Gramya Manthan Story#1 - Systems Awareness in the Village

Contributor: Shashank

I have come to believe that one can learn way more about systems thinking from the village than from any book or any modern facility. Its visible in daily actions. Take, food. Crops harvested from fields, stored for household use, cooked and eaten or eaten uncooked. The inedible remains (like vegetable peels) go to the cattle as their food. That food from cattle becomes poop, which in turn is made into manure for the fields. To let more food grow. Take water ponds. Most villages have had a tradition of maintaining ponds. Annually they desilt it, using the top layer of soil for repairing their mudhouses. Water and housing system, interact with each other. Local awareness, limited resources unleashed deep systems thinking and doing in the village.

It has taken a great deal of schooling and ‘working’ to take local systems awareness away from us. The other reason has been tyranny of convenience. We have traded awareness with comfort.

In the Systems Thinking session in Gramya Manthan, participants shared numerous more examples of where they observed systems thinking at play in the village. And several examples of lack of systems thinking in the city. Like using AC in hot weather, making the weather hotter or eating fruits without preserving the seeds. The concept of waste is omnipresent in each activity in city life - water wasted out of washing utensils, bathing, vegetable waste out of kitchen and so on.

The idea is not to glorify the village. Village as much as the city is seeing erosion of communities, oppression by gender and caste or transactional relationships. However, some gifts of systems awareness are more accessible in the village than in the city - it is really important to learn from them. Gramya Manthan is an attempt to access that awareness and make it alive in different contexts.

An immersive journey by Youth Alliance

A house plastered with mud from the pond

A glimpse from Systems Thinking session

The session was adapted from 'Web of Life' game by Vinod Sreedhar and Rajat Kukreja

Pottery in Village Palia, Kanpur Dehat