A Newbie Surveyor’s Guide to Rural India

Its been a whirlwind two months in India and this is a post which has been in the pipeline for a while (hence the length). For those unaware of my current research project, I’m working on a study of Microfinance Self-Help Groups in villages near Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh. It is the first time that I have conducted a real survey. Needless to say, it has given me a deep appreciation of the process of data collection and work of the surveyor.

First, designing a questionnaire is not simply about putting questions on paper; Murphy’s Law rules big time. Framing of questions is key – anything remotely ambiguous WILL cause confusion. Leaving any decision making to your interviewer and interviewee WILL come back to haunt you. Less words, the better. More options, even better.

Second, Lost in Translation is not just the name of a sappy movie. It is a huge pitfall whenever you are relying on an interviewer to translate questions and record responses. While I hired a local person to accelerate the rate of data collection, the main challenge was to have him understand the entire survey and be able to code responses in Bundeli, the local Hindi dialect, onto the English questionnaire. Fortunately (and it is good fortune in a country where the dialect changes every 100 kilometers), I understood Bundeli well enough to oversee that process and ensure that erroneous recording of responses was minimized.

While questionnaire design is demanding, the actual interviews of people were the most fun and rewarding part of the survey. Their responses often threw all the planning of a first-time surveyor like me out of whack. Observing features of demography and village life which veteran surveyors (and astute casual observers) of rural India know very well, I would often have to retract, change my interview questions or simply remember to account for those features when interpreting my results. In any case, here they are - A Newbie Surveyor’s Guide to Rural India.

· aG Age: Women simply don’t know it. Tellingly, they don’t care enough to understate it. Women who are 30 think they are 40 and vice-versa. For all the influence of cable TV on rural women, propensity to understate age is not one of them. Caveat # 1: this might be a local phenomenon as renowned Indian demographer, Ashis Bose, claims otherwise. Caveat # 2: Women under 30, who tend to have attended school, do know their age, often reminding me of the 60s anti-establishment dictum, “Don’t trust anyone over 30” when asking the age question.

Education: Hardly any woman over the age of 30 had attended school. Almost every woman under 25 had some schooling. Clearly, some education policy began working in the area in the early 1990s. Two frequently cited reasons for dropping out of school were 1) corporal punishment, and 2) inability to pass the class V or class VIII exams, common dropout points.

Time: The Gregorian calendar has little to no meaning for the rural woman’s calendar. Time is marked by festivals, crop cycles and the Hindu calendar (Panchang), based on lunar movements. This meant that I finally put my mind to understanding how the months of the Hindu calendar map onto the Gregorian calendar!

Time II: The Pan-Indian problem of “Indian Stretchable Time” (IST) is amplified many times over in villages. Anyone who has lived in India/South Asia or has a brown friend knows what I mean. Trying to quantify distance between the houses of SHG members through time, which I had initially considered a great idea, flopped big time. It does not matter whether you ask if point A is 5 minutes, 10 minutes or 20 minutes away from point B – the answer remains the same! A better question is to simply ask if point A is close or far from point B.

Assets: Using household owned assets (bicycle, fan, almirah etc.) as a measure of poverty can be tricky if you take responses at face value. Assets which come into the household by way of dowry are often not considered ‘owned’ by the household and respondents need to be reminded about them (Dowry is not restricted to Hindu marriages – Muslim marriages are also characterized by it). Moreover, the high maintenance cost of assets means that many are in a state of permanent disrepair, creating another classification dilemma for researchers.

Financial Inclusion: Commercial banks (state-owned and private) have not reached the poor and ultra-poor in Madhya Pradesh. Very rarely in my sample would I come across someone who had even attempted borrowing from a bank, forget actually taking out a loan. Reasons varied but a common refrain was that a bank location was too far, in the city. This suggests that the financial inclusion gains made between 1977 and 1990, when national banks were mandated to open 4 rural branches for every branch opening in an already banked location, have been reversed. Check out the famous Pande-Burgess paper on Social Banking to know more about the positive poverty reduction impact of that policy.

W While there are plenty of non-survey related anecdotes to keep this post going, I’ll stop here and save them for some other time and place. Stay tuned for the startling revelations of my earth-shattering paper which will be written sometime this summer.

Chak De India

"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a cricket team, long suppressed, finds utterance."

