Beyond the Margin

Are US and Pak fooling us?

2011-05-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

I am not a foreign policy analyst or an expert in military issues, but what is now being claimed as a stealth raid by the US navy seals to kill Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, bang inside the Pakistani territory, leaves more questions than answers.
That Indian foreign policy and military analysts within the State and in the 24X7 media haven't raised questions regarding the many missing links surrounding the facts of the raid is not only baffling. It is in worrisome.
First: I find it indigestible to accept that the Pakistani defense establishment had no idea of the US raid on a compound that hosted Osama in their sovereign territory - and that too in a town like Abbottabad where the entire Army training is based. Four choppers flew in to carry out the raids; circled around the town for hours, as one of the tweeters put it, and one of them actually crashed near the compound, and no one even knew it? Rubbish. A crashing chopper, in flames, could hardly be kept a secret.
I find it even more of a fiction that four stealth choppers fly in, in the middle of the night, over this compound with no ground directions, right in the heart of Pakistan?
From where did the American stealth helicopters fly? I believe from the nearest base somewhere in Afghanistan.
Is it possible to navigate their way into the territory right in the heart of Pakistan without any ground communication? I believe, from whatever I've read, it isn't.
Indian defense experts - I believe - are taking a closer look at the theories doing the round, and I'm sure they are concerned at the fact that the US and Pakistan are fooling the world with their common lies about this raid. For, if the US and Pakistani establishment are hand in glove, it obviously is a concern for India. It's happening next door.
The US meanwhile has launched more attacks inside Pakistan, and the premier is still on a foreign tour.
Who are the militants getting killed, including Osama? Not a single one is a Pakistani national. And I believe, it is significant. Osama was an arab. Others being neutralised are either Afghans or Arabs. Are any of the militants of Al Qaeda being killed, Pakistani nationals? I see no terrorist born and bred in Pakistan getting killed or neutralised by the US forces. The killings appear selective, and pretty much with the knowledge and complicity of Pakistan. Is it some part of a bigger deal? We shall - and must - know over the next few days or, may be, years.
Osama was sick. Abbottabad is not known to have private hospitals, at least from the information available on the internet. It has a military hospital though. It is virtually impossible that the Pakistani military and establishment had no knowledge of his presence. Even the Pakistani journalists are refusing to accept their establishment's view that they had no idea of Osama's presence. Some of them actually are hinting that Osama might have lived his utility for the shrewd Pakistani military establishment.

"Be prepared for trade-offs"

