The new-age sarpanch

She rides a horse named Magic, cutting a striking figure, dressed in Levi's jeans and a Reebok T-shirt. One minute Chavi Rajawat is at a cricket match asking boys to bowl to her, another minute she is inspecting the progress of a pond dug by village women under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) Since February, when Rajawat, 30, got elected as the sarpanch of Soda village in Rajasthan's Tonk district, she has blown through the desert like the local wind, the laliya bayaro. She is in charge of the implementation of MGNREGA in her village. She has also been trying to build water harvesting structures and ensure safe drinking water for villagers. She does not lose her calm when more than a hundred village women break into a chorus, demanding more wages. They are not happy with their daily wage of Rs 70 and insist on Rs 100 which can be paid only if they complete their task on time. Rajawat willingly mingles with them and says, "We will pay you more if you dig more." She is used to facing the villagers' ire due to her insistence on getting the job done properly and her rivals' criticism who claim things had been better before she replaced her 50-year old predecessor Dhanna Lal Pareekh.

From an army background, Rajawat did her schooling in Ajmer. She graduated from Delhi's Lady Sriram College and has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Modern Management, Pune. She had worked with several corporate houses before she decided to join grassroots politics following the footsteps of her grandfather Raghubir Singh, winner of the Mahavir Chakra. Since Soda was their ancestral village and Singh was its sarpanch for three consecutive terms, some of the villagers approached her to contest for the post of the sarpanch, which was then reserved for a woman.

Rajawat spends five days a week working out of her office run from her ancestral, rustic haveli. Her father Narendra Singh too has shifted base to Soda to help her as he knows that the grassroots reality is quite different from his daughter's corporate experience. Rajawat rues the fact that "there is no single system in the government that tells me how many schemes exist for us". "Information just does not reach us, from the villagers or the government," she says. Just seven months into the job, she has battled male prejudice and female distrust. That's what you call a power-packed panch.

Posted in: Chhavi Rajawat