One of the faces here on the Chhattisgarh workshop series
belongs to Mohan Yadav. Mohan has a mystical talent for putting people at ease.
Wherever I go with him (be that train stations, bus stands, tiny villages, fast
food restaurants, clothes shops, markets) he always talking to everyone and
people talk back to him and tell him their problems and, more than that, invite
him into their homes for chai or roasted macca (maize) or a place to rest. In
Narayanpur we were standing outside one morning and he struck up a conversation
with a man walking into town and, after less than a minute, the man was showing
Mohanji his bank account book and telling him how his employers owed him 30,000
rupees but was refusing to pay him until he gave them 15,000. Mohan told the man
not to pay and to come back to the workshop if there was any trouble.
I asked him about this mystic power of connection he has and
he said it was because people appreciate that he is working for them. This is
obviously only part of the story (otherwise everybody would be like Mohanji) so
I sat down with him and asked him about his life.
Mohan comes from a village in Bethel District, Madhya
Pradesh. He grew up on a farm and – in 1989 – attended a local meeting held by
an organisation called Vikas Parishad that was concerned with rural people’s
rights. He told me his village was beset with all kinds of problems to do with
moneylenders and corruption so he joined up to help people like him.
Eight years later he was travelling around Madhya Pradesh
organising the setting up of Gram Kosh (a kind of community co-operative
society). After that, in 1998, he began working with an organisation that built
networks for Adivasi artists and artisans. At the same time, he was working at
educating people about their legal rights. This is an issue that he is still concerned with: I have regularly heard him talk about the the Forest Rights Act,
a piece of legislation passed by the previous government in Delhi that gives
tribal people who depend on the forest for their livelihoods legal rights over
forest lands, yet this Act is largely meaningless if the people who need it
have no idea of the rights it promises.
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| Mohanji on the back of a motorcycle with folk musician Charan Singh Parthe |
Other projects followed – from 2002-4 he worked for UNICEF
as a village-level sanitation educator, in 2011 he trained rural people
(mostly) how to supplement their incomes with handicraft manufacturing – until in
2013 his friend took him to a CGNet workshop in Mandla District, MP.
Apparently, he sang a Gondi song, was asked to work for the organisation more
and, after organising a Bhopal workshop with 60 Gondi-speaking participants
from across six states, became a key member of the CGNet team in the field.
Mohan has spent twenty five years doing social work for very
little financial reward (he told me his first salary was Rs. 125 a month) and a
largely nomadic lifestyle (he has a family back in Bethel that he only sees for
two months of every year). I asked him why he chose to spend his life like this and he said 'The Constitution says everybody is equal but I see that everybody is not equal so I work for people'. It’s hard not to be impressed with a man like him.
On a more analytical note, Mohan is emblematic of the way
CGNet depends on existing NGO and activist networks throughout the region.
Without the kind of help that these groups give in providing locations,
resources and contacts it would be impossible to spread knowledge of CGNet in
effective way. Many of CGNet's report contributors also work for their own organizations and groups.
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