2011-01-11T00:42:00.000-08:00

Rather than facing the mirage of bringing a third of our country under forest cover, the union minister for environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh, Monday saw the need to shift the public policy mindset on maintaining the quality of forests, in the light of growing conflicts on the common property resources.
“From quantity of the forests, we need to change our focus on its quality,” the minister told a gathering of academics, practitioners, and policy makers,while inaugurating the 13th biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) in Hyderabad. Sustaining quality forests over a certain area of land, he explained, could do the same amount of carbon sequestration than degraded forests scattered over the vast stretches of land. He said it might also reduce the potential conflicts.
The minister’s remarks are significant in the face of growing demand to open up some forest areas for the mining sector. He said the current legal regime will have to be looked into in the context of multiple pressures on the natural and common resources, and developmental and conservation imperatives.
While India argues for equitable access to sustainable living at the climate change talks, we can’t be oblivious to the skewed domestic distribution, the minister said.
The minister also disclosed that come April, the central government would be putting a 2.5% weight in the annual resource allocation as an incentive to the states managing their environment better, in what may bring environment as a subject on the planning and policy agenda. Ramesh was speaking after the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Professor Elinor Ostrom’s plenary address in which she explicitly vouched for the need to free commons from the institutional monoculture and to evolve a diversity of institutional to deal with the complexities of CPR management. She built up on the empirical studies and field data to support the notion that communities might actually manage their commons efficiently and sustainably. “When the subjects in the laboratory experiments made their decisions anonymously with no communication, they tend of over harvest, but face to face communication enables them to increase cooperation,” she said. Resources in good condition, she said, have users with long term interests, who in turn invest in monitoring of resources and building trust among themselves in polycentric approaches.
Collective action theory at the core of the social sciences and policy is the underlying part of Ostrom’s work in the areas of development economics. Access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation, she said, were five identified community rights in the practice.
Ramesh categorically admitted that conventional mindsets and institutional monoculture was a hurdle in management of CPRs such as forests in India. He actually saw four factors in poor implementation of policies and laws in India. “Development dynamics; institutional monoculture; split responsibilities; and old policy mindsets,” he reiterated, stood as hurdles in the way of implementation of law.
More than 700 delegates from all parts of the world and from diverse backgrounds are attending the conference – the first to be held in South East Asia – that would culminate on January 14. The theme is ‘Sustaining Commons: Sustaining our Future’. Within the broad thematic categories, the participants will be deliberating on sub-themes dealing with new and evolving commons: such digital and knowledge.
In the light of increasing conflicts among different stakeholders, the Foundation of Ecological Security (FES), the co-partners of the conference and local hosts, intend to derive pointed recommendations for the 12th plan from this conference. Commons, they expect, could be brought in the planning agenda.
Ramesh said it was time for the country to acknowledge that to sustain a nine percent growth trajectory, there would be an ecological trade off.
“In some cases you can reconcile both: growth and conservation,” he said elaborating on the complex dynamic of development that has led to conflicts over commons. “In a few cases, you can say ‘yes, but there will be conditions’, but there are cases when you have to make a clear choice, and you’ve to say no,” he said. There are occasions where trade-offs are inevitable, he said in the context of increasing conflict between the growth imperatives and conservation urgencies.
Ramesh said the institutional monoculture – and the notion that only the state could manage commons efficiently – need to be done away with. “We need multiplicity of models to manage our CPRs,” he said. That would include of the market driven models that, he said, are still an anathema to many. “CPRs do need regulations, but do they need regulators, who become a part of the problem?” The entire legal, he said, will have to be relooked to deal with the new issues in the changing contexts. Elucidating the issue of river basin management, he said, maintaining a minimum environment flow of rivers amid multiple pressures on water use is becoming a potential conflagration point in public policy debate.
Taking a relook of the current legal regime, he said, had now become necessary.
The minister said the global commons debate, particularly on the climate change, suffers from a total lack of communication between the academics and the climate negotiators. Devising sets of rules to define the equitable access to sustainable development was the biggest challenge before the academic world. “We need a diversity of solutions,” he said, “and a variety of options.”

Supreme Court strictures against Vilasrao a blot on the Govt

2010-12-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court’s strictures against Vilasrao Deshmukh for interfering in the enforcement of a law that regulates private money lending while he was the chief minister of Maharashtra are not only a blot on the DF government in the state, but also a reminder of an unabated exploitation of the peasantry.

The strongly worded verdict that imposes a fine of Rs 10 lakh on the state government also comes as a major embarrassment to an already troubled UPA government, and particularly the Congress party, as Deshmukh is currently a union minister (for heavy industries) in the Manmohan Singh-cabinet.

The case, which highlights a victim peasant’s indomitable grit to take on the powers-that-be despite risk to his life, also brings to fore the political patronage private usurers enjoy, maiming the debt-trapped peasantry. The development is bound to raise a storm in the ongoing winter session of the legislature in Nagpur, though no immediate reaction was forthcoming on Tuesday from the Sena-BJP opposition.

It all began in 2006 with a letter that Shangdhar Singh Chavan, a 54 year-old victim peasant, wrote to the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court on behalf of the 55 debt-ridden farmers.

The beleaguered farmers said in the letter that neither the Buldana Superintendent of Police nor the collector was paying any heed to their complaints against Gulabchand Sananda, the usurer father of the Congress MLA from Khamgaon (Buldana district), Dilip Sananda. The farmers had alleged in their complaint that the Sanandas had usurped their farmland against the money they borrowed.

