Pilot Project, India: The Story of Rural Development at Etawah, Uttar Pradesh

By Albert Mayer

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1958.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520346024

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Pilot Project, India

The story of rural development at Etawah, Uttar Pradesh

The story of rural

development at Etaw ah, Uttar Pradesh

Pilot Project, India

By ALBERT MATER and ASSOCIATES in collaboration with McKIM MARRIOTT and RICHARD L. PARK, with a foreword by PANDIT GOVIND BALLABH PANT Home Minister, Government of India

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California • 1958

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Cambridge University Press, London, England

© 1958 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-10290 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Marion Jackson Skinner

Frontispiece, photograph by Ernest Kleinberg, courtesy of the Ford Foundation.

To co-workers, mentioned and unmentioned, and to my Indian village friends

A. M.

Foreword

Nearly 85 per cent of our people live in the villages. For ages, the village republics of India had been celebrated for their remarkable vitality, organized life, and tough tenacity in planned and ordered self-sufficiency. The established order, especially in the rural areas, was upset, however, because of the political upheavals and the inroads made by foreign rule during the last one or two centuries. The Congress Government in Uttar Pradesh, on assuming office in 1937, saw the deterioration in the conditions of rural life, and realized the dangers that would inevitably follow if this state of affairs were allowed to continue unchecked. A separate Rural Development Department was therefore made responsible for executing a program of rural reconstruction throughout the State. This program had not proceeded very far when the Second World War intervened and the Congress Government resigned. The Congress Government came back to office in 1946, and in accordance with the cardinal principles of Congress policy, the task of revitalizing life in the villages was again taken in hand.

It was at this stage that Mr. Albert Mayer entered the scene. He prepared in December, 1946, a Preliminary Outline for Village Planning and Reconstruction, proposing one basic rural pilot project. He gave certain ideas which, after discussion, were suitably adjusted to fit in with Indian conditions. It was realized that one of the main reasons why the work done under the old Rural Development Department did not go very far was the absence of thorough participation of the villagers in it. There were drains to be made, tanks to be deepened, inter-village roads to be constructed and repaired, canals to be dug, health and sanitation measures to be undertaken, adult education to be spread, and, last but not least, methods of agriculture to be improved, and the yield from crops to be stepped up. This mighty work could only be fulfilled with the active cooperation and participation of the people. The urge for constructive endeavour and betterment was there, but it had lain latent for too long; it had to be revived and stimulated so that the villagers’ initiative could radiate in all directions, and nourish the life of the rural community.

Accordingly, the Pilot Development Project worked out with the assistance of Mr. Mayer was launched in the Etawah district in October, 1948. It was a new experiment in rural planning, under which the task of seeking a better life and of reconstructing and rehabilitating the village was to be undertaken essentially by the villagers themselves. Provisions had of course to be made for expert advice also being available in technical matters, but the distinguishing feature of the arrangement was that there was to be an integrated scheme, in which the technical workers functioned as a part of the over-all village team, with a feeling of deep interest and participation, so as to invoke and retain the confidence of the village community. Another new idea that was introduced was that of the multipurpose worker at the village level. Experience had shown that if villagers were approached by separate functionaries of different nation-building departments, the advice that they offered for the improvement of agriculture through the introduction of better implements, new manuring devices, and high quality seed, animal husbandry, sanitation, and public health seldom went home and showed little practical results. But if these functions in the initial stage were entrusted to a trained individual who was actuated by a genuine spirit of service, the villagers would respond to his advice and draw real benefit from it.

The Etawah experiment has confirmed the soundness of this new administrative technique. The pioneer work that has been done there and the invaluable experience in rural reconstruction that has thus been gained have been in a large measure responsible for the scheme of Community Projects which figured so prominently in India’s First Five-Year Plan and now forms a vital part of the Second Five-Year Plan. A side achievement of the progress of our extension work in Etawah and elsewhere has been the establishment of the Planning Research and Action Institute, which was inaugurated by the Uttar Pradesh Government at Lucknow in May, 1954. The State of Uttar Pradesh has always been in the forefront of development activities, and Mr. Albert Mayer can appropriately feel a just pride in having made a notable contribution towards this achievement. It was a happy thought on his part to reduce into writing his experience of the community development project in Etawah, in order to make it available to a wider public, particularly outside India. India’s efforts to reconstruct every one of the nation’s half a million villages through the National Extension Service program represent one of the most significant events of the present age, and this interesting book written by Mr. Albert Mayer in his homely style will, it is hoped, serve as a stimulating guide for those who may be charged with the initiation of similar undertakings elsewhere.

