Villages are all alike in India. A visit to a typical village gives a complete picture of the rural life in our country. A typical Indian village is not a model of cleanliness, beauty and comfort. On the other hand, it consists of huts having dark and dingy rooms without any ventilation. Pucca houses are rare. The huts are narrow and littered with rubbish and filth. There is no drainage system and during the rainy sea­son the streets are flooded with water which becomes the breeding ground of mosquitoes.

The village well is a busy place where women folk come with pitchers on their head to fetch water. There is a village pond where urchins swim and the buffaloes wallow. Every village has a potter, carpenter, weaver, blacksmith and gold­smith. Almost every village has a school now and the teacher commands great respect among the village folk. The boys are very much afraid of him, for he never spares the rod.

Life in the village is very hard. Before the day dawns, men arc in the fields with their bullocks. They work in the scorching sun of the summer and the biting cold of the win­ter. The women prepare the meals in the morning and join their men-folk in the fields. The ‘hukka’ is a constant com­panion of the village farmer and his only source of recre­ation. The monotony of life is sometimes broken by mar­riages which are gay occasions for spending lavishly. Now in every village there is a Panchayat which decides the petty quarrels of the villagers and saves them from expensive liti­gation in courts to which they often resorted to in the past and thus ruined themselves. The people are generally simple, religious minded and superstitious.

India lives in villages. She cannot advance if villages lag behind. The Community Projects launched by the Government several years ago aim at changing the face of villages by providing schools, roads, dispensaries, wells, tanks, seeds, implements and other modern amenities. They are bringing about a wide awakening among the village-folk and the day is not far off when an Indian village will not be a picture of poverty, ugliness and ignorance but a unique model of opulence, beauty and enlightenment.