The high court suo motto converted the farmer’s letter into a writ petition. In March 2009, delivering its verdict, the high court flayed the then chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, for “the gross abuse of power” and directed the state government to pay Rs 25,000 to the petitioners as the cost of petition.

Deshmukh's then personal secretary had asked the police not to register a FIR on the complaint of the farmers, an instruction that got recorded in the police diary. Subsequently, he had instructed the district collector that he’d personally look into the matter before any action was taken against the Sanandas.

Chavan’s letter to the high court actually epitomized hundreds of farmers’ grievances against the private usurers across the crisis-ridden Vidarbha, particularly the ones indebted to the Sanandas. The Congress MLA’s family is alleged to be big moneylenders in Khamgaon, with a reign of terror in the region.

Elated by the SC verdict Chavan told DNA from Khamgaon over telephone, the government must help complainant-farmers get back the land from the clutches of the Sanandas. He said he lost 14-and-a-half acres of land in his native village Hingnakadegaon, near Khamgaon, to the Sanandas against the loans he took from them in 1993 and subsequently in 1995. He’s managed to keep three acres in his possession.

While the government reckons it needs to bring in stringent laws to reign in the private money lenders the amendment to the existing legislation has been pending. The government essentially wants to bring in 12 rules to monitor the private usury violating the laws and give relief to the trapped peasants. There are stricter punitive clauses, the draft Bill that has been referred to a joint select committee suggests.

The number of farmers who sought recourse to private lenders despite the loan waiver package rose to 574,046 (2008-09) in Maharashtra compared to 423,213, the previous year.

“It’s a political conspiracy against me,” a defiant Dilip Sananda told reporters in Khamgaon. “There is no mention of my name in the police records, and there was never any pressure from me or the then CM,” he maintained. He refused to comment on the Supreme Court verdict, saying “I am yet to read it.”

“The chief minister had no business to interfere in the functioning of the 1946 Act to regulate money lending in the state,” the Supreme Court said while dismissing the Maharashtra government's appeal challenging the Bombay High Court order and enhancing the cost of petition to Rs 10 lakh.

“This is historic decision,” Kishor Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a farmers’ movement, said in a statement, urging the prime minister to sack Vilasrao and take legal action against the legislator.

The 1K-crore aid is peanuts

2010-12-06T00:54:00.000-08:00

Nagpur, December 5:

There are many ways to read into any government bonanza.

Look, for instance, at the thousand crore aid that the Maharashtra government announced on Saturday for farmers, hit by the untimely rains.

Plain arithmetic shows that the aid would come to roughly Rs 20,000 a hectare, since the preliminary estimates are of losses over 5.4 lakh hectares.

Weigh it with past figures, and one thinks the government has really been more liberal in helping the peasants than the previous years. As the new chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, and his deputy, Ajit Pawar, put it: The compensation has been increased three-fold over the average assistance of Rs 350 crore the government has been giving every year to the losses-torn farmers of the state since 2004.

But when demystified, the huge amount looks more of a pain than relief to the peasants, whose losses this year stand anywhere around Rs 10,000 crore.

Given this year’s phenomenal increase in the production cost, particularly for the rain-dependent farms of the state, the loss of harvest due to an extended 60-day post-monsoon period comes as a rude shock, since the peasant’s farming risks have risen manifold with cash crops, price volatility, and natural calamities.

So how do the Rs 1000 crore get distributed?

The amount includes of the burden of interest on grape growers’ loans that the government has decided to bear for the next two years. This, when desegregated, will include of three components, top officials say: this year’s losses, interests on commercial loans and the loans taken under the National Horticulture Mission.

Together it amounts to about Rs 250 crore, and since the interest waiver is for two years, the benefit to the grape growers in Nashik and Pune would eat into almost half the package amount. The government has made it clear that it would bear the entire interest burden (without upper limit or land size restriction) so that the grape growers, whose losses are unprecedented, rebuild their vineyards.