G. B. PANT September 12, 1956

6, King Edward Road

New Delhi

Preface

The purpose of this book is to cast light upon what has become one of the most significant movements of the present century—the movement to raise the levels of living of vast rural populations in Asia and Africa, and to give their lives enhanced dignity and worth.

In this accelerating movement to enrich the lives of the world’s underprivileged agricultural masses, the Pilot Project in Rural Planning and Development at Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, India, has played a crucial role. What the Rochdale experiment in England is to the world’s cooperative movement, what the Tennessee Valley Authority is to the integrated exploitation of the world’s great watersheds, this the Etawah project has fast become to the movement for revitalizing the ways of life of the world’s peasantry.

Begun under sponsorship of the provincial government of Uttar Pradesh in late 1948 with a unit of sixty-four villages, the project at Etawah grew in three years to include over three hundred villages of the same district, was reproduced at four other centers in Uttar Pradesh, and finally became a prototype for Community Development Projects and National Extension Service blocks in thousands of villages in every part of India. Official visitors numbered by the hundreds have come from other provinces of India, from other Asian countries, from Africa, from Europe, and from the Americas to see the original pilot project and its offspring, to try to learn from them, and to apply the lessons of Etawah to projects of rural development in their homelands. The pilot project at Etawah has become to the world a symbol of successful rural development initiated by an enlightened popular government, and carried through without compulsion among a peasantry known for its conservatism.

Although there have been many visitors to the pilot project and its offshoots, few have written more than brief statistical accounts of what they saw. Thus, despite the fame and significance of the experiment begun at Etawah, no thorough analysis or description of the projects’ guiding ideas, techniques, or problems has been presented to date. The inner story of the original pilot project has yet to be told.

We believe that there is much to be told of planning theory, of administrative innovation, of the constructive uses of tradition, of Indian institutions in government and in village, and of human history at Etawah—much more than any statistical assessment, however complete, could reveal. We feel, too, that a detailed report on this significant experiment is already much overdue.

To render this report, there is none better qualified than Albert Mayer of New York, Planning and Development Adviser to the Government of Uttar Pradesh since 1948. An architect and a town and rural planner of powerful imagination, Mr. Mayer had served in India as a United States Army Engineer from 1942 to 1945, and later contributed to planning the cities of Bombay, Kanpur, and Chandigarh. It was he who acted from the beginning as the catalytic agent of the pilot project at Etawah, working under the leadership and with the encouragement of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant. It was Mayer’s contribution to propose and implement creatively a unified, many-sided approach to rural problems which had already been conceived as a general axiom by such leaders of the Uttar Pradesh Government as K. B. Bhatia and A. N. Jha. It was Mayer who assembled personnel and ideas, sought out, combined, and tested newly synthesized and existing plans and methods. The story of Etawah may thus be told in considerable part as a section of the biography of Albert Mayer. A perceptive and always critical observer, and himself by far the most copious and persevering writer among all witnesses of Etawah’s growth, Mr. Mayer is peculiarly well fitted to relate the story of the experiment.

Most of the words of this book are therefore those of Albert Mayer. His words are supplemented at a number of points by others such as Horace Holmes, who served the villagers of Etawah skillfully and with sympathy as Agricultural Adviser to the Government of Uttar Pradesh, and Dhyan Pal Singh, IAS, Baij Nath Singh, Rudra Datt Singh, H. C. Seth, and other outstanding officers among the many exceptionally able civil servants of the Government of Uttar Pradesh who helped to earn for the pilot projects the high reputation which they have come to enjoy. The men who carried out the Etawah experiment thus become in this book their own reporters.

In order to tell the Etawah story most directly, these authors speak for themselves, often quite personally, through reports, memoranda, and correspondence written while their work was moving forward. Quotations from their contemporary documents have been recast or modified only occasionally in the interests of wider intelligibility. Each quotation is dated and numbered, while full citations are given in the list of References at the back of the book. The direct quotations are linked by newly written passages, those from the point of view of the author appearing in brackets, and those from the point of view of the collaborators appearing in italics. For these passages, whether written in the first person singular or the third, we and Mr. Mayer are jointly responsible.

