Mindset of a poor
Visiting a village in most of the rural India is like visiting another world. Beyond the flamboyant metro culture of big cars and bigger houses, ever growing lust for consumer goods that drags you into a meaningless rat-race of more, more and more for I, me, myself, there lies another India where people live in a here and now situation (not because of the famed duo of Dipankar and Ramesh of PRADAN PAS made them so, but because of their hand to mouth existence). One can plan for future when his or her present is secured. When a person knows that he has only today to live in, he tries to live it fully, up to its last moment, trying to drink the last drop of the elixir of life from the cup of today. We were disgusted initially when we would see a poor man buying commodities (supposedly luxuries- bidi bundles, clothes, ornaments) for every member of his family member the day he gets some cash upon selling his harvest.
“Save it”, we would tell them, “put it in the bank so that you may use it later.”
But for them, there is no later. All that matters is today, life is uncertain. They would like to marry off their daughter, or buy a necklace for their wife rather than investing it anywhere.
“Kal kisne dekha hai, bhaiya”, they would ask me, “aaj haath mein paise hain, aaj maja kar lete hain, kal jab aayega, dekha jaega.”
Visiting a village in most of the rural India is like visiting another world. Beyond the flamboyant metro culture of big cars and bigger houses, ever growing lust for consumer goods that drags you into a meaningless rat-race of more, more and more for I, me, myself, there lies another India where people live in a here and now situation (not because of the famed duo of Dipankar and Ramesh of PRADAN PAS made them so, but because of their hand to mouth existence). One can plan for future when his or her present is secured. When a person knows that he has only today to live in, he tries to live it fully, up to its last moment, trying to drink the last drop of the elixir of life from the cup of today. We were disgusted initially when we would see a poor man buying commodities (supposedly luxuries- bidi bundles, clothes, ornaments) for every member of his family member the day he gets some cash upon selling his harvest.
“Save it”, we would tell them, “put it in the bank so that you may use it later.”
But for them, there is no later. All that matters is today, life is uncertain. They would like to marry off their daughter, or buy a necklace for their wife rather than investing it anywhere.
“Kal kisne dekha hai, bhaiya”, they would ask me, “aaj haath mein paise hain, aaj maja kar lete hain, kal jab aayega, dekha jaega.”
(“Who has seen tomorrow, brother? Today I have money, let me make merry with it. I would worry about tomorrow when it comes”).
Such is their insecurity about the life ahead. People who you find working today are no more the very next day. They die in the harness like the war horses. I can elaborate this by an example. On a day of my regular visits to my favorite village of Kankerkhedi, I reached the home of Hari Singh, one of the PRADAN service providers. He was not at home, but his father was their, doing some carving on a big wooden door frame. Upon my asking him why he was making so much effort on carving on he door and not putting it directly on, he told me that one should leave something different behind, so that upon his death his children and grandchildren should remember him by his works. I left the village that day contemplating about the pearl from him, an elderly man that he was. Next day, when I came again pursuing some work, I found the whole village deserted, only women and children to be seen in the alleys of the village. I asked one of the ladies, who was a member of the Self Help Group that we had initiated there about it. She told me that all of the men folk have gone in the lakdi.
“Lakdi (wood)? What’s that?” - I asked.
“Oh, you don’t know?”- She said- “Hari Singh’s father expired yester night. All the men have gone in his cremation (lakdi).”
“What???”- I exclaimed- “but yesterday he was here, working on the door frame when I met him?”- I said, baffled with this information, the old man’s face and the discussion that we had previous day being replayed in my mind.
The woman displayed a painful smile-“That’s how things are for us, bhaiya. Today you are here, talking to me, tomorrow you would come to find me gone. We are no better than animals.”
On my way back home, I was thinking why is it that even after 55 years of swarajya our people have to consider themselves animals. How can a seemingly ordinary stomachache kill a healthy person in a matter of minutes? I was pained to think how a son can see his father die in a matter of minutes so helplessly and that too not by some accident or some dangerous disease but water borne diseases.
How exactly did the father of Hari Singh die, no one would ever know because no body was bothered to know. After all, what was he? A poor, old man owning a few bighas of land in some unknown village of a less know district of the backward state of Madhya Pradesh. How does his death affect a fattened corporate honcho or a shrewd political fountainhead or, for that matter, a common man on the street of the capital of his country, where a Yamuna of wealth flows after the original Yamuna has been converted to a huge, open drain? There would be no obituary, no media coverage, no national mourning for him, because he was the common man, he was the Janta Janardan.