The losses borne by other traditional agriculture crops: paddy, soybeans, pulses, cotton, and sugarcane, would get compensated from the remaining amount, and within the ambit of the existing norms: that is compensation up to two hectares, unless the government decides to treat 2010 as a special case. In any case each of the beneficiaries, reliable sources say, won’t get more than Rs 5000, or Rs 1000 per acre. The details would be anyway available by December 14-15.

That, for the kind of losses paddy, soybean, sugarcane and cotton farmers have borne this year, is peanuts, according to the agriculture experts and peasants.
The other promise of restoration of power supply to agriculture pumps favuors the irrigated farms, and ignores majority rain-dependent peasants.

More tragic is the flaw the government continues to persist with since 1997 in its policy to compensate the peasants for losses due to nature’s vagaries.

The Panchanamas, or the spot verification, is intended to compensate individuals and not the entire village. Which is strange. If untimely rains cause losses on one field in a village, how can other fields be left untouched by their impact!

The 5.4 lakh hectare agriculture land where crop losses are more than 50 per cent would be eligible for the compensation doles. This area is scattered over 33 districts. On the ground, the actual acre of farmland wrecked by untimely rains is no short of a million hectares. May be more.

Who will the Rs 1K crore provide relief to and in what way is therefore a million dollar question.

Rumblings after Ashok-Parva

2010-11-18T23:28:00.000-08:00

By Jaideep Hardikar

The ‘Ashok Parva’ is over. Its aftershocks aren’t.

Here’s another trouble brewing up for the axed chief minister Ashok Chavan, and this one might actually be worse than the Adarsh society scam that saw him lose his throne.

While the Prithviraj Chavan cabinet is likely to take oath, the former CM would on Friday be defending his 2009 election to the legislative assembly when the Election Commission of India (EC) holds the next and what is likely to be the final hearing of a petition that seeks his disqualification for allegedly fudging his poll expenses, including the unaccounted spending on what has come to be known as paid news.

The Ex-CM is defending a notice served on him earlier this year by the EC to explain why he should not be disqualified under the relevant sections of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, this – after his rival Madhav Kinhalar petitioned the EC following a series of reports that embroiled Chavhan in the paid news controversy. More than a dozen newspapers, some of them leading ones in the state, had in the run up to the polls published several pages in Chavan’s praise. The petitioner’s argument has been that one, the published content (dozens of pages virtually praising Chavhan) qualifies as “paid news” and, if accounted for, they would have cost crores of rupees breaching the Rs 10 lakh poll expenditure limit. In his official submission to the retuning officer of his Bhokar constituency, Nanded, Chavhan showed his expenditure to be Rs 7 lakh on his entire campaign, and a mere Rs 5,379 on newspaper advertisements.

That included of Rs 4400 he spent on the rally where Bollywood star Salman Khan was an attraction. And a meager Rs 200 on the pandal, Rs 1000 on setting up of the stage, Rs 40 for the cloth to cover it, and Rs 200 on the sofa-rentals. The rent of the meeting venue, added to the expenditure sheet later: Rs 500.

Kinhalkar holds that the very fact that EC sent notices to Chavan means that it is convinced that there’s prima facie a case against him and that there’s some violation. In his submissions before the EC, Chavan has denied any wrongdoing. Senior Congress leader, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, is said to be his counsel.

The BJP’s Kirit Somaiyya, who is intervener/petitioner on the issue, would also get an hour to plead his point of view before the EC, through his counsel and Rajya Sabha member, Ram Jethmalani.

The voluminous material evidence and other advertisements that were not accounted for in Chavhan’s election expenditure statement now form part of the EC hearings on the complaint.

The complaint against Chavhan and successive hearings over it hold significance, given that the EC, keen to clean up the malaise of paid news, has now set up a special cell, just before the Bihar assembly polls, to generally keep tab on paid news that favour some candidates and black out others in elections. The EC, sources in the know said, has this year issued circulars describing what according to it would qualify as paid news – content that is paid for but published under the garb of news.

