Carter-Poori Revisited

When Jimmy Carter visited the Indian village of Daulatpur (pop. 1,907), the hamlet was temporarily renamed Carter-Poori (Carter Place). The President perceived that the villagers, who had doubled their wheat production by introducing irrigation and better seed varieties, were "passionately attached to their rights and liberties." They are also realists. Nobody was vexed that Carter's gift to the village, a View-Master with slides of the presidential family, had wound up in the hands of the state's chief minister rather than those of the village council chief, the sarpanch. Nor did anybody seem very surprised that the gifts to the Indian government--loans for starting a chicken farm and for buying a machine to turn manure into methane gas--had been bestowed upon people who were able to make use of them, the local police agent and the man with the biggest cattle herd.

The farmers want a paved road to their fields, but nobody dared hope that the Carter visit might enable them to build it. "If nothing comes," said a villager, "we will not be affected, because we live as we have lived." If outside aid came, would much of it go to ordinary people? "No," shrugged the sarpanch. "That is what has always happened."

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