This was not the only death that I saw. There were others who dies in this strange way. There would be a terrible stomachache, and by the time one would even get on board the Sironj bound bus for diagnosis, he would be dead. I saw at least four such cases in this village where grown up people died, what to talk about the children?
Government’s Reaction
Not that I did not try to do anything. At the very beginning, I had noticed the dearth of the safe drinking water in this area and decided to take this up with the local government hospital. One fine morning when I reach the superintendent and told him the whole situation, he was livid. “Just who the hell are you?”- He frowned at me. I told that I am an NGO worker taking care of the poverty alleviation project in some of the villages there. His next question was- “You mean to say there is an epidemic in this village?”
“No”, I said, “That’s not my job to declare that there is an epidemic. You are a doctor, you should come there, see for yourself and then decide whether it is an epidemic or not. All I am telling you is that there are about 90% villagers suffering with water borne diseases and having loose motions. I am wondering for how long your department has not chlorinated the drinking water well there.”
He called the Village Health Worker and scolded him in front of me. He told him that today it is an NGO person raising voice, tomorrow it would be all over the press and media.
“Do something”, he said, “Lest it becomes an issue for us.” Clearly his concern was not the dying children but negative publicity and subsequent fallouts. Anyways, the well was disinfected by using chlorine after some days, and that’s all we could do.
Unfortunately PRADAN keeps it away from the health related work (something that always bothers me) and so my interest in health was not supported much as they would have been supported had it been a livelihood activity.
A Bucket full of holes
My doubt is how can be the development of a people compartmentalized into livelihoods, health or education? How can we ask a person to form a SHG or do improved agriculture when s/he is dying of diarrhea? How, as a human being, I can turn my head away when I see some issue that is not exactly livelihood. In PRADAN we saw that many a times the poor family had an average annual income of Rs. 12,000 to 15,000 (collected in 2004, that is not a very old data, it may hold true even now!). We were told that even if we were able to increase it by 5,000 an year, it would be a boon to the family. We tried to do this by using all kinds of livelihood and microfinance interventions and achieved it, only to find that one person falling ill in the family, one death, one marriage wiped it out. One year of hard labor, the toil of the family as well as the NGO worker, just vanishes in a jiffy! No matter how hard the family works, it is bound to remain poor if good health is not ensured to them, for the bucket that they are trying to fill is full of holes, from which water flows away the moment it is poured.
Unhealthy body, unstable mind
Bad health affects not just your body, it affects your mind as well. The financial indiscipline that we see in the rural areas (taking loan and not repaying in time, or using it for purposes like marrying off some distant niece) is borne by a strong sense of insecurity in mind- the instability that future represents to these rural peasants. ‘Tomorrow’ is a big question mark for them.
“Kal kisne dekha hai, bhaiya. Aaj haath mein paise hain, aaj maja kar lete hain, kal jab aayega, dekha jaega.”
This is the sense that drives the mind of the poor who are not sure from which quarter of life the next shock will come. Then there is the general callousness that the educated society and government officials display towards them. People are still not allowed to sit in front of the government babu in the tehsildar’s office. The Janta Janardan still squats on the floor along with the dirty rubber slippers of the wealthy money lender. They still run after the bikes of people like me to get themselves enlisted in the poverty alleviation projects.
Reality Bites-A distant Banjara village
Upon reaching Panchmarhi, another border posting of mine, I was surrounded by the villagers. I had gone there to do the village study and so was hiding my real identity of a PRADAN worker, because once they know that I work for the Poverty Alleviation Project, all of them may project themselves to be abjectly poor, in order to get listed. This had happened a number of times earlier, and I was pretty sure this would happen here again. So, I hid behind the half-truth (ardhya satya) and told them that I was there to write a report. An old man (must be in his 80’s) was watching me intently, keeping quite through out the discussion. Finally, when he spoke, everybody fell silent, may be he was one of the village elders.
In a very low but clear voice he started speaking-
Such is their insecurity about the life ahead. People who you find working today are no more the very next day. They die in the harness like the war horses. I can elaborate this by an example. On a day of my regular visits to my favorite village of Kankerkhedi, I reached the home of Hari Singh, one of the PRADAN service providers. He was not at home, but his father was their, doing some carving on a big wooden door frame. Upon my asking him why he was making so much effort on carving on he door and not putting it directly on, he told me that one should leave something different behind, so that upon his death his children and grandchildren should remember him by his works. I left the village that day contemplating about the pearl from him, an elderly man that he was. Next day, when I came again pursuing some work, I found the whole village deserted, only women and children to be seen in the alleys of the village. I asked one of the ladies, who was a member of the Self Help Group that we had initiated there about it. She told me that all of the men folk have gone in the lakdi.
