Shiva) as their supreme deity, while also worshipping local nature spirits. They believe in recognizing gods and spirits within the natural world, including rivers, trees, and rain. Totemic animals such as the tiger, peacock, and horse are held in high regard. Every village has a localized Gramdev (village deity).  Because their deities generally do not have dedicated temples, the Bhils rely on shamans called Bhopa. These practitioners act as mediums, diviners, and traditional healers. 

Animal sacrifice (such as goats) remains a common practice among many Bhil clans to appease deities. We had visited one such matavan to take part in a tree plantation halma. The local priest told us that their village gods included: Kundo Dev – Kund means pond – so I guess this is the water god. Vagil Dev – The tiger god. Vogaja ban – I have not been able to trace this one. And the more conventional – Kalka mata and Hanuman Dev.

Jhabua was known by the ‘civilised’ folks as Lutero ki bhoomi. But then Sher ka itihas shikari likhta hain. The hunter gatherer lifestyle does not resonate with the farmer. Bhil’s etymology is from the Tamil – Vil – which stands for bow (the one associated with arrow.) The Bhils have their roots in Western India – Rajasthan, MP and Gujarat – with another pocket in Tripura. Jhabua was granted as a jagir to Kishan Das, an Akbar era armyman, for his contribution to Mughal battles in Bengal – and also his suppression of the Bhil chiefs of Jhabua. 

Forest dwellers have always been exploited by nagriks – city dwellers. Yet there have always been nagriks who have taken up the forest dweller’s cause and fought for their rights. Govindgiri Banjara was a tribal who, influenced by Hindu practices, started a reformist movement, encouraging agriculture, vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol. Folklore has it that the liquor mafia of the region influenced the kings to have Govindgiri eliminated. Govindgiri, in turn, organised the tribals to revolt against the rulers. In a battle in Mangadh in 1913, he was defeated by the British Army, who had been called in to help by the local kings. The number of casualties on the Bhil side were quite high – possibly around 1500. The Bhils like to think of Mangadh as the Adivasi Jalinawala Bagh. Govindgiri was captured in Mangarh – and awarded life imprisonment. He was later on pardoned on the condition that he would not indulge in political activities. He settled in Limbdi, Gujarat and passed away in 1931.

Thanks to the agricultural messaging of Govindgiri – and helped by continuous deforestation, the Bhils are now mostly farmers. Despite good rainfall, the region faces water shortage because water flows down through slopes and is not retained by soil. Land holding is small – the typical farm is less than 2 acres (5 bighas – 3 bighas make an acre.) With an undulating terrain, it is difficult to have irrigation canals – so most crops depend on rain for their water needs. 

The main crops are soya and corn, with high interplant distance, so that they can manage with less water. They also do a little bit of rice – but that is only for the farmer’s own family. Pesticides and fertilizers are still not so prevalent in agriculture, but their use is increasing. In addition, most families have some poultry or goats, which are sold to supplement income.

Inspired by Govindgiri, RSS set up a Kalyan Ashram in Jhabua – to improve the lives of the tribals. And to inspire them to become practicing Hindus. Mahesh Sharma, a Datia resident, who had joined RSS in the seventies, was deputed to Jhabua to start work. Datia is not too far from Jhabua – and Mahesh has worked with Medha Patkar in the andolan so he was familiar with the terrain. When Mahesh ji came to Jhabua for the first time in 2004, these were the issues:

– Migration – People would have to travel to cities, typical in Gujarat, searching for jobs.

– Lack of Hospitals

– Police atrocities 

– Shortage of Water

Bhils have a lot of self respect. You won’t find beggars here. The initial thought was that to prevent migration you need to work on education. After all, the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram was a flagship scheme of the Sangh. Do people who can survive in forests really need an education? 

Mahesh realised that it was livelihoods that mattered more than education. For an evolving agrarian economy, the bottleneck was water. And to resolve this, Mahesh, along with his friend Harsh Chouhan, set up Shivganga, joining the local ruling deity with the most holy symbol of water in our land. The first project that Mahesh took on was building a dam in Gopalpura, a village in Meghnagar tehsil, about 35 km from Jhabua. The biggest hurdle was non cooperation of villagers, most of whom had been converted to Christianity by local missionaries. 