In the previous hearing on November 12, the petitioner completed his arguments. The EC set November 19 as the date for next hearing, when Chavhan would get to explain his side of the story.

Dancing to the Official Tune

2010-11-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

Pendhri, Gadchiroli:

The shadow of gun was inescapable, the contrast sharp.

As a motley group of adivasis danced to the enigmatic rhythm of the traditional ‘Rela’ drum-beat in the heat and dust, Pendhri village felt the tension and unease.

Tens of eyes stared at each other, as the armed troops in the olive green fatigues manned every nook and corner of this small village on Thursday, 75 km from the district headquarters of Gadchiroli in the thickly forested tribal hinterland, about 250 km away from the bustling urban trappings of Nagpur.

But when the police are holding a Jan-Jagaran Melawa, or the public awareness rally, in the strong Maoist-reigned area, the contrast is only natural if somewhat ironic.

This rally, the police said, was held against the backdrop of a strong Maoist threat. Only days ahead of the event, the armed rebels had threatened to foil it, warning the tribal villagers to desist from going to the venue. But as the crowds poured in, either under the police duress or on their own volition, officials smiled with a sense of relief. Holding it looked like a statement. What did it achieve, hardly mattered.

Originally designed to be the police propaganda and later converted into all-department information fair for the villagers, the ‘Jan-Jagaran Mewalas’ in naxal-prone Gadchiroli are resuming after a long lull.

The previous one was held in the month of March in hinterland of Laheri, where Maoists had killed 19 policemen in October, last. But the police said that one was a much-subdued event.

“Idea is to reach out to the people,” district superintendent of police S Veeresh Prabhu said. “It’s like breaking the ice with the people, and saying we are here for you.”

Several stalls put up by the various government departments meant that the district administration got a chance to meet the tribal people they are supposed to serve.

The stalls displayed information in Marathi, the volunteers explained the government schemes to the visitors, but the belying message was: shun supporting the Maoists if you want progress in your area. The stall that drew most attention was once where the police had on display the names and pictures of the top Maoist leaders and the list of violent incidents in the district over the past decade.

It’s an area where people hardly ever speak for fear of retribution, said an intelligence officer. “There is obviously some pressure from the police to attend the rally,” he said. “But it is for their good.”

Maoists don’t believe it. They describe the Jan-Jagran rallies as a “propaganda” ploy against them.

The state government though has persisted with the rallies as a means to hold dialogue with the people, in the absence of any political process. “We know it won’t yield immediate results,” said an officer, “but it is important that we engage with the people and reach the benefits of the government programmes.”

Gadchiroli Zilla Parishad CEO Amit Saini told the gathering: “Unless you participate in the Gram Sabha, how will you know where and how the government funds are being spent by your representatives.” He asked the villagers to ask their panchayat representatives how they were spending the village funds.

The rally also provides a rare opportunity to the villagers to get their work done on the spot: whether it is related to the revenue or agriculture or tribal welfare department.

An aging Chamaru Bai Atla came from an interior village to apply for the Sanjay Gandhi Niradhar Yojana, seeking the old age pension at Pendhri rally. Many others quietly glanced through the schemes offered by the agriculture, animal husbandry, tribal welfare or health departments.

Holding a Jan-Jagaran Melawa in the Maoist territory isn’t easy though.

“We postponed the event twice last month due to the Maoist threat,” the SP said. “It took us some time to re-plan it.” For a month, he said, his men undertook the area domination exercises to keep the rebels at bay and convince the villagers to attend the rally. On Thursday, tens of armed commandoes and CRPF jawans guarded the road that led to Pendhri through the thickly forested belt of Chatgaon.

Yet, the outcome may not always be as desired.

“It’s hard not only to convince people to come to the fair since they fear retribution from the Maoists,” said a police officer on the condition of anonymity, “but also the administration and other offices.”

