One farmer’s protest worth Rs 400 crore

When Mohan Lal, a landless Dalit farmer, sat in protest outside the tehsildar’s office in 1999, demanding to know what was happening on...

When Mohan Lal, a landless Dalit farmer, sat in protest outside the tehsildar’s office in 1999, demanding to know what was happening on a few development schemes in his village, little did he know he was blowing the lid off a scam of at least Rs 400 crore spanning around 1 lakh villages.

All he wanted to know was the progress of a few projects in the village and the list of PDS recipients. Five years later, Lal, along with Magsaysay Award winner Sandeep Pandey, unearthed a scam that went way beyond his village of 341 families. The records for his village alone showed a bungling of Rs 40,000.

That was when Lal and Pandey got down to the figures. There are 97,134 villages in UP and if each loses out on Rs 40,000, the figures reach Rs 400 crore of tax payers’ money going into pockets of village heads and officials. ‘‘What has happened in this village is happening in every village of the state but who cares?’’ says Pandey who has initiated a movement aimed at availing the right to information. A beginning has been made in 12 villages of Hardoi.

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The locals held a panchayat in Mehmodapur village on August 28 where a list of development jobs undertaken in the past year was read out. Villagers realised majority of the work was only on paper. The ‘‘development jobs’’ in Mehmodapur included a kuchcha road over a pond, levelling of a road (three times) which had already been made three years ago. Village head Horilal is unfazed. ‘‘I know I have done my job seriously,’’ he said.

Pandey knows this is just the beginning. The Magsaysay award winner had faced trouble when he tried to collect details of the work done at a primary health centre in Bharawan. ‘‘We were denied at the first stage to have access to basic detail of how many people were treated by the PHC and what vaccination the locals had got. We then decided to go for a dharna in December 2002 and it lasted for 12 days. Finally we got the details,’’ said Pandey.

That dharna was the beginning of a silent revolution to claim their right to information and Hardoi became the nerve centre of the movement. Of the total 1,482 villages in Hardoi, Pandey has finally got details of jobs done in six villages — each shows embezzlement between Rs 40,000 and Rs 60,000. ‘‘We are going for spot inspection and collecting details. We will put it before the panchayat secretary and minister in a seminar which we are planning to hold next month,’’ says Pandey.