How to spread happiness with little money? MP govt dept is doing it with bhajans & ‘sanskar’
India

How to spread happiness with little money? MP govt dept is doing it with bhajans & ‘sanskar’

The ‘Rajya Anand Sansthan’ was established in 2016 to ensure happiness of people in Madhya Pradesh. Here is how the department is trying to do that.

   
Illustration: Soham Sen

Illustration: Soham Sen | ThePrint

Bhopal: What is happiness? This ephemeral feeling that humans have chased for thousands of years has had philosophers divided for nearly as long.

Aristotle described it as a good or flourishing life; Nietzsche thought that happiness was about control over surroundings; Indian philosophy has argued that to be happy is to be content.

But a small department in Madhya Pradesh, run from a sparse office in Bhopal’s Shivaji Nagar area, has narrowed the idea down to self-introspection, ‘sanskar’ and emotional support.

This is the ‘Rajya Anand Sansthan’, which the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government established under the ‘Anand Vibhag (Happiness Department)’ in 2016 to ensure that people in the state are happy.

Working from a small hall with a couple of desks and some chairs at the departmental office, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Akhilesh Argal and five other officials are on a “happiness mission”.

According to Argal, their focus is on “self-introspection in daily life where we look at ourselves and understand our own psychology before we judge others”, and to “create a positive environment among people”.

The Rajya Anand Sansthan office in Bhopal | Photo: Anupriya Chatterjee/ThePrint

The CEO has around 60,000 volunteers at his disposal, most seemingly drawn from the state government, as ThePrint found. These ‘volunteers’ go by the cheery title of ‘anandaks’ and offer support to the people — even if they say they don’t have adequate funding support from the Chouhan government — via workshops called ‘anand sabhas‘ that include games and bhajans.

The MP citizens who have been to these sabhas don’t seem impressed though on account of repetition in activities and disinterest from the volunteers.

The organisation’s small history itself hasn’t been too cheery.

The previous Congress government, which briefly stayed in power between December 2018 and March 2020, “snatched” happiness from the people of Madhya Pradesh when it merged the body with the “spiritual department”, as claimed by state minister Vishwas Sarang.

The department was reinstated as a singular identity only in January this year.

But in two of these over five years of its existence, there has been the minor inconvenience of the pandemic too, which has upended lives all over the world. And the anandaks have found it tough to do their jobs. 

Criticism has poured in from several quarters too, over the lack of sustained programmes, only sporadic activities and a missing road map for what the department should focus on.

This hasn’t dimmed the lights in the department’s office, though, where plans are afoot to make the lives of people happier. The mission is on.


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What the department is meant to do

India’s neighbour Bhutan was the first to get to the idea of ‘gross national happiness’, introducing it to the United Nations in 1998 as a holistic approach to life and a paradigm for alternative development.

The Madhya Pradesh government has taken a similar route too.

According to the website of Rajya Anand Sansthan, “the parameter of development should be value based as well as finding happiness of the citizens”.

It identifies key responsibilities of the body: identifying and defining the scales of measurement of happiness and well-being; fixing guidelines for coordination to raise the spread of happiness; to mainstream the process of planning, policymaking and implementation of the concept of pleasure; among others.

Rajya Anand Sansthan CEO Akhilesh Argal at the organisation’s office in Bhopal | Photo: Anupriya Chatterjee/ThePrint

According to CEO Argal, his department has set up ‘anand bastis’ or village clusters across districts under the ‘anandaks’. It is functioning with minimal funds, Argal said, but added that it doesn’t matter since theirs is a philanthropic initiative. 

The department’s annual budget is around Rs 3 crore, said Argal. The department doesn’t invest in any training or on trainers, it only provides chairs, copy machines, stationery etc.

Even so, the body has its programmes for children and elderly, women and differently-abled.

“We have our own programmes, which also includes children. The whole concept of ‘sanskar’ that is missing among children these days since they don’t live in joint families, we try to impart knowledge on that front. Teaching them basic manners, traditional aspects of life etc,” he said.

“We also have programmes for the elderly, women and differently-abled. Since the pandemic did not allow us to take physical classes, we tried to go the digital way using Zoom and Webex,” Argal added.

During these workshops, the department organises yoga sessions, and activities like tug-of-war, kho kho, etc. Both the elderly and the children are also encouraged to sing bhajans.

