Portraits of Dhankya

In early December, my team and I visited Dhankya, a village about 30 minutes outside of Jaipur in Rajasthan. Dhankya has been selected as a model village under Prime Minister Modi's Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana program, which requires every member of parliament to adopt a village and coordinate development efforts to make it a model village by 2016. My team is working on providing solar power to households and community buildings to supplement electricity from the erratic national grid.

I suspect Dhankya is representative of a number of villages in India - places where residents are close enough to city centers to have access to urban amenities and service sector jobs but where agriculture is still the primary economic activity. Compared to other villages in India, Dhankya is relatively well-off, enjoying good road connection to Jaipur and literacy rates higher than average for Rajasthan. However, the village still faces a number of serious issues like underfunded public schools (science isn't taught at the secondary school level), a rapidly falling water table, and poor sanitation practices. Through the course of our field visit I photographed many residents of the village, giving a look at some of the faces of semi-rural India. Enjoy!

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