Elections to the panchayats and nagarpalikas were held in Tamil Nadu in October 2001. Over the past six months, I have visited the nine intermediate (block) panchayats of my constituency to meet with as many of the 410 elected village panchayat presidents as cared to come. At the first block meeting, less than half of them came; by the end, almost all were present. I have also met the presidents and councillors of the 12 town panchayats, as also of the three municipalities that fall in my constituency. None is chaired by a Congressman; indeed, there are but a handful of such councillors in the constituency as a whole. But there are unexpected advantages of belonging to a party which virtually does not exist: if there had been more Congressmen in the local bodies, perhaps they would have objected to my granting equal time to everyone! At these meetings, I have explained that as a member of parliament, I am entitled to allot Rs 2 crore every year to projects of my choice. On the basis of mathematical equality, this amounts to around Rs 16 lakh to each of the blocks and municipalities of my constituency, plus a little more. God and Atal Bihari Vajpayee willing, I should be there for another three financial years; so this means approximately half a crore per block and municipality is available for investment over the rest of my present term. Saying that it was the same electorate which voted me, which voted them, I invite it to tell me what in its opinion would be the optimal way of spending the available resources. I point out that the equitable thing to do would be to cover each of the village panchayats and wards of the municipalities, which means an average of around Rs 50,000 to Rs 60,000 per unit, but that this should be complemented by facilities that benefit more than one panchayat or ward. Thus, assistance given to a school benefits not only the panchayat in which it is located but also many other panchayats in the vicinity, and a bus stand in a municipal area cannot be identified only with the residents of that ward but with all those who use it. I, therefore, plead with the electorate to not be too mechanistic in defining what is equitable. I then list the requests made orally or, in a larger number of cases, glean these from their written submissions. There is no disagreement that priority must be given to the poorest and most needy. I have also been travelling around the constituency, village to village, as is my invariable practice every evening, I am there, from around 5 pm to midnight or well beyond. I invariably head straight for the Harijan basti because there is virtual equivalence between poverty and caste. There, I meet the people and ask them what they need. So, in addition to the requests the elected local bodies' representatives press on me, there are also the commitments I have personally made during these village tours. I thus have a cornucopia of data from which to undertake the heart-breaking task of deciding which works to sanction and which to leave out. At the beginning, it was all quite arbitrary because so much needed to be done in so many places and the resources available were derisory in relation to demand. Now that I have been able to spend my money over several years, at the rate of a crore a year for the last two years of my first term (1994-96) and at Rs 2 crore a year over the first three years of my second term (1999-2002), I have the satisfaction of looking back at where exactly Rs 8 crore have already gone and the dissatisfaction of knowing exactly which are the hamlets, village panchayats, town panchayats and municipal wards still to be covered. My first priority is to cover the uncovered areas; my second to meet requirements which benefit more than one panchayat or ward (such as bridges, culverts and link roads); my third to concentrate on works which the state government, for good reason or bad, is not undertaking notwithstanding a huge seething unmet demand. In the last category falls an utterly unexpected demand for small funeral sheds - a concrete floor and four pillars covered by a galvanized iron roof, costing about Rs 35,000 each - which amazingly constitute the single most pressing demand of the poorest and most deprived. When I first encountered this demand, I could hardly believe my ears. I would remonstrate with them, 'I've come to ask you what you need to live, and you're telling me how you want to die.' Then, slowly, the truth began dawning on me. The poorer you are, the less geographically or socially mobile you tend to be. So, when a death occurs, you do not need to ask for whom the bell tolls; each one knows it tolls for him. Boy and girl, man and woman, they have all known, grown up with, fought and loved the departed soul. As there is a minimum of a death a month even in the smallest of communities, and upto a death or more every week in the larger bastis, every inhabitant joins in the funeral several times a year. A funeral is the defining community event. The sense of loss, combined with what the sociologist M.N. Srinivas has described as the 'Sanskritization' of social behaviour, has ensured that every mourner wants to pay a fitting last tribute to the lost loved one. Hence the demand for a parlour where the final obsequies can be conducted in dignity. They can all bear the heat; but when it rains buckets - as it does through several months of the year - they need a place of shelter, not for themselves but for the dead body before it is finally interred or burnt. I have thus far built 251 funeral sheds, and, in several cases, mud or gravel paths to the funeral site. So popular has been this priority to funeral sheds that the state government has at last woken to the need for it and announced that it will shortly be launching a scheme for this out of government money. When that happens, I can shift my money elsewhere, happy in the thought that I was there when needed and can now turn my attention to other unattended needs. The most important of these other unattended needs is a place where the locals can gather. The temple or church, where these exist, is, in Dalit bastis, the drawing room, the local inn, the meeting room, the wedding hall, the auditorium all rolled into one. The MP local area development scheme quite properly prohibits the use of the funds for building places of worship. So the next best thing is to build community halls. In Tamil Nadu, the public works department design is so poorly conceived that it costs Rs 4 to 5 lakh to build a hall that is too small and far too stuffy to be useable. I, therefore, got an architect friend to prepare a new, more spare design for a community hall of the required minimum size but at less than half the PWD rate. Resistance to innovation is, however, so fierce within the bureaucracy and technocracy that the state government is still to approve the alternative design a good two years after it was submitted. Fortunately, two of the three district collectors through whom I have to get the work done have had the courage to sanction my suggestion and so we now have a model to show off to all those who ask. Schools are another high priority. The expansion of the schooling system in Tamil Nadu has been so fast and so effective that there is virtually one hundred per cent literacy, indeed almost cent per cent elementary education coverage, among children up to the constitutionally mandated age of fourteen. Among the other spin-off benefits of the universalization of elementary education, especially among girls, has been a plummeting of Tamil Nadu birth rates to Scandinavian rates and below. It was the combination of education-for-all and cooked noon day meals which ensured this marvel of development. Alas, the state has not the resources to build enough class-rooms or school compound walls or kitchens or dining spaces for the noon day meal to be eaten. The MP's funds are an excellent source of funding such facilities. At the start of my sixth year of implementing MPLADS, I find I have built 251 funeral sheds, 132 bus shelters, 95 link roads, 34 bridges and culverts, 61 bathing ghats, 30 revetment walls, 12 TV rooms and 11 public lavatories, besides providing various kinds of facilities to 127 schools, 5 colleges, 4 hospitals, 2 primary health centres and one veterinary centre. Moreover, I have provided 13 drainage works, 8 drinking water facilities, 7 community halls, 4 noonday meal centers, 8 fair price shops, 2 library buildings, a vegetable market and a boating yard. Now, what's wrong with that?