“Lakdi (wood)? What’s that?” - I asked.
“Oh, you don’t know?”- She said- “Hari Singh’s father expired yester night. All the men have gone in his cremation (lakdi).”
“What???”- I exclaimed- “but yesterday he was here, working on the door frame when I met him?”- I said, baffled with this information, the old man’s face and the discussion that we had previous day being replayed in my mind.
The woman displayed a painful smile-“That’s how things are for us, bhaiya. Today you are here, talking to me, tomorrow you would come to find me gone. We are no better than animals.”
On my way back home, I was thinking why is it that even after 55 years of swarajya our people have to consider themselves animals. How can a seemingly ordinary stomachache kill a healthy person in a matter of minutes? I was pained to think how a son can see his father die in a matter of minutes so helplessly and that too not by some accident or some dangerous disease but water borne diseases.
How exactly did the father of Hari Singh die, no one would ever know because no body was bothered to know. After all, what was he? A poor, old man owning a few bighas of land in some unknown village of a less know district of the backward state of Madhya Pradesh. How does his death affect a fattened corporate honcho or a shrewd political fountainhead or, for that matter, a common man on the street of the capital of his country, where a Yamuna of wealth flows after the original Yamuna has been converted to a huge, open drain? There would be no obituary, no media coverage, no national mourning for him, because he was the common man, he was the Janta Janardan.
This was not the only death that I saw. There were others who dies in this strange way. There would be a terrible stomachache, and by the time one would even get on board the Sironj bound bus for diagnosis, he would be dead. I saw at least four such cases in this village where grown up people died, what to talk about the children?
Government’s Reaction
Not that I did not try to do anything. At the very beginning, I had noticed the dearth of the safe drinking water in this area and decided to take this up with the local government hospital. One fine morning when I reach the superintendent and told him the whole situation, he was livid. “Just who the hell are you?”- He frowned at me. I told that I am an NGO worker taking care of the poverty alleviation project in some of the villages there. His next question was- “You mean to say there is an epidemic in this village?”
“No”, I said, “That’s not my job to declare that there is an epidemic. You are a doctor, you should come there, see for yourself and then decide whether it is an epidemic or not. All I am telling you is that there are about 90% villagers suffering with water borne diseases and having loose motions. I am wondering for how long your department has not chlorinated the drinking water well there.”
He called the Village Health Worker and scolded him in front of me. He told him that today it is an NGO person raising voice, tomorrow it would be all over the press and media.
“Do something”, he said, “Lest it becomes an issue for us.” Clearly his concern was not the dying children but negative publicity and subsequent fallouts. Anyways, the well was disinfected by using chlorine after some days, and that’s all we could do.
Unfortunately PRADAN keeps it away from the health related work (something that always bothers me) and so my interest in health was not supported much as they would have been supported had it been a livelihood activity.
A Bucket full of holes
My doubt is how can be the development of a people compartmentalized into livelihoods, health or education? How can we ask a person to form a SHG or do improved agriculture when s/he is dying of diarrhea? How, as a human being, I can turn my head away when I see some issue that is not exactly livelihood. In PRADAN we saw that many a times the poor family had an average annual income of Rs. 12,000 to 15,000 (collected in 2004, that is not a very old data, it may hold true even now!). We were told that even if we were able to increase it by 5,000 an year, it would be a boon to the family. We tried to do this by using all kinds of livelihood and microfinance interventions and achieved it, only to find that one person falling ill in the family, one death, one marriage wiped it out. One year of hard labor, the toil of the family as well as the NGO worker, just vanishes in a jiffy! No matter how hard the family works, it is bound to remain poor if good health is not ensured to them, for the bucket that they are trying to fill is full of holes, from which water flows away the moment it is poured.
Unhealthy body, unstable mind
Bad health affects not just your body, it affects your mind as well. The financial indiscipline that we see in the rural areas (taking loan and not repaying in time, or using it for purposes like marrying off some distant niece) is borne by a strong sense of insecurity in mind- the instability that future represents to these rural peasants. ‘Tomorrow’ is a big question mark for them.