Our presentation is therefore not an evenly balanced narrative. Nor is it an integrated treatise on principles. Instead, our aim has been to state general problems as they were encountered, along with particular situations that are redolent of field needs and actual confrontations—situations which in turn reflect back into the realms of policy and high-level planning. In deference to the crucial importance of local detail in planning we have included case histories that go far beyond the general and dwell at length upon the specific. In recognition of the role of give-and-take in any such program of action, we have also included reports of conversations, sketches of personalities, and not a few anecdotes— records of kinds of experience which leaven the work of rural development and which may have as much significance for understanding what happened at Etawah as the weightier principles of planning theory.

There is a sense of the unique in this study of the pilot projects, since its subject is a single instance of rural development in Uttar Pradesh, India. At the same time, we believe that many of the principles exemplified by the matured experience of Etawah have universal applicability, however different the details of given local circumstances may be. Such details, of course, are of the essence in rigorous planning. What is perhaps common to all successful planning and action for rural development is the need for disciplined reflection, sensitive awareness of field strategy and technique, and an intimate familiarity with local traditions.

In reading through some of the case histories and case analyses presented in this book, the reader familiar with subsequent rural community development work in India will recognize that the magnitude has vastly increased. The example cited in this book of a small bridge over a minor canal linking two halves of a village has been far exceeded since. The building of much larger bridges has been organized successfully and carried out frequently. But the histories of the first small successes are worth exploring, because it is there that inertia had first to be exorcised, that lack of precedents had first to be confronted, and that methods not only for planning but also for initiating development had to be devised.

The story which follows is divided into nine chapters. Each chapter conveys one or several of Etawah’s experiences and lessons for the larger world. Chapter One describes Albert Mayer’s wanderings on the highways, byways, and no-ways of northern India in search of a pattern for concentrated rural development work. It adumbrates theories of planning and action which were to underlie the subsequent years of experiment within the pilot projects. Chapter Two confronts the problems of bureaucratic organization among the ranks of the development workers themselves, and vis-à-vis the purely administrative men, problems of action within a relatively rigid and orthodox administration which will find parallels in much of Asia and Africa today. Chapter Three outlines and illustrates a series of new organizational devices aiming to assist inner democratization and to encourage personal commitment and realism at all levels within government service.

Chapter Four continues an analysis of local administrative problems in development, focusing now not on the government organization, but on that organization’s approach to the villagers who are its charge. A combination of techniques and principles that are widely known to agricultural extension workers elsewhere is exemplified in its intensive operation at Etawah.

One of these techniques, an unusual program for arousing and involving the people, is described in some detail in Chapter Five. In the Western world, rural development work tends to constitute mainly a popularization and demonstration of better agricultural and home managing methods. But Etawah’s experience suggests that in India and among impoverished peasantry generally, work for productive improvement to be successful must include provision for fundamental awakening and alerting. Anthropologists have often warned that planned changes should avoid conflict with traditional culture and social structure. A unique conception and aim of the pilot projects has been to promote a positive expansion of traditional culture and social structure capable of managing the emergent effects of technological development and capable of adding emotional strength to the people’s new efforts.

In Chapter Six the narrative is resumed. Some results of eight years’ work are summarized and appraised, with attention to failings as well as to successes. One of the biggest unresolved problems is how rapidly rural development can be expanded from the pilot stage to the country-wide saturation stage without losing its essential intensity and integrity. This question, a burning one which faces every country beginning a program of rural development, is dealt with in Chapter Eight.

Chapters Seven and Nine carry the story beyond past chronology into the future. Chapter Seven particularly anticipates the need for continuing applied scientific research. As Mayer puts it, a successful development program soon outruns the accumulated working capital of tested research with which it started. Examples are given of ways in which some new capital is already being researched into existence, and of future promise in research. From a still broader perspective, Chapter Nine criticizes the onesidedness of planning for future material development without planning also for the longer trends of social and moral development.

We think it natural that this book itself grew out of a mutual seeking between the interests of social science and action. The collaborators sought specific knowledge from the experience of Mr. Mayer in action programs, while he sought from them an acquaintance with broader contexts of social, anthropological, and political theory. The two interests first combined forces in 1954 through a series of lectures and seminars conducted by Mr. Mayer at the Social Science Faculty Colloquium and in the Institute of East Asiatic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. This book is the fruit of their continued association.

