Moving in Sand and Time : URMUL Rural Health and Development Trust, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

Monday, March 8, 2010

URMUL Rural Health and Development Trust, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

The URMUL Rural Health Research and Development Trust, URMUL Trust, as it is more popularly known, has been working in different areas of western Rajasthan since 1984. Initially formed as an outreach project of the URMUL Dairy it soon developed its own independent vision and mission to work with the vulnerable desert communities. Along with a team of dedicated people from Bikaner it was formed by Mr. Sanjoy Ghose. Before Sanjoy moved from Bikaner to work in Majuli island in the North East in early nineties he had fostered a number of autonomous rural organisations that continue to work in different parts of western Rajasthan.

Many of them continue to strive for improving the quality of life of poor and vulnerable in the fragile ecology of Thar, independent autonomous yet part of URMUL Trust family.

For reading Moving in Sand and Time, the story of this desert organisation till 1999

click here

Text and Layout: URMUL Team (Arvind Ojha, V.K. Madhavan, Chetan Ram Godara, Ramchander Baropal, Kashyap Mankodi, Anwar Ali, Rahul Ghai, A.K. Mukherjee)

Design: Bibhas Das; Printed by Ganeshan, Uttara Print

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Gerbils: the compulsive diggers

Gerbils, also called sand rats, are rodent-like creatures of the desert. Most desert animals evade the stifling heat by leading a nocturnal life. Gerbils though, thanks to their unique adaptations, are happily diurnal. They are truly compulsive diggers, ready to burrow at a moment’s notice. Existing in large groups, gerbils collaborate to create, modify and actively maintain their living spaces in response to ever changing winds.

Surviving in the heart of the Thar, assiduously digging, ever searching, and ceaselessly communicating, the gerbils are the inspirations for this blog.

The attempt here is to understand the multiple intersections and contestations of culture, meaning ensemble of practices and ways of life of communities, with the discourse and practices of ‘modern development’. In particular the effort is to understand the travails, tribulations of lower levels of society that mostly remain either invisible or are assumed as mute variables to be acted upon and transformed through the dominant discourse of ‘modern development’. Here it needs to be mentioned that the rustic yet life reinvigorating celebrations of these marginal communities are sought to be understood and experienced. The threads of posts that weave together this tapestry of blog seek to understand and narrate experiences of marginal communities in their effort to negotiate their lives in the ever expanding enterprise of modern development in Thar.

These excavations into collective memory of history and everyday lived consciousness seek to resurrect subaltern and rustic experiences buried underneath the dusty layers of Thar, layers that contain within them the prodigal mass of longue duree history of the Thar. It is an effort to make sense of contemporary times marked by rapid escalation of assertions and claims of development by state and private, corporate and non- profit entities.

The boundaries between rural and urban life are increasingly getting blurred. This is evident in the changes that are coming in the morphology of human settlements. Rural urban continuum is ever expanding its boundaries, its gushing hold taking more and more of life under its sway.

New inter-dependencies are being created and age old inter-relationships between town and countryside are waning away and getting reconfigured like possibly never before.

These contemporary changes in Thar have much in common with similar processes in other fragile ecological regions. Gerbils of Thar occasionally get an opportunity to communicate about these bio cultural traditions undergoing such transformations.

In such an dynamic context impregnated with numerous possibilities, the blog strives to collect, reflect and communicate issues relating to well- being of fragile ecology of Thar, improvement in quality of life and livelihoods of communities especially those at the margins. In doing so the effort is to generate a dialogue regarding the importance of their cultural traditions of survival, regeneration and deep veneration of nature.

This blog is intended as a medium for silent meditation, like a mole burrowing deeply, never wanting to abandon its subterranean tunnels, attempting an empathy to surface phenomena.

Resurrecting experiences of change is about deciphering of multiple and intertwined relations between man and biosphere in Thar.

Contact for further communication:

to.rahulghai@gmail.com