Among the most backward districts in the country, Gadchiroli is also among the lowest in the human development index, with high infant mortality and hunger. It’s also a district where both the police and the government officials refuse to serve. Many a post lie vacant in the police and other departments.

The district police say they look to hold such rallies regularly now – at least once every two months. “This will allow the district administration to have a dialogue with the people living cut off from the world in the interior,” Prabhu said.

Pendhri was closed for all other activities though. The weekly market was shut for the afternoon, shops closed, and the armed troops kept an eye on incomers. As the poor adivasis poured in at the venue, been forced, prodded, or coerced by the police, the day long rally served one purpose: That a strong Maoist threat did not deter them to hold the event, seen as an important government initiative.

Despite a stern warning from the Maoists, the turnout was good, given that the fair coincided with the weekly market where villagers from the neigbouring 40-odd hamlets come to buy their groceries. It provides them with a reason to come to the rally; otherwise they face the wrath of the naxalites, one officer said.

Cultural dances, a discourse by Nilkanth Maharaj on the government schemes and the development issues, and a group skit on the Maoist-problem, marked the event.

What do the tribals gain out of such an exercise? As a tribal youth, Anil Usendi, of the neighbouring village put it diplomatically: “Those who can make a sense of it will know. It really depends on the individual.”

Farm widows protest Obama's visit

2010-11-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

On the eve of US President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated three-day visit to India, in a non-descript village of Vidarbha’s cotton bowl, farm widows on Friday staged a quiet candle light protest, saying that the American agriculture policies and huge subsidies were among the main reasons for their grave conditions.
Coinciding with the occasion of Laxmi Puja during the festivities of Diwali, the symbolic protest of the widows held under the aegis of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti at village Hiwra Barsa in south Yavatmal, sought to draw Obama’s attention to the plight of farmers, who, they said, bore the brunt of huge US farm subsidies.
“We do not want to spoil Obama’s visit or hurt the government’s feelings,” the VJAS convenor Kishor Tiwari said in a statement. “But when our government talks agriculture with Obama, the farmers and their families who face the outcome of their policies should not be lost sight of.” The US subsidies, he said, are killing the farmers in India.
Reports are that high on Obama’s agenda is the demand for India to open up the FDI in retail and food processing, push for the GM seeds’ adoption, reinvigorate the Indo-US knowledge initiative started in 2006 during the former president George Bush’ visit, open the market access further to the US agribusiness corporations through further cuts in the import tariffs on commodities, and push for settlement of WTO talks by the next year.
A farm widow from the village, Babytai Bais, lit a candle and led a collective prayer that was attended by the widows of the farmers who took their own lives in the region. India has seen more than 200,000 farmers’ suicides between 1997 and 2008. Maharashtra saw over 40,000 farmers’ suicides during that period, with Vidarbha being the worst hit.
In roughly the same period between 1995 and 2009, the US government paid a quarter of a trillion dollars or a staggering Rs1250000 crore in farm subsidies to its farmers.
According to the report on US federal subsidy published earlier this year by the Washington-based research organization, the Environment Working Group (EWG), the American tax payers shelled out $245.2 billion in farm subsidies during 1995-2009, which works out to an average of $15 billion or Rs75000 crore per year.

Fever, fear, plague Amravati--II

2010-09-27T00:15:00.001-07:00

Fifty-year-old Nirmala Pawar is fatigued, anemic, and tired of sickness over the last fortnight. “For a week,” she says, “I am unable to work on farms.” Which in turn means her husband has to work extra or hire a hand for Rs 120 daily, given this year’s un-abating rains. “For three months, it’s been work, work and work.”

In Surali village of Amravati’s Warud tehsil, Nirmalabai is taking a typhoid dose intra-venous at a private clinic run in his home by Dr Rajesh Fate. Alongside is a 60-year-old Ramkisan Kadu, who, like her, looks tired, and wrought in tension.