A very large part of the editorial burden, both technical and financial, has been borne by Mr. Mayer himself. At our invitation, he made available from his private files a selection of the most important documents on the pilot project, and on his observations of the subsequent Community Projects and National Extension Service blocks. The collaborators’ work has been largely that of further selection, recasting, condensation, arrangement, and integration.

As the compilers of this book, we wish to record the generosity of Prime Minister Nehru and the Government of India, and of Premiers G. B. Pant and Sampurnanand and the Government of Uttar Pradesh in granting permission for us to use and publish many internal documents. We are much indebted to Dhyan Pal Singh, Director, and to Harish Chandra Seth, both of the Planning Research and Action Institute, U.P., for their painstaking assistance in confirming and supplying many details of information. Thanks are due the Harvard University School of Business Administration for permission to quote Richard Morse’s observations at Etawah, and the Council on Economic and Cultural Affairs, Inc., for help towards the costs of publication.

We are individually grateful for our opportunities to undertake this book: Park, to the Modern India Project, the Ford Foundation, and to the University of California, Berkeley; Marriott, to the University of California, Berkeley, to the University of Chicago, and to the Ford Foundation Foreign Area and International Relations Fellowship program. However, neither these universities nor the Ford Foundation are responsible for the views expressed in this book. We have both appreciated the encouragement given to our efforts by Professor David G. Mandelbaum.

No one knows better than Mrs. Mary Blair and Miss Donna Divine how much we and Mr. Mayer relied on them for help with a voluminous correspondence during the writing of this book. To Mrs. Janet Seibert we are grateful for producing the numerous typescripts which eventuated in the following text. We give special thanks for the assistance of Keith Sexton and Robert Frykenberg, who managed the handling of hundreds of documents with accuracy and dispatch. Thanks are due also Miss Ynez Haase for the maps, Miss Betty J. Blaine for the charts, and the staff of the University of California Press for their forbearance.

The frontispiece is by Ernest Kleinberg, courtesy of the Ford Foundation. The photograph of Albert Mayer conferring with Anand Madho Shukla is by Harish Chandra Seth. The photograph entitled Literacy Classes is by courtesy of the Uttar Pradesh Government.

MCKIM MARRIOTT University of Chicago

RICHARD L. PARK University of California, Berkeley

Contents 1

Contents 1

Pilot

1 Origins

RURAL EXPLORATIONS

THE PROJECT CRYSTALLIZES

THE PLAN

2 Organization for Work and Response

THE OLD REGIME OF DISTRICT AND DEPARTMENTAL ADMINISTRATION

STRUGGLES IN THE NEW ORGANIZATION

3 Inner Democratization

THE SEVERAL LEVELS OF INITIATIVE

IMBEDDING THE WORK

TAKING COUNSEL WITH THE PEOPLE

MUTUALITY AND INNER REWARDS

4 Philosophy and Techniques of Rural Work

CRITERIA FOR CHOOSING DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES

PRINCIPLES OF REALISTIC PLANNING

APPROACHING THE VILLAGE

CASE STUDIES OF CORPORATE ACTION

5 Village Participation

WHY A VILLAGE PARTICIPATION PROGRAM?

THREE TASKS OF VILLAGE PARTICIPATION

6 Results and Implications

WHAT WAS DONE

BALANCING THE BOOKS

7 Research and Action

ORGANIZING FOR RESEARCH

THE INSTITUTE IN OPERATION

SPECIMEN RESEARCH PROJECTS

8 Some Problems of Expansion

PLANNING FOR ACCELERATED PROGRESS

EXPANDING PERSONNEL

9 Future and Potential

GIVING AND RECEIVING

A REVALIDATION OF RURAL LIVING

CHARTING ULTIMATE DIRECTIONS

Appendix

Glossary

References

Index

Pilot

I will simply try to tell you what happened in an individual set of projects in which I had a hand. I will try to transmit to you the spirit and feeling of such projects, their requirements, the factors that make them click; the grand adventure it has been and is to conceive them in common with the people who are there; the deep cordialities and intimacies that are part of them, grow out of them, and make them worth while; and above all, the mutuality of such work.