Activities organised by volunteers in Niwari, Madhya Pradesh | Photo: Anupriya Chatterjee/ThePrint

Asked about how the department is reaching out to people, Argal said: “We depend on our volunteers for that and there is a wide variety of people who bring participants from their areas. There are yoga teachers, school and college teachers, journalists, people from the Art of Living etc.

We don’t have a separate outreach programme for people yet. People have reached out to us for all the training programmes as well for which they sponsored themselves. Although we have sponsored lunches when the physical workshops took place here.”

Who are the volunteers and what do they do?

The department is completely dependent on volunteers, who organise these programmes and workshops.  

ThePrint reached 25 volunteers whose phone numbers were listed on the official website. Most of them were government school teachers, or associated with a government office in their area, or former government officers. Only two were from private organisations.

V.K. Purohit, a volunteer from Niwari, is a government school teacher. He has been associated with the department for the past three years.

“We recently conducted a workshop from 14-28 January and we have tried our best to divide the nearby rural areas in clusters. There was participation by women and children. We focused on playing traditional games and sang bhajans,” he said.

“For children, we conducted some sessions on exam fear. However, I hope that there is more structure to this programme. We don’t have enough people here and it is completely volunteer-based work. We cannot expect 100 per cent effectiveness from it,” added Purohit.

Rajkumar Patel, a journalist from Sidhi in Madhya Pradesh, is a volunteer for the department. He believes the scale of the programme isn’t large but they work anyway.

“We don’t have continuous programmes on this and there is no funding as of now. We conduct small workshops for elderly people who need help in daily life and provide them with some social and emotional support, we don’t do this on a large scale. But we have tried to conduct physical workshops whenever possible,” said Patel.


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‘Showing off’

The citizens who have attended these workshops, however, don’t have too many happy words to offer.

Praful Sharma, principal of a government higher secondary school in Indore, participated in workshops around his area. 

“People who conducted these sessions believed in showing off. They clicked pictures and uploaded them to the website. It was a selfish affair. Who knows who is submitting fake pictures, there is no way of checking that. Advertisement is not all, real work should have been done. They could have called people in small groups and created awareness or helped in coping with deaths at home. Hence, I stopped going,” said Sharma.

He also highlighted that the department was missing during the pandemic.

“This department should have motivated people during Covid-19 even if they were not directly involved in relief work. The second wave was brutal and we needed this department to boost people’s morale,” he said Sharma.

Ravi Gupta from Morena also shared the same sentiments, pointing out that the activities were repetitive.

“I started participating during their physical sessions before the pandemic and I liked it initially but their activities are repetitive. There is no newness at least in the past two years. Most participants and trainers were government servants and they kept waiting for the session to be over,” said Gupta.

“Online sessions were a joke too, how many people even know how to join a Webex session?” said Sharma.


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Happiness survey

One of the department’s mandated tasks is to prepare and publish a survey report on the status of happiness in the state.

In 2019, nearly 80 experts along with department officials brainstormed on parameters that make people in MP happy. A questionnaire was prepared, which comprised nearly 30 questions wherein people had to rate the government on a scale of 1-10 on parameters such as experience on welfare schemes, education, economic conditions etc. A tie-up was announced with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur the same year.

However, the happiness survey got derailed due to the pandemic. And three years since, it has not yet been conducted. The department now plans to hold it this year.

What the critics say

Child rights activist Rakesh Malviya, who has been working with the government on nutrition policies through his NGO Vikas Sanwad, said there isn’t much conversation on the ground pertaining to happiness department programmes.

“We have not come across many who know about these programmes either. The outreach hasn’t reached enough people yet,” said Malviya.

The Congress party, which wanted this department to create communal harmony and to “strengthen the idea of Sarvadharma Sambhav”, also questioned the intentions of the government.

Former minister P.C. Sharma, who was associated with the department during the Congress government, questioned the department’s absence during the pandemic.

“We didn’t see any help coming from these functionaries when people needed it the most during the second wave. We cannot improve the happiness index by conducting these small-scale activities. We need concrete policies on health and employment which will increase the happiness index. I don’t think this department has helped people, the concept is hollow,” Sharma told ThePrint.

Argal, however, denied the criticism, saying they were active on the ground.

According to a former department official, both Congress and BJP governments didn’t pursue the mission “aggressively”. 

“There were sporadic activities and that is all they did since there was no funding. So the vision might be clear politically since the CM is using this plank to reach out to more people and this looks good on paper. But neither government pushed this department which could have been used during the pandemic when volunteers were truly needed,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

(Edited by Amit Upadhyaya)


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