“It’s a double blow,” Kadu, a farmer from the neighbouring Kurali village with suspected typhoid, says. Farm expenses shot up three fold this year. Now come the health expenses. He says the families like him are mortgaging gold and silver to buy health care. He has done it. “I am old, but can’ stop working,” he says.

By the evening, both of them will return home, to come here the next morning to take another dose of medicines.

“What to do!” he doctor says. “There is no room at the rural hospital at Warud.”
The 30-bed hospital in the tehsil town is overflowing with patients; waiting list is growing with every passing day; and the daily OPD (out patient department) has swollen to 500. Private hospitals in this small town are choc a bloc with patients.

Rural Amravati, the home district of President Pratibha Patil, is exploding with a deadly combination of viral infections and influenza. Rains have taken a break, but humid weather has unleashed a wave of health exigencies unseen before. At least 45 patients from a cluster of 15 villages in the orange county of Warud have died in a month, even as the rural hospital and the primary health centers lacked medicines.

Now, after the damage is done, the health machinery has woken up.

At least ten of these deaths were due to swine flu, health officials say. In Warud, a separate 10-bed ward has been set for the suspected swine flu (H1N1) patients. As reported by DNA earlier, medicine paucity only aggravated the problem – a fact admitted by health minister Suresh Shetty on his visit here last Saturday. On the night before his visit, Warud rural hospital got two trucks load of medicines, enough to see through the next several months, when infections will have died.

Tens of patients queue up for medicines at the rural hospital’s pharmacy. Some of them are waiting to be admitted, but there’s no space.

But why small infections are proving fatal? The health machinery is still studying the cases and the pattern of flu. Rural doctors say poor nutrition and a declining immunity is turning peasants and labourers vulnerable to viral fever.

“Most patients have poor nutrition standards,” says Dr Poddar. “Viral fever can’t be so deadly, but if the patients’ immune system is weak it could become fatal.” This year, he says, many of those who fell sick worked in double shifts. Demand for farm hands spiraled with pest and weed infestations due to incessant rains.

What has foxed the health machinery is that all 45 deaths are of adults. Children along with pregnant women are among the risk groups.

Neither the government hospitals nor the private ones record patients’ weight, a key to calculate the body mass index that could give significant insight into their nutrition standards. But as Dr Poddar suggests rural adults are eating lesser.

In Surali, Dr Fate agrees. “I see a constant decline in nutrition standards among the villagers, particularly women,” he says. “I have never seen such an outbreak in this part in the 20 years of my practice,” he says. “Most patients come late to us,” he says. They’ll try home remedies; then take analgesics, and when nothing works, come to them, he says. “Most of them pay no heed to their fever because their farms need more attention.” Like Nirmalabai, who says, she had fever for a fortnight, but she had no time to see a doctor, until she collapsed two days ago.

Fever, fear, plague Amravati

2010-09-27T00:14:00.000-07:00

September 17:

An outbreak of viral fever, including the swine flu, has claimed in a month about 35 lives at Warud, an orange producing belt hundred km from here in Amravati district.

Seven of these deaths have occurred in 24 hours, rattling the sluggish rural health system grappling with a heavy rush of patients and acute medicine shortage rooted in recent policy changes.

At least eight deaths, health officials confirm, are due to Type A-H1N1 virus or swine flu, which the World Health Organization (WHO) says is in its post-pandemic period. Significantly most of the deceased are adults.

“There is always a brisk flow of patients during this season,” Dr Pramod Poddar, who heads the Warud rural hospital, said. “But this year due to a combination of factors, the mortality has shot up.”

The 30-bed rural hospital is thrown out of gear, with a sudden increase in its Out Patient Department. “We are operating a daily OPD of 400-500 patients,” Dr Poddar said. The scene at the private clinics is no different. Late diagnosis in some cases, where patients came late to the hospital in the advance stage of fever with adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), resulted in some deaths, he said.

