Assessing the Participation of Villagers in a Participatory Rural Appraisal Based Study: An Amrita Live-In-Labs^® Project Case Study

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) is a key methodology in the socially inclusive development of Indian rural communities. Even though there are various organizations and government agencies involved in the ’real’ implementation of PRA for identifying the root causes and solutions of poverty, health issues, societal imbalance, and so on, the actual participation of the beneficiaries in the process is still a question mark. In this paper, we try to analyse the effect of actual participation of the people from the local community in the application of some PRA tools to do surveys and identify the root cause of the economic backwardness, and societal imbalance in a rural village in the state of Maharashtra, India. Most of the similar projects are done by management or social science students/researchers/scientists. In this paper, the analysis is done and presented from an engineer’s perspective. This project is part of the Live-in-Labs<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> project of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham to encourage students to live and interact with society and to learn and solve the community’s problems. In this paper, we try to explain the various levels of complexities faced during the study, with an emphasis on both failed and succeeded steps. We believe this paper supports practitioners and policymakers who are working towards improving the methodologies and approaches involved in PRA to ensure an inclusive and holistic community integrated development in rural India.