What is a pilot project? Three years after helping to start the first one at E taw ah, and then four others, Mayer wrote the following letter to Tarlok Singh of the Planning Commission. The Commission was then considering a vast program of similar Community Development Projects, which have since come to pass.

Mayer and Whittlesey

Union Square

New York 3, New York September 24,

Shri Tarlok Singh

Deputy Secretary, Planning Commission

Government of India

New Delhis India

DEAR TARLOK SINGH:

… India is going to go ahead in a democratic way, not by the exercise of ruthless force. You can go forward, make all sorts of mistakes, suppress critics, liquidate thousands of people, and in the end possibly arrive at the goals through a sea of blood and suffering. India will not do that.

The only way I can see to avoid this is by determined, immediate, careful setting-up of pilot projects to accumulate experience, to serve as models to be examined, and to act as practical training centers. I know of no faster way to make solid progress. The pilot project method is slow at first, but can gain speed and momentum rapidly once it is firmly under way, once trained men are available. I always visualize it graphically thus—maybe I’ve already spoken of this to you:

I would like to point out here another advantage of the pilot project method. In a small number of pilot projects, you can pick very good people who will understand that this is genuine experimentation or exploration, men of sufficient caliber who can honestly assess success and failure and learn and apply lessons quickly.

PILOT 3

And I believe you can begin to build up a tradition of intellectual honesty and self-appraisal.

Another advantage in the pilot project method is this. While one chooses fairly average conditions, so that the results may have real significance, and does not employ methods or require supplies that cannot readily be duplicated or multiplied for application to other areas and situations, it is legitimate to concentrate attention on them to assure their success as far as possible. If a tradition of success can be created in the first or pilot instances, it will certainly be an enormous psychological boost, and make all the future work in that field much more likely to succeed.

Sincerely yours, ALBERT MAYER

[51.4]

1 Origins

[My first contact with India was as an officer in the United States Army Engineers in World War II. At first encounter with a strange and seemingly inscrutable country, one can follow the colonial pattern of keeping aloof in the foreigners’ clubs, which is a sort of escape. Or one can look around sympathetically and try to understand, try to mingle and learn. By dint of determined efforts which were not encouraged by the British authorities who were then still in control, nor by the American army authorities who also liked to keep themselves to themselves, it was possible to meet friendly, eager people. They were as eager to explain themselves and to learn about us as a handful of us were about them. The upshot was that in 1945, a few weeks before I was due to leave for home, one of my Indian friends suggested I should meet Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.]

Nehru, recently released from jail by the authorities, said he was too busy for ordinary meetings. But he did suggest that if I were to find it possible to be his guest at his home in Allahabad for a few days, we could find odd times, chiefly late at night, to have some talks. And this is just what we did. In the course of these intimate talks until far into the night in his delightful Anand Bhawan and in the context of India’s coming inevitable freedom, an American habit asserted itself. I gave my own impressions, and offered some suggestions as to what I would do.

What I would do was to try out various pilot projects just as fast as they could be thoroughly thought out, formulated, and carried out. When India gained her freedom, there would be a tremendous upsurge of demand for a better life, and work would need to be done on a tremendous scale. Only by this initial experimentation, by finding out what would work and what wouldn’t and why, could we prepare for this tremendous scale. And only by that first experience, gained as quickly as possible, could there be a reasonable chance for success in the later big, inevitable program. And only if in the course of our pilot project work we could succeed in training personnel to push such work and train other trainers, then only could a large program later succeed. [52.1]

[We discussed the possibility of starting by establishing some ‘model villages which would emphasize good housing, sanitation, and sound community structure. I had felt the desperate importance in India of making some specific things work well as radiating demonstrations, rather than to give high-level advice that was not planted anywhere.

[Then I went home, got out of the army, and settled down into my normal work, and became reacquainted with my family after three years. And then some six months later I had a letter from Prime Minister Nehru. He had, he said, often thought of our talks. And would I like to come out and try some of the things we had talked about? Of course talk is a good deal easier than real planning and execution. Finally I agreed to go back to explore the situation before seriously saying what could or could not be done.]

