“What is the name of the Chief Minister”, I asked a group of tribal women in Mahasamund. It was my first field trip to Chhattisgarh and I was a rookie with one year of experience in the development sector. With all the scepticism that new idealists could gather, I felt that women not knowing the name of the Chief Minister of the state would reflect on their agency, and hence would give me a starting point to discuss decentralised governance with them!

“I do not know his name, but ‘chawal waale baba’ is what we call him”. Mahasamund has always been a Congress dominated belt and the response came as a shock to me. For the next couple of hours, I went on to talk of a lot of things, but what dominated the discussion was how the women in the village zealously monitor the fair price shops and how this ‘chawal waale baba’ is doing some good work for them.

Few days back, Dr Raman Singh was about to face a defeat in his constituency of Rajnandgaon from which he has been contesting elections since the early 90s. He somehow managed to scrape through but the government and his party could not be saved. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been reduced to 15 seats in the state and has lost out across all demographies and geographies in the state. But, 15 years is not a small time and Dr Raman Singh has presided over the most significant period of change in the state. So what is his legacy and what is the way ahead for him, politically?

Before the arrival of the Gujarat success story by the fag end of 2014, Chhattisgarh was the state where the issue of development was front and centre in electoral terms. It was a state carved out of Madhya Pradesh to help the tribal and the Scheduled Caste communities and hence, the articulation of development here was also very different. Development in Chhattisgarh in the way Raman Singh articulated meant a turnaround in fortunes and not just a facelift.

As one of the states with the largest tribal population, abject poverty and violent Left wing extremism, Chhattisgarh needed that narrative of transition and Raman Singh was the one who provided it. And this was not the development of mega industries and four-lane highways and metros criss-crossing cities. This was the development of getting people adequate food to eat and putting the first generation of learners in schools and bringing the first pucca roads to a village. It was development from scratch.

If we look at the Chhattisgarh story since the past 15 years, there are two aspects of governance which would stand out as the legacy of Dr Raman Singh.

Social Development Legacy

The biggest success story in Chhattisgarh under Dr Singh was the efficiency of the public distribution system (PDS). Chhattisgarh took an unabashed Left route in approaching food security and increased the PDS coverage to 74 per cent. Moreover, when other states were experiencing major issues of pilferage and looting, the Chhattisgarh government undertook a slew of reforms to address the situation.

The first concern that Raman Singh identified after taking office was that more than 50 per cent of the below poverty line (BPL) population, were unable to access the food grains meant for them. The first reform he brought in was taking away the ownership of PDS shops from private businessmen and handing over control to the local community.

Then came other measures like issuing new ration cards with holograms which weeded out over 3 lakh fake beneficiaries, increased commission and even a seed fund to shop operators for making the business viable, increased monitoring and vigilance including community audits, doorstep delivery of food grains and raids and massive crackdown of corrupt rice millers. Raman Singh without any doubt made PDS the key to his re-election in 2008 and there was no other issue which worked, except ‘chawal’.

The victory of 2008 was on the back of the almost transformational change in the supply chain of the PDS and sealed the tag of ‘chawal waale baba’. The Chhattisgarh success story was so convincing that even some stalwarts in Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) had to use it as a template.

The success of PDS in Chhattisgarh had an expected ripple effect on the nutritional levels in the state. Food scarcity in tribal belts leads to malnutrition and stunting, and Chhattisgarh managed to address this issue thoroughly. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 4 data shows that the percentage of adult women with body mass index (BMI) less than normal has decreased from 43.4 per cent in 2005-06 to 26.7 in 2015-16. It is less than the figures for MP and Jharkhand and almost the same as Odisha, even though it recorded a higher incidence level than all three states in 2005-06.

Another important change has been the decrease in instances of anaemia in infants which has reduced from 71.2 per cent in 2005-06 to 41.6 per cent in 2015-16. It has now reached below the national average, while the states of MP, Jharkhand and Odisha still register more instances of infant anaemia. The final indicator which directly speaks about malnutrition is the incidences of stunting.

The following figure provides an idea of how Chhattisgarh has progressed on addressing stunting and underweight issues in children. The only state which has fared better than Chhattisgarh is Odisha but it also needs to be seen that Chhattisgarh had a much higher base in 2005-06.