Muzaffarpur
Muzaffarpur (pron. Mujaffarpur!) , Monday March 24th - Niraj and I left Patna at 6:30 this morning. The journey was eventful - on the outskirts of the city we came across an autorickshaw which had toppled on to its side, trapping the driver underneath it. We stopped to help right it, and thankfully the driver wasn't badly hurt, just bruised and shaken, so we carried on, reaching Muzaffarpur around 8:30.
I started the day with a meeting with Nitish, who's in charge of the Muzaffarpur office, and Niraj. The rest of the day was spent going to two villages in Musahiri block, which is an hour or so away from Muzaffarpur. As before, I've put notes up on the wiki so I'll just pull out the things which I think are particularly interesting or important.
The common theme that I heard from Nitish and from the villagers I met today was the need for some sort of early warning system for floods. This is not really something which came across in our discussions with CRS Delhi, but it seems like it would be extremely useful. It would probably take the form of
villages which see a rise in water levels telephoning a control centre which would analyze this information, perhaps together with weather reports and satellite
maps, and issue warnings as appropriate. The Inter-Agency Group (IAG), a state government-organized conference of NGOs is working on this right now, and I've asked for some more information on the direction they're taking.
Such a communication channel would be useful for other things too. The real killer is not just the floods, but how unpredictable they are. The villagers
don't know what sort of crops to plant which will best last out the three months or so of flooding - and if they guess wrong they can lose the entire crop. Some indication around the end of April as to how intense the coming monsoon will be would be invaluable in crop planning.
I don't know how feasible this is - how accurate are monsoon forecasts that far ahead of time? - but something which should certainly be doable, and invaluable, would be a couple of days notice of the onset of the monsoon.
This is all a little tangential to our original project, and we'll have to have serious talks both as a team and with CRS Delhi to figure out a reasonable scope for this semester. The deadline for rollout of a preliminary trial is fast approaching - the monsoon normally comes in the second week of June and we have to be ready to go a couple of weeks before that. But if we can't do it this year, I think this would definitely be a good project to consider for next time.
Another interesting thing is the attitude towards the state government. The former Chief Minister, Lalloo (whose name had become a byword for corruption
in India) was voted out four years ago. The people in Muzaffarpur think the new CM is taking positive steps towards repairing some of the damage, and taking a particular interest in flood relief. Very little of this is visible at the village level though, and the villagers are still a little skeptical about the
government. The current government says that it will take another 5 years to get the state back to the level it was 15 years ago.
In fact, 15 years ago was around about when the previous flood warning system stopped working. There used to be a set of water-level meters (i.e. graduated rods stuck in the river bed) at 8km intervals down the river, with a red line marking the danger level, and a loudspeaker system which would make an announcement when a flood was imminent. Why did it break down? Sarkar ne jaanta hai: only the government knows.
Coming back on topic - if we want the villagers to use the stuff we are developing, and even to an extent the partner organizations, we will absolutely have to have Hindi language support. They are very willing to learn to use the new technology when the can see the benefits of it, but it will have to be in the local language.
In theory this is not a big deal - J2ME and ASP.NET both support Unicode, and we plan for CRS and the partners to author the forms themselves anyway - but theory doesn't really work with computers, and especially not with internationalization (and especially with J2ME it seems...) so I'm going to try and buy a cheap cellphone here which we can use for testing.
Time to wrap up for today I think. More village visits tomorrow.
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