Lesson learnt: Understand local culture and traditions before starting any work. So Mahesh and company started learning and discovered a powerful local tradition – the Halma. If a person from the community is in trouble and after all her efforts unable to get out of it, calls out for Halma, members from each family in the village will join her and solve the problem collectively. For example, a farmer building his home is accompanied by members from other families. When the task is completed they celebrate with a feast and dance.

The next water project was closer home, Haathi Pau – a hill just 5 km from Jhabua. In the nature worshipping Bhil samaj, Haathi Pau was a sacred hill. Shivganga decided to work on making a pond at the base of the hill. And called for a large scale halma to do it. About 800 people landed up for the pond digging. The Haathi Pau halma soon became an annual affair – and the number of Bhil volunteers went on increasing. The movement soon evolved into reforestation and trenching operations. The Haathi Pau trenching improved ground water. Hand pumps that ran dry in March, were functioning till May.

The halmas have started spreading to other villages now. In 2025, Shivganga set a target of 3,000 ponds, planned in 10 years. I chatted up with our Meghnagar Ertiga driver, Ranga. His village has added one pond, thanks to Shivganga’s push. There is an older pond in the village – that drains fast. I wonder if Shivganga should start by focussing on the water infrastructure that already exists – like increasing the capacity of older ponds and repairing leaking dams. It’s not as glamorous as building new stuff, maybe why the government favours ethanol addition instead of focussing on increasing fuel efficiency.

The Shivganga philosophy has evolved. Religion is about duties: Parmarth Vs Swartha

First involve then evolve. (Reminds me of the CTK philosophy: Connect before you correct.) Don’t give gyaan, discuss then solutions emerge. Mentors should never be permanent. Work should be seen, not the doer. Swabhiman ke bina koi Swanlambi nahi ho sakta. 

Shivganga expects villagers to identify problems and solve those themselves, with some facilitation from Shivganga. A good example that comes to mind. If a villager complains that a handpump is not working, more often than not, it is the non return foot valve that is broken. In a halma deja vu, repair tools are provided but no repair folks. The villager is also trained on handpump repair. Interesting question raised by a Jhabua yatri: Can halmas be successful in Bangalore?

And then there is another interesting halma on health. Malnutrition is one of the major issues facing the Bhils. So the halma is to plant fruit trees around each house. 15 fruit trees are being given to each family to ensure that they are able to get a balanced diet without worrying about spending in the market. During the Jhabua yatra that I attended, almost 500 families came in to collect their sapling parcels. To ensure that only serious folks come in to collect the saplings, there is a small entry barrier. They need to pay Rs. 100. Not only do they get the saplings for that amount, they are also treated to a halma lunch after that.

And so Halma has helped in prevention. And Shivganga steps in for the cure. The NGO operates health vans which visit villages once a week for half a day. People from 3-4 surrounding villages drop in for telemedicine treatment. Not only do they get medical advice but are also told where they need to go for treatment in case hospital visits are required. Local volunteers are on hand to help in communicating patient problems to the remote doctor.

For any NGO wanting to outlast its founders a full fledged internship program is important. The Shivganga program attracts students from premier colleges – the IITs, Government medical colleges and NLUs. I suspect that Harsh Chauhan, the Shivganga co-founder being on the Board of Governors of IIM Calcutta would help. And also Harsh’s philosophy of management education – we are producing a generation of Ravans who are trying to build golden Lankas.

Some of the interns convert to full timers once they finish their graduation. And they are groomed by seniors to take on responsibilities for different projects. RSS affiliation means that Shivganga is well funded – and that helps with planning for a career path for interns wanting to take full time positions. Another option that Shivganga offers is Weekend volunteering. They have an office in Indore to help with logistics. You can find a list of full timers at the end of the blog. Disclaimer: I could not connect too well with the full timers, maybe there was a spirituality gap which I could not cover. 