As at Anand Bhawan Allahabad, India June i7, 1946

DEAR MR. MAYER,

I have received your letter of May 20th and, as I cabled to you, I have sent it on to the U.P. Prime Minister, Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant. Subsequently I had a talk with him also and I understand that he has sent a cable to you. He has pointed out in this that the rainy season having begun in India, it will be difficult to start any major operations before this season is over. Just at present, also, prospective political changes as well as the food situation are coming in the way of the consideration of other problems.

As you say, this is going to be more or less of a pioneering job. Of course, many people have thought about it and prepared plans, but usually they have been isolated plans dealing with one aspect of the question only. The proper way to view it, as you mentioned to me, is to look at it as a whole with various aspects interlinked. We want to raise living standards and to train people to utilize them to the full. We want, in other words, to build up community life on a higher scale without breaking up the old foundations. We want to utilize modern technique and fit it into Indian resources and Indian conditions. This is not an easy matter, for the resources are limited at present and the conditions are often very different from those in Western countries. But that it can and should be done I have no doubt. Probably a number of experiments will have to be made before we hit upon the right method of tackling the problem. Or it may be that there are several methods which can be simultaneously pursued. It is a job which appeals to me strongly, although I have no technical competence to draw up schemes. From the talks we had in Allahabad I feel that not only your technical knowledge and experience, but even more so your psychological approach to these problems will be of great help. The average American might well feel disgusted with many things in India which are entirely new to him and which do not fit in with his scheme of life. I think you will not feel that way.

… Changes are in the air and more and more people want to bring about social improvement on a large scale. I feel that with your ideas and experience, if we once get going, there would be plenty of popular backing. Just at the beginning some people, used to the old type of authoritarian British expert, who neither understood nor cared to understand Indian conditions, might view any foreign intrusion with some suspicion. Our people have naturally developed a number of complexes during these past generations of foreign rule and foreign exploitation. But we can get over them given the chance. …

I hope that you will write to me of any problems or difficulties in regard to your coming to India which might trouble you. We shall, of course, try to help.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

[46.1]

[My background and work had been in architecture and town planning. I had thought the challenge that was taking me back to India would be within this framework of ability. Planning of new villages in India rather than towns in the West would involve new sets of factors to be taken into account. But a planner is accustomed to facing and organizing new components in almost every project. Unfamiliar work can gain from a fresh eye.]

New York

August 2, 1946

Premier Govind Ballabh Pant

U.P. Premier

Nainital, India

DEAR PREMIER PANT,

As noted in your cablegram received here in June, I am listing some thoughts on housing and rural reconstruction, based on what I believe was the tenor of talks and letters between Jawaharlal Nehru and myself, supplemented by some thinking and work I have been doing. I could gain a great deal by having your comments.

1. Basically the objective is to formulate a practicable program for functional planning and physical rebuilding of rural community life in such a way as to improve its quality and performance: negatively to remove as far as possible the handicaps to proper development of the individual and the community, positively to foster such development.

2. Such a program must be based on and tested by actual specimen projects. These will be of two kinds: first, as far as possible an evaluation of any previous experience in the U.P. and elsewhere; second, actual experimental work to be initiated in the U.P. The work we would initiate in the U.P. would be in several groups of villages whose characteristics—geographic, economic, social—should be sufficiently different to permit general conclusions to be drawn.

Such actual concrete work in situ would be very important in order:

a) To test out, in actual practice, ideas that had been adopted; to check their advantages and weaknesses, and their reception by the people for whom they are intended; and based on the findings, either to adopt generally or to modify the original program.

&) To get an actual check on anticipated initial and recurring costs.

3. In the formulation of the program a most essential element will be to relate costs and timetable of accomplishment to the economic status of the people affected and to the budget and resources of the U.P. and local governments.

How we resolve this matter will be one of the principal elements determining whether we have something laudable but unfeasible, or whether we evolve a real program that can be carried out successfully year after year.

4. In what may be called this purely physical and functional phase, the following items will enter:

a) We will want to provide as far as possible:

i) Better housing, in physical space, arrangement, quality, and permanence.

ii) Intercommunicating system of simple but all-weather roads to some center for regular reliable disposal of produce.

iii) Sanitation—personal hygiene, sewage disposal, drainage.

iv) Water supply and distribution.

v) Mosquito and malaria control.

vi) Maximum local irrigation obtainable, and tie-in with any larger schemes, either existing, being developed, or proposed.

vii) Dispensary, clinics, hospital.

viii) School or schools.

ix) Community house and recreation center (may be in the same physical building as the school).

x) Meetinghouse for local council Çpanchayaí) or other local governmental or administrative unit (may occupy same physical space as community house).

xi) Warehouse if required.

xii) Possibly small building for small machines, looms, and so on, which may be justified by local cottage industries; possibly also for central storage of cooperatively used farm implements.