I can almost feel Nehru turning in his grave after my shameless use of his historic 1947 speech to describe a cricket win, but there are times when lofty prose is needed to aptly describe monumental achievements, and this is one of them. India won the Pataudi trophy, defeating England in England, 1-0. For the cricket dabblers, statistically minded and perennial cynics, it is a result which merits little attention - India had just about pipped an opposition that wasn't the evil hegemon Australia or the old enemy Pakistan (even though no one had given India a ghost of a hope before the series). Yet for the acculuturated cricket lover, a test cricket romantic, and an Indian team follower, the magnitude of this victory cannot be dimmed. To understand these layered feelings, one has to have lived the hopes, some successes and many failures of the Indian teams of the 1990s and 2000s.

My love affair with cricket began with the '92 World Cup, all of which I watched snuggled up in blankets during a chilly winter vacation spent in Patna (like all of my vacations, really). It was a forgettable world cup for India, who lost to everyone except Zimbabwe and eventual winners, Pakistan. Yet it was also the arrival of a short, scrawny and curly haired Sachin on the One Day stage - the sight of a little 19 year old boy taking on and dominating tall, strapping, fast bowlers, beamed into millions of TV viewing homes, pan dukans, restaurants and villages brought him instant fame and celebrity. It was the simultaneous birth of the television fuelled One Day cricket as we know it (colored clothing, white balls et al) and the cult of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. As the great man once modestly said, "I'm the child of the one day game".

In all this razzmatazz, what was lost was India's love for Test cricket. The wham-bam-thank you-ma'am kind of instant entertainment that one day cricket provided had captured the imagination of a generation (my generation) but had also made the coquettish joys of the Test cricket format appear quaint and an anachronism. Where Pa would rave about the crease occupation prowess of Gavaskar and Vishwanath, I would sing praises of the stylish Azhar and the maverick Jadeja's hitting. Even though the rise of One-dayers are identified as cause and decline of Tests as effect, there is another mechanism at work encapsulated by an inversion of the Latin saying, "'Quod me nutrit me destruit" (What nourishes me also destroys me). One-Day cricket hasnt just destroyed Test cricket as it was known, it has also nourished Test cricket. Apart from subsidizing Tests with the millions that it rakes in (check out the difference in stadium crowds in the two forms) , it has also created a more result oriented Test match culture where 400 runs in a day has moved from the realm of the impossible to eminently probable (incidentally, one of the reasons why Dravid chose to play safe at Oval).

Adapting the framework that I have laid out to the specific case of India, certain observations about this victory come to mind. The young architects of India's win, Karthik, Dhoni, RP Singh, Sreesanth are all between 21-25 years old, about my age or older. They must have watched the '92 World Cup sunggled in their own blankets, whether in Bangalore, Ranchi, Lucknow or Kothamanglam. Their imagination must have been fired by the same SRT, whose images must have been beamed from the same Doordarshan. This, in itself, was the biggest contribution of the TV fuelled One Day game - the democratisation and spread of a sport dominated by the Bombay Boys and Delhi Dons to cricketing backwaters of Jharkhand, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. If you include current discards Sehwag, Pathan, Raina and Kaif to this lot, what you get is a demographically more dispersed Indian team. And the long term success of Indian cricket will be built on this wide platform.

Now, coming to the second significance of this win: As a part of a long farewell year or two for the Galacticos of Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Kumble, this win on English soil after 21 years is a culmination of a golden generation who have been part of many almost there moments together. There have been the memorable ODI successes like the 93 Hero Cup, 97 Titan Cup, 98 Sharjah Coca Cola Cup, Mini World Cup win in Dhaka, reaching the finals of 2003 WC but the disappointments are too many: 12 ODI tournament finals without a win, 96 WC semi-final, 03 WC final whitewash and the biggest of them all, the 07 WC disaster. If the ODI record is chequered, the Test record has recently become better, without the success that should have accompanied it. On nearly every occasion when India were poised on the brink of an overseas Test win in the 1990s, they were thwarted - by the weather (Wanderers '97 against South Africa), or by their own tendency to crumble (Barbados '97, chasing 120), winning a solitary Test against Sri Lanka in the 39 Tests they played. In the 2000s, this trend was reversed, with India's wins abroad being only second to Australia yet they caught an even worse affliction: of losing the next Test after a win (against England, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa and even West Indies) resulting in the only outside the subcontinent win last year in West Indies.

Even though India's golden generation has achieved a lot - a WC final, stopping the Aussie juggernaut in Tests and nearly beating them at home, defeating Pakistan in Pakistan, what it has finally done is convincingly beat a good non-Asian team in foreign conditions. The nation had achieved Independence from the foreign domination 60 years back. The cricket team has taken its time.

P.S. Check out Sachin's pic to know what I mean.