Some of the interns return to Jhabua during the yatra to help out. I met with Vadodara based Varunesh, an IIT Bombay, UT Austin alum, who is working in CPU Design. We had a nice discussion on quantum computing. And there was Gargi, an IIT Roorkee intern, settled in Bangalore now. She has come with her better half, an IIT Madras alum, and her Mysuru based mother-in-law.

We had some fairly interesting fellow yatris. There was Anil Joshi, who runs VishalFab, an Indore based factory, which makes copper forget electrical parts. Anil is a BSc (Botany), who looks after factory operations. Fun fact: his brother is also in the business. Bro is a BITS Pilani alum, but he looks after Finance & Marketing. Bro’s son has recently returned from the US and joined the business. 

And then there was Jogeshwari, who saw the invitation on a WA group – and immediately booked Tatkal tickets for the family to visit. She runs an organic farm in Erode. She has been a teacher in the past – has taught at 3 colleges in Erode. Also visited most schools in her district. She does not practice what she professed – both her kids are unschooled. The teacher in her had a message for the ashram folks – please reduce use of single use plastic. And she did that with a flimsy yellow plastic bag wrapped around her hand to make the point. As a fellow teacher I would also suggest the Shivganga team to reduce some of the pravachan time. We can do that better in cities. In Jhabua, make us walk, make us talk. Listening we will keep for another day. Jogeshwari had a tough time as her Hindi was not up to the mark. Yet she stayed on for two days more to absorb Jhabua life. 

We were given a conducted tour of the 5 acre Dharmapuri campus. Apart from offices, residences and training areas, what was interesting was the Vigyan Ashram like workshop. We saw a motor driven dal mill -where you could play around with speeds for grinding different dals. Processing tur dal increases value from from Rs. 80 to Rs. 180 for a kg. There is also a seed buying co-operative, alas, they are buying only hybrid seeds from the market today.

I had a small chat with Avinash, the Telangana lawyer, who is fighting for forest rights for the tribals. The Community Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006, but it took 20 years for the implementation. There was huge resistance from the bureaucracy to hand over forest that had always been controlled by the forest department. 4 villages have received rights after a 7 year legal fight. NCST helped. Now 35 villages are fighting for their rights. Forest rights mean some serious moolah for the community. Just before handing over the forest in one of the beneficiary villages, 40 lakh worth bamboo was harvested by the local rangers. One of the beneficiary gram sabhas is slated to earn more than  2.5 cr in minor forest products this year.

But the best time at the Ashram was the conversation with Krishna. Krishna, from the local Bhil community, first came in touch with Shivganga in his school days. He was the 10th topper from Jhabua, but tragically, his education stopped after that. Mahesh ji’s sister takes classes for ashram lads in the evenings. Krishna has 2 daughters. Both attend these classes. 

In spite of lack of formal graduation, he is an eager student and a fantastic listener. Krishna prefers the use of the phrase ‘Bhil Samaj’ to ‘Adivasi’ when he refers to his community. Krishna showed me a film he helped make on Mangadh. Seemed quite political, featuring Narendra bhai’s speeches. I listened to him reminiscing about his growing up days, when wild grasses and fruits grew in Jhabua fields and were part of the diet. With today’s use of pesticides, these have all but vanished. Krishna’s grand-parents lived a self-sufficient life. She only went to the village market and barter dried mahua flowers for salt.

We brainstormed Jhabua livelihood ideas:

• Local veggies for Jhabua tourists. Check out Barbatiya and red bhindi for instance.
• Subscription model for organic veggies
• An Alirajpur tribal homestay program
• Krishna wants to start a newspaper/ TV channel/ YT channel to highlight Bhil Samaj Issues. Big questions: Who would be the target audience? Who would it feature in organic searches if it were a YT Channel? 
• I gave him my tuppence on a Bhil take on sustainable life through a YT channel. Targeted at city folk with an interest in sustainability.

One fond gastronomical memory of the trip is going to be the ‘Dal Paniya’, which was made by the ashram team for our weekend lunch.  It is usually made during festivals and on auspicious occasions. Paniya is a bread prepared from corn flour and is roasted after sandwiching it between the leaves of Palash tree. I helped Avinash to sandwich the corn dough between leaves. There was a 2 m dia gobar fuelled fire over which the cooking happened. Parag missed meeting Jhabua’s black ‘kadaknath’ chicken, famous for its taste and health benefits, on his plate. 