It may be that in the above I have either suggested more than is feasible or less. But I believe that for a minimum standard of well-being and productivity, each item definitely merits consideration. Probably in a relatively few experimental cases, we should try to accomplish all or nearly all of these items. In the eventual entire program, trying to accomplish them all will almost certainly be too ambitious. On the other hand, any conclusions at this time may need to be revised upward if it becomes obvious, as it should, that in the experimental cases a very substantial improvement of productivity and income results from the work done.

b) To accomplish such a list will require the maximum of ingenuity. We must try to use locally available materials to the maximum, to use local labor by the people themselves (in what I believe is their ample spare time) so as to reduce cost.

To do this, research will be necessary on these levels:1 check carefully on what others have done in India and here, in such matters as improved earth construction, in cheap waterproofing methods, in stabilized earth roads; do such original laboratory and field research as appears feasible and as offers reasonable chance of fruitful result; and finally apply methods arrived at by either of the two above courses, and test their adaptability to your own U.P. conditions and to the abilities of your citizens.

5. So much for what I have called the physical and functional

phases of the undertaking. But from our experience over here, a number of other elements must enter if the work is to be successful in actual result over the years.

Undoubtedly a proper physical and functional framework is indispensable, is a necessary condition precedent to accomplishing our objective. But that alone is only a first step. If people don’t know how to use these, or don’t care to, then however fine the framework, the value in use will be small or negligible.

To assure most fruitful acceptance and use, there must be provided:

a) Education and information in the use of these facilities. People have got to understand why such innovations are of benefit to them, and how they have to be used. For example, if we provide improved sanitation but people continue to use primitive methods, then we have wasted our money and effort.

b) Some skilled personnel must be provided, initially from the outside, to operate certain facilities, and to keep them in proper repair—simple machines or tools, cesspools, septic tanks, wells, and irrigation tanks. This personnel should be selected or trained with the idea in mind not only of assuring their own skill and ability, but of their being able to impart enough of this so that local people can then carry on. This phase of proper maintenance and repair is of the most vital importance. If neglected, the installations work badly and either have to be replaced prematurely or become useless or worse than useless; if handled properly the recurring cost is very small, since only the simplest installations should be made, particularly at the start.

c) Improved agricultural practices to stimulate cooperative action. This is, of course, important in raising the level of productivity. Over here our Department of Agriculture has evolved a very successful system of county agents who not only give instructions, but who continuously circulate among the people, answer questions, take personal interest, and have gained the confidence and friendship of the cultivator. Possibly the same system is already in existence in the U.P.; if not, some such system might be adopted.

I have indicated the importance of this value-in-use phase of the physical program because the two really go together. One of our problems will be to tie them together successfully from the start.

My personal competence and experience lie largely in the phase of actual planning and construction. But I have had enough contact with this second in-use phase—cases both of its presence and its absence—to know how vital it is.

This is a very brief note or outline of the problem as I see it from this distance. It may be far from what you have in mind, or it may not. But I hope that it will expedite our arriving at what will soon become a practical and yet a worthwhile program.

Yours,

ALBERT MAYER

[46.2]

An exploratory visit to India followed this note. A month after his arrival, Albert Mayer wrote the following newsletters, the first of many sent over the years to American friends.

New Delhi, India October 27, 1946

… From Karachi where we landed I had the inspiration to send a wire to Nehru. As the plane was passing through Delhi and I had to stay overnight there, I thought I would take a chance on being able to see him before going on to Lucknow to meet the U.P. officials. I asked him to call me at the hotel at 7 P.M. as to whether and when he could see me. I reached the hotel at 7:05, and was informed of a call from Pandit Nehru five minutes before. I was invited to dinner that night and saw him again the following morning at breakfast.

Here was he, in the midst of a busy and critical period generally, and in the immediate throes of the severest possible crisis of negotiations with the Muslim League, and yet he not only gave time and attention to me, but told me that I should see various people at Delhi and who they were and that his secretary