What a season with our first ISVC intern taught us about the hardest part of village work
There is a building in Tilwari that people here call the SETU building. It is the Integrated Smart Village Centre — a room, really, meant to become the place where a village’s services, its learning, and its small enterprises might one day converge. For six weeks this summer, it had someone new working out of it: our first intern under the ISVC, living at Kaaya and spending her days between the centre and the villages around it.
She began, as good work often does, with something small. A library. A few shelves, some books, a room with the lights not always working. On the first proper session, one child came. The next weeks were uneven — three children, then four, then, one Saturday, eighteen. Parents began to stop and watch. Two children started keeping their own dictionaries, writing down words they did not know. A teacher offered to open the room on Sundays. A woman asked whether she might bring a sewing machine and teach the others. The library had quietly stopped being a library and become something harder to name: a place people wanted to be.
Alongside the library, she did the slower, less visible work. She sat with self-help groups as they talked through a member’s difficulty. She walked household to household across five villages, not asking people to rank themselves by wealth — that would have been extractive — but asking them to rank the things they buy, and watching what the ranking revealed about a household’s economy. The women took to it. *”हमारी समस्या भी समझ आ गई और मज़ा भी आ गया,”* one said — *we understood our problem, and we enjoyed it too.* Another, thinking of neighbours who own no land: *”अब जिन पर खेती नहीं होती, उनके लिए तो सब ही महँगा है।”* From those conversations came the beginnings of a study — where a village’s money goes, and where it leaks away — and, later, the unglamorous scaffolding a centre actually needs: a way of keeping records, a calendar, a first draft of how the place should run.
We could tell you this is a success story. The honest version is more interesting.
Because across all six weeks, one question kept returning, and it was not the question we expected. It was not *can we start things here* — plainly we can. The library filled. The women came. The workshops ran. The question that would not leave was quieter, and harder: **once something is begun by an intern, or by us, or by any visitor who will one day leave — who keeps it going?**
Our intern named it before we did. The long-term success of the centre, she wrote, may depend less on introducing new initiatives than on finding the local people who can gradually take responsibility for the ones already there. The library that fills when she runs it — does it empty when she leaves? The study that villagers enjoyed contributing to — does anything come back to them once it is written?
This is not a comfortable thing for an organisation to sit with, and we have decided not to look away from it. It is, in truth, the same question Kaaya has been asking about all of its own work. We are not in the business of teaching a village how to run itself. We are still learning, alongside it, what makes anything last.
What the season offered was not an answer but a shape for one. The centre was at its best not when it belonged to one person, but when it held several at once — children reading on one side of the room while a self-help group met on the other; an outside organisation arriving to see whether it could use the space; a teacher, a seamstress, a group of women each holding a corner of it. Perhaps continuity does not look like one appointed coordinator. Perhaps it looks like many people, each becoming the custodian of one small part — the Sunday library, the sewing hours, the record book — until the centre no longer depends on anyone in particular, and therefore cannot be emptied by anyone’s leaving.
We do not yet know if that is right. The centre still runs on a handful of committed people. The lights still fail. The season ended with the question more sharply drawn than resolved, which is perhaps the most any six weeks can honestly do.
But we have learned to stop mistaking a beginning for a result. A room that fills once is easy. A room that keeps filling after the person who opened it has gone — that is the work. We are looking now for the people who will keep it open, and thinking hard about how a steady stream of learners, each leaving a little behind and handing on what they started, might be part of how a place like this endures.
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*The ISVC intern engagement is part of Kaaya’s work with Setu Aayog on the Integrated Smart Village Centre in the Tilwari cluster. The names of community members have been left out by choice; the voices are theirs.*