Whenever I visit a new town, I make it a point to walk around and talk to the locals. I had wanted to do that in Jhabua, but the ashram was 4 km from town. I got an opportunity in the evening, when Nitin was delivering his Shivganga talk. I had heard him deliver the same talk at the 14 Trees office, so I thought it would be a good idea to explore the neighbourhood. I came across an interesting Kaizen, tying a long piece of fabric to a cock’s leg makes it easier to round them up in the evenings.

Met with a drunkard & mistakenly asked him for advice. He began a litany about his poverty, hoping that I would buy him his next drink. I was rescued by his fellow villager who walked me to the dam. He was from the Patelia samaj, which according to him was a notch higher than the Gonds & the Bhils in the tribal pecking order. My Patelia guide had no idea of what the ashram folks were up to. All he knew was that a lot of vehicles would come and go at the Ashram.

The guide was one of 7 brothers, of whom 3 were off! 1 to TB,  1 to cancer. My guide was working with the Jhabua Municipality – repairing broken pipes. 5 min into the walk, his nephew offered two of us a lift to the dam on his motorbike. Nephew was in grade 11 – science, who harbored ambitions to do an MBA. The dam backwaters go back 10 to15 km and are the main water supply for Jhabua town.  The nephew dropped us off at the ashram and was lucky to have evaded the drunkard – who got to know @ our dam visit. He motorcycled past us as we were returning.

The yatra ended on Sunday afternoon. Parag went off to Indore to catch a bus to Pune. I stayed back. The original plan was to spend a night in a village. There are families associated with Shivganga as volunteers. But that didn’t happen. Probably my interest In the village fruit tree audit was unwelcome. 

Mahesh ji’s philosophy is: we don’t require suggestions, we don’t give suggestions. Lest it sounds very insular, let me share that Shivganga practice is villager input driven. It’s just that Shivganga has designed their work such that they do not need audits. They think action is more important than documentation. To increase output, we need to get rid of arithmetic signs, 4 + 2 can become 42 if the plus sign is taken away. If a tree dies, the villager can just collect a replacement sapling. The only exception in the audit history was when Infosys Foundation donated books to village libraries. Infy managed to get PWC to audit, but Infy had to pay the expense for the audit themselves. I did get anecdotal evidence in a conversation with one of the tree beneficiary families of a deeper problem – water. Of her 15 trees, only 2 survived. In summer months, she had to walk 1-2 km to get water for the plants. Most of her trees withered away then.

This is not to belittle the work done by Shivganga. They have covered 300 of 1450 villages in Jhabua till date. The target is that In 30 years all of Jhabua will be green and self-sufficient. 

Shivganga likes to draw an analogy of Halma to Hanunan. Like Hanuman, The Bhil doesn’t know his own strength. The Halma made him realise it. Amongst the yatris was Sumitra Mahajan, the ex LS Speaker and MP from Indore. She tells us that Indore villagers are complaining of labor shortage in Indore villages. The Jhabua workers are staying back in Jhabua! 

Mahesh ji, like Pravin Bhagwat of 14 Trees, is dismissive of suggestions. He asked me to jot down my thoughts into a report which he promised they will discuss internally. Hence this blog. I feel that there are ways in which the Shivganga movement can be made stronger. I liked a concept that they talk of – Personal Social Responsibility. Small Acts, Big Impact. Borrowing from the Church’s tithe – they ask yatris to donate a part of their monthly salary to Shivganga. This can be just a few hundred rupees per month. There was a UPI QR code put up to start the process. Shivganga should ask for action points from the yatris. I feel that getting a yatri to donate time is a good starting point. Money always follows time.

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Full timers at Shivganga

Abhishek – PhD Purdue, material science, IIT Roorkee 

Nitin – IITR-Elec. From Kota 

Poonam – NLU LLB, CFR

Avinash – Karnataka – LLB- knew only Kannada when he came here.

Harshal Patil -Kolhapur MBBS. Pursuing MD Community medicine from GMC Indore.

Dhanashree- GMC Kolhapur MBBS