“Kal kisne dekha hai, bhaiya. Aaj haath mein paise hain, aaj maja kar lete hain, kal jab aayega, dekha jaega.”
This is the sense that drives the mind of the poor who are not sure from which quarter of life the next shock will come. Then there is the general callousness that the educated society and government officials display towards them. People are still not allowed to sit in front of the government babu in the tehsildar’s office. The Janta Janardan still squats on the floor along with the dirty rubber slippers of the wealthy money lender. They still run after the bikes of people like me to get themselves enlisted in the poverty alleviation projects.
Reality Bites-A distant Banjara village
Upon reaching Panchmarhi, another border posting of mine, I was surrounded by the villagers. I had gone there to do the village study and so was hiding my real identity of a PRADAN worker, because once they know that I work for the Poverty Alleviation Project, all of them may project themselves to be abjectly poor, in order to get listed. This had happened a number of times earlier, and I was pretty sure this would happen here again. So, I hid behind the half-truth (ardhya satya) and told them that I was there to write a report. An old man (must be in his 80’s) was watching me intently, keeping quite through out the discussion. Finally, when he spoke, everybody fell silent, may be he was one of the village elders.
In a very low but clear voice he started speaking-
“I don’t know who you are, and why you have come here. Good or bad, whatever your intention may be, I am happy. I am happy because after decades somebody has come to this distant village to ask if we still exist. It doesn’t matter if you do something for us or not, but I am happy that you have cared to come to us and are treating us as human beings.”
That day I was moved to my foundation. Here is a part of our country which is happy that somebody is coming to at least headcount them- forget about providing them the basic amenities that we promised ourselves so proudly as declared in the preamble of our constitution decades ago. Just where is the ‘India shining’? Where are all the chest beating jingoists of this country who claim that India is going to be a superpower of sorts in a few years to come?
“We are already an economic superpower”- many of my friends would say, if reminded about these issues- “Problems are there, but why should be not celebrate the successes so far?” –they would shoot back.
Of course we should. We should celebrate the nuclear pact when our compatriots don’t get the safe drinking water. We should dance to celebrate in the pubs and malls when their houses remain shrouded in darkness. We should decorate our houses and fire crackers worth thousands when they don’t have enough oil to cook their food even.
After all, it is not my house that is burning; it’s their hut on fire. I would react when a spark would fly to my palatial verandah! Till then, I would play the flute, as Nero did, when Rome burnt to ashes around him.
Is this what they call- 'Drink thunder'?
That day, there were many firsts in my life. For the first day I reached a village where they had expected me the least. For the first day, my urban pride was humbled by an old nomadic banjara. For the first time, I drank water directly from a seasonal river, like the poor who live in these unknown corners of our so called largest democracy of the world. It was a brownish mix of water, decayed leaves, mosquito larvae, mud and other wastes. Today, I see poverty and wretchedness being discussed in air-conditioned conference rooms of the capital. Whenever a mineral water bottle is placed in front of me, I am reminded of that Banjara community. Those smiling faces, who did not lose their charm in the scorching heat of poverty and backwardness, those open hearts which did not hesitate a second in sharing their two chapattis with a stranger, those hopes that I could see in their twinkling eyes- not at all seen ever after in my life so far.
That reminds me of the famous poet Dushyant Kumar, who once wrote-
“Kahan to tay tha chiragan har ek ghar ke liye
Kahan charag mayassar nahin shahar ke liye…”
(Once we had decided to provide light in every house, but now there is no light for an entire city…)
Swarajya (Self-rule)
Under these circumstances, is it wrong for a village like Mendha in Garhchirolli district of Maharashtra to seal its borders with rest of the world, take the administration in its hands after declaring itself a village republic- and raise the slogan
“Dilli-Bambai humari Sarkar
Humaare gaon mein hum hain Sarkar”
Our government in Delhi (central) and Bombay (state), but in our village, we are the Government!
As a utopian dream, don’t we talk of the empowerment of the communities to the extent that they can make and maintain the rules to govern their lives? Is Mendha not a crescendo of all our community enablement swan songs?
After all, didn't Tilak roared a century ago -
'Swarajya is my birthright, and I shall have it!"
(Based on my experience in Mendha village that I visited during my attachment with North Chandrapur Forest Circle in December 2001)
(Based on my experience in Mendha village that I visited during my attachment with North Chandrapur Forest Circle in December 2001)
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