A New Beginning in Delhi

As anyone who comes in winter from the west finds out, it was beastly cold in Delhi due to the lack of central heating. I was still exhausted with all the packing decisions, the work at the Deccan College, the cold, the housework, and so on. When I finally gave in and saw a doctor in Delhi some two weeks later, he exclaimed that it was so bad he wondered how I had borne the pain for two weeks without any specific treatment!.

Annaiya went to stay with Tripuri for a while until we got our allotment of a house in Delhi, and we both moved in with Sundara and Prabha. Ramu had thought it would be only for a couple of weeks; instead it turned out to be two monthsWe stayed with Ramu's eldest brother, Sundara, a temporary arrangement till we got our allotment in an appropriate government quarters [all laid down in some bureaucratic rule book – the exact type and location was according to one's rank and seniority!]. It was a very pleasant stay in a large spacious bungalow [also an official allotment]. Prabha and I kept each other company till Sundara and Ramu returned from work.

For two weeks or so after we landed in Delhi, I did not feel upto going to see Prodipto or even call him: the cold had left me so enervated that I just lounged in the house except for occasional walks. When I felt a bit better, the children, Vivek and Kalpana then in their teens, would play badminton with us almost regularly.

After the first week or so, Prabha asked me if I was not going to search for a job. I told her that I had expected one was waiting for me but i had to feel better to go and see about it. Finally, i did call Prodipto Roy, and found him with Gerry Hursh, one of the senior staff of the Growth Centre Project at the Council for Social Development [CSD]office. Immediately, in the characteristic sharp fashion that i was to get to know well, he exclaimed, ' where have you been? We were told you would be back in india nearly a month ago, and we have sent letters to you at your Bangalore address!'
Then he went about describing my job or jobs I should say since I was to be both Sociologist in the multi-disciplinary team and Data Coordinator by default of my having used computers with state of the art technology – punching and verifying cards, using a terminal to the main 360 HP computer in the University!

I had decided to plump for a half-time assignment so that I could complete my thesis dissertation. So, in the midst of his discourse, I ventured to say that I wanted a part-time position, but both Gerry and he flatly told me that was impossible. By then, I had become captivated by the project and I meekly accepted a full-time job, mentally vowing i would still find time to do my dissertation.

I was taken in the double role of Sociologist and Data Coordinator. Along with the rest of the group, but for Prodipto who had anyway his room at CSD, I had a room at the Ford Foundation office but to fulfil my second role, I had to be in CSD and so a room in its basement next to the data processing team – about 8 of them to begin with.
But first we had to plan out our strategies as a group and in the data collection part, work out the questionnaires and field methodolgies. This was all very exciting and as a mixed, mostly young team, we used to have heated discussions about everything. I was again the only woman professional in the team but as in HLL that never even impinged on my relations with the others. Some of them became very good friends.
After i had formally joined, Appa redirected a letter from Ford with the formal job offer. It included the full cost of my travel Delhi with transport of all household effects being paid for. But i found out that this was no longer valid as I had accepted the job from Delhi itself! If, as I had first wanted to, I had stayed on in Bangalore for a few days with Appa, we could have availed of all these benefits. Anyway that was that.

The Growth Centre Idea

The Growth Centre Project [GCP] was a joint one with the Govt. of India, almost all states and union territories, the Ford Foundation [FF] and the CSD [Council for Social Development that Prodipto headed] collaboration. It was part of the National IV five year plan.

The exercise was based on the idea of using natural or created nodes of growth and development with multi-purpose functions, in an optimally dispersed space, to enhance accesssibility, attraction to the hinterland population and small and medium town as well as rural economic growth. Or to put it differently , it was a regional planning exercise to optimise the location and types of links of a set of institutions/services including schools, health centres, agricultural markets and transportation links. It grew out of work done by the UN centre for regional planning in Nagoya, Japan.

Let me elaborate in a broad. even crude way. If a farmer has to sell his produce in a market centre that lies a little way off from his village, it would be good if he could also check up on any health problems he or his family might have in the same place. But this is rarely possible, as these two services may not be found anywhere near each other. Location of various services are decided upon other grounds such as political favour, lack of coordination amongst various departments, a sense of fairness leading to dispersion of facilities. Similarly, schools are located on norms that are distance-based, but the transportation might not exist between a middle or high school and the villages it is supposed to serve. In some cases, there are unfordable streams or difficult hills and so the distance actually is much more. Ditto for health centres.

If the locational optimisation takes place, such centres would become the hub of local regional development and thus be 'growth centres'. This was the genesis of our project.

The project was funded by the Ford Foundation and technically run by CSD. A huge multi-disciplinary staff at Delhi and teams attached for the most part to academic or quasi-academic institutions in most states and union territories, were being assembled to run this project. Finally, we had 20 field projects in various Community Development blocks spread over the country and a number of capable and interesting personnae in charge of some of them.
The GCP team was large and multidisciplinary in its thinking and its personnel – urban and regional planners, sociologists [Prodipto, another and myself], economists, geographer, computer specialist, etc. I had a dual role as I was also the data coordinator., supervising a team of about 12-`4 people, Correspondingly, I had two offices, one in FF where the rest of the professionals were located, except Prodipto who remained in his own CSD office, and another in CSD where the punchers and verifiers worked.

Those were still the days of the main frame computers that were typically housed in a/c rooms. One had to punch cards in a punching machine that converted data into a binary code and after verifying to see that no mistakes had occurred, the cards were fed into this computer with a program telling it what to do with the data. It was not uncommon for the machine to reject cards due to some imperceptible bending or folding in them. Then one had to do that card over again. The only computer we could access was in Delhi university [some 17 km from CSD] and someone had to physically take the bundle of cards to feed them into the computer, wait for its processing [snail pace by today's standards] and bring back the results. This tedious process would have to repeated till there was nothing wrong with the cards. Most often our computer man, Venkatraman, would go, and occasionally, I would accompany him to process my thesis data [Prodipto had kindly agreed to let me use the facilities in CSD and our time at the computer for processing these considerably minute amounts of data].