It was a delight to watch the new web-series Panchayat on Amazon Prime. It has a good storyline that keeps you glued. It was wonderful to see a web-series that has a plot set in rural India where the majority of the population of our country lives. Mainstream Bollywood is also shifting focus to stories from small cities, I hope that they bring some more stories from rural India as well. Our social distance from rural India is so much that our mind tends to be full of stereotypes about rural life.
The stereotypes are formed from really skewed news coverage, whatever little gets reported, it’s largely about social issues such as – honour killing, farmer suicides, hunger, and poverty. While these issues are important and deserve more space in all kinds of media, they tend to form stereotypes in our minds. Rural life is not limited to these issues.
It has stories of love, local politics, college life, and the sense of being together, dance, folk music and much more. Wrapped in comedy, ‘Panchayat’ communicates some social issues but also manages to touch upon otherwise less visible, rural life in general. Having worked in the development sector for 5 years, I have stayed and travelled to rural parts of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh.
During this time, I have enjoyed 3 years of living in rural areas, many times, with a local family. Watching the web-series refreshed many memories of my experiences. I was able to relate with the bus and the conductor showed in the series, and the occasional frustration of the protagonist (Abhishek, the panchayat secretary), related to a comparison of personal achievements with other friends living an urban life. But unlike Abhishek, most of the time, my frustration was related to the slow pace of development projects and extremely slow government processes.
Having said that, there are a few features in the story which I believe are not generally true in rural areas.
1. Panchayat Secretary has high respect in the village and generally get addressed as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’.
The protagonist of the web-series, a Panchyat Secretary, had a tough time living in the village. There were many instances where villagers and the sarpanch himself (Pradhan) ill-treated him. For example – when sarpanch asked him to find a room for himself in the city or when he was asked to serve the groom and bring ghee from the market. In my experience, the Panchayat Secretary receives a lot of respect from the people, they are a local government elite.
Being a government servant, they are responsible for the implementation of most government schemes at the village level. The responsibility gives them the power to distribute benefits of government schemes to individual beneficiaries. People of the village cannot afford to ill-treat them and ask them to do menial jobs. A panchayat secretary is a signatory in panchayat’s bank account with the sarpanch of the panchayat. Thus, even sarpanch cannot mistreat them.
Sarpanch, being an elected member, is senior to the panchayat secretary but the latter tends to be more educated and aware of the government schemes, documentation, and procedures. This gives an advantage to the panchayat secretary over sarpanch. Hence, in many panchayats, it can be noticed that sarpanch tends to request (not order) panchayat secretaries to do their duties properly and guide them.
Throughout my experience, I came across only one sarpanch who used to command his panchayat secretary. That was in Talodara Panchayat of Bharuch district in Gujarat where the sarpanch himself was quite rich, had a really high influence at the district level. On the contrary, I came across various incidents where the power dynamics favoured the panchayat secretary more than the sarpanch.
2. Panchayat secretary doesn’t stay in the panchayat office
In the web-series, the protagonist stays in the panchayat office. Generally, Panchayat Secretaries don’t prefer to stay in the village, let alone the panchayat office. They prefer to stay in nearby suburban areas, in the case of this web-series, the nearest suburb was “Phagauli Bazaar” which was 15km away from the Phulera Panchayat.
In some states like Maharashtra, a few villages have old government quarters for panchayat secretaries located in the village. But, in any case, they generally don’t stay in the panchayat office unless they decide to work overnight. In fact, panchayat secretaries in many states manage more than one panchayat. In that case, they can’t afford to stay in one panchayat. In many states, such as Gujarat and Assam, panchayat offices don’t even have enough space for any person to live.
3. Generally, people in rural areas are quite hospitable
In the web-series, people, in general, are shown quite inhospitable. Particularly, the wife of the Sarpanch is shown as hostile to guests coming for lunch. She also argued with her husband to ask for money for half-litre of milk from Panchyat Secretary and insisted not to give bottle gourds for free. This portrayal gave may give expression to the viewers that villagers, in general, are not quite hospitable to the outsiders. While it can be true for a few villages, I have never experienced that in any of the villages I stayed in, even when I stayed with the family in rural areas for more than a year.
Generally, people are quite hospitable. An extreme but a common gesture which I have noticed in every village is that people would ask you to sit on the chair or the bed at their homes and they would themselves sit on the floor. Another experience is women of Self Help Groups insist on giving free maize or okra from their fresh produce of farms to government employees or outsider who works in the village.
4. Generally, the opinion of elected representatives is valued by local government administration
In one of the episodes, it was shown that the people of Phulera panchayat were against one of the slogans written for family planning. Such slogans are written through a top-down order and as shown in that episode, panchayats implement it and as a government employee, it’s the duty of panchayat secretary to ensure it happens on the ground. However, in that episode, Abhishek keeps on insisting that it is difficult to convince Block Development Officer (BDO) to remove the slogan from the wall as it was an order from District Magistrate (DM).
In reality, I think a Sarpanch’s opinion is respected by everyone in the administration, at least until the block level. It is because they are an elected representative. If a slogan is sensitive to the culture of a community, BDO/DM may not see the removal of it as problematic as shown in web-series. I feel it is important to point out these errors as we are already less informed about the rural areas. Given that, any film or web-series may tend to portray rural areas in a particular way (not necessarily negative) which can either reinforce a stereotype and can form a perspective of the viewer which may not be true.