Who wouldn’t love waking up to the chirping of birds and see the lush green fields around as they step out of the house? Relishing fresh organic food and breathing fresh air is on everyone’s wish list too. Isn’t it?
Yes. Village life often fascinates everyone. However, the on-ground reality is quite different. One may find the village life attractive for few days as part of village tourism, but usually, life is tough out there. Fewer amenities than cities and even missing necessities often make village life not as attractive as it sounds.
Meet 43-years-old Dilip Kumar Tripathi. He is the head of village Hasudi Ausanpur in Bhanwapur Block of Sidharth Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh. To everyone’s delight with his relentless efforts, he has brought his village at par with city life.
The Hasudi Ausanpur village, situated in the Indo-Nepal district, provides facilities that outclass many mofussil towns. Situated nearly 200 kilometers from the state capital, Lucknow, it was another nondescript village.
Dilip, a postgraduate in Sociology and Medieval History, was elected as Village Head or Pradhan in 2015. The village at that point had nothing much to offer other than non-existent health services, poor infrastructure, and crumbling roads.
“I got the village when everything was in shambles. It was hard to initiate things. Our district comes in the top 100 backward districts of the country. It is situated in very interior part and lacked on all fronts,” Dilip said.
Dilip took it as a challenge and started his village transformation mission. His hard work paid and now recently he has been re-elected as Village Head for another five-year tenure.
Facilities at village Hasudi Ausanpur
The facilities in the village now can give a run for money to any middle-level town. The whole village has been covered with GIS Mapping. Details of every family, every land holdings, and every person is available with the click of a mouse. Everything is online.
The Hasudi Ausanpur village also boasts free wi-fi now and is covered with 23 CCTVs monitored through a control room. All important announcements are aired on the public address system. This system was handy during the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
“We utilized our public address system to the maximum. Local police and administrative officials visited and delivered their message through our public address system. It was also a warning when local police thanedar said in his address that all villagers should follow the lockdown and social distancing else action will be taken against them. It was the easiest way to disseminate the message of government agencies,” he added.
The whole village is painted pink making it a treat to the eyes. It is as if you are in the pink city with beautiful graffiti adorning the village house walls.
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There is a common service center where all online services are provided to the villagers. One bank service center is also functional. The village proudly owns an open gymnasium, a park for children, and an herbal medicinal park.
You name it and the facility is there in the village. A Yoga center, nearly 45 solar street lights, and underground drain in the whole village, a toilet in every household, 90 LED street lights. A library and a guest house beside a public utility center are also in the village.
The village school is now equipped with a digital classroom, computer lab, water purifier, sports facilities, CCTV in each classroom, music classes, rain harvesting system. And the above three rooms are air-conditioned.
A public bathroom for females, a proper well-developed cremation center is also there in the village. The whole village has interlocking tiles paving the streets and an RO Plant for drinking water supply. The Panchayat Bhawan is air-conditioned and the village provides facilities for door-to-door collection of garbage. For the villagers, there is a bank for agricultural implements, 25 cattle sheds, and eight goat sheds.
Dilip has donated a mini-hospital constructed from his own pocket in memory of his late mother and this is available for villagers.
Awards and Honors
With such all-around development and facilities, the Hasudi Ausanpur village has attracted attention across the country.
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Hasudi Ausanpur has received awards and prizes from many government departments. It was the first village in the country to get the highest government award for a village, Nana Ji Deshmukh Rashtriya Gaurav Gram Sabha 2018 and Deendayal Upadhyay Panchayat Sashaktikaran Award in 2019 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Hasudi Ausanpur village retained those awards in 2019 and 2020. Besides this, numerous awards and honors from the state government have been pouring in for the village head, Dilip Kumar Tripathi.
“Earlier, people never knew that a village head could get so much work done. Now our village is fully developed to some extent. I am now focussing on providing job opportunities to the villagers in the village itself so that the migration of workforce stops and the village becomes a self-dependent model,” Dilip said.
Everyone gets an opportunity, but few have the willingness to transform that opportunity into reality. Dilip is one such person. His determination and spirit have distinctively placed the Hasudi Ausanpur village ahead of many other villages in the country.
The journey has been six years long, from being one of the most backward to transforming it into a model village.