Heavy rains this year have triggered outbreaks of viral fever and water-borne illnesses across Vidarbha. More than 25 patients admitted from various parts of the central India, including neighbouring districts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the government medical college and hospital (GMCH) at Nagpur have died of swine flu since the beginning of monsoon, authorities said. But Warud is the latest hotspot.

The outbreak of viral fever is compounded by a severe paucity of medicines, local MLA Dr Anil Bonde, an MD in Medicine himself, said. “The situation was avoidable,” he said.

The medicine crunch reported at the rural hospitals and primary health centers in at least 14 districts in Maharashtra has arisen out of the changes in drug purchase rules earlier this year.

The government terminated its earlier decentralized purchase policy citing corruption, but did not place orders for procurement of the essential drugs in the past four months, pushing the PHCs and rural hospitals into a state of coma.

“The rural hospital did not have even Paracetamol (the commonly available anti-pyretic analgesic,” Dr Bonde said. “We had to provide all the essential drugs from the funds we raised,” he said.

Officials said they had been begging for medicine supply in view of the steady increase in the number of patients this year particularly due to heavy rains. “In some cases, paucity of medicines was fatal.”

The health minister, Suresh Shetty, had reportedly instructed the chief surgeon of Amravati to go for local procurement of medicines. The chief surgeon denies having any written orders for local purchase. The district collector was instructed to release Rs 20 lakh from the district plan for the health exigency. But sources in the know at Amravati said it took him a month to get the technical clearance.

Even as the rural patients continued to pour in, the union of Warud journalists ran a campaign to raise collections and self-contributed to that fund. A few days ago, the district guardian minister Rajendra Darda, who holds the industries portfolio in the Ashok Chavan-cabinet, visited Warud and promised help but the structural problems have not yet been fixed, health authorities said.

The medicines to the rural hospital are being bought from the Rs 3.5 lakh collected from the people of Warud and public representatives, local MLA, Dr Anil Bonde, said. An MD in medicine himself, Dr Bonde said the fund is also supporting the ambulance service.

Birth of a new American farmer

2010-08-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

(Last year, I wrote this story at the end of my six months of Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship program during which I worked at the Sun Sentinel newspaper in South Florida. The piece remains unpublished, but I thought it makes a good blog post. For, a year on, that trend is fast catching up with a lot of urban Americans, who are re-discovering their roots in the soil)

Grow nothing that you can’t eat.
Andre and Sharon Fletcher last year learned their first basic lesson in farming, when their ornamental fish business tanked with economy. “We switched to edible fish,” said the Jamaican-born couple in rural Homestead area of South Florida. “It worked.”
The couple, who took to fish farming barely three years ago without any background or knowledge, discovered Tilapias had a big market right in their neighborhoods. Soon the revenues picked up. There was no looking back.
Self-learning though was fraught with problems and losses.
Once, they over-medicated fish in the tank and saw it die one by one. “It was not a good sight,” said Andre, tall, well-built former U.S. Navy employee.
Until three years ago, Andre, 51, and Sharon, 46, were typical urban Americans. They knew only one thing about fish. “It tasted great.”
Then, as the economy nosedived his small construction business hit rock bottom. And she got laid off last year after working 21 years with a cruise line company.
The two-acre farm that also houses their home helped them overcome recession worries and pay off debts.
Today, Andre and Sharon can pretty much educate aspiring fish farmers. On their small fish farm – their primary occupation today – they are scripting a success story.
The Fletchers are South Florida’s emerging neo-farmers, part of a U.S.-wide movement that shows urban Americans – cutting across all ages, professions and strata – are falling back on the world’s oldest vocation: farming.
More than 300 new small farms started operation in Homestead between 2002 and 2007 agriculture census, said David Paynes, county extension director with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences (UF-IFAS). “They come from diverse professional background, and are the first-time farmers,” he said.
More than 60 per cent of the 300-plus respondents in the first ever survey of small farms in Florida were first-generation farmers, said Bob Hochmuth, small farms coordinator with IFAS and someone who’s followed the sector for six years.
Take for instance, Hani Khouri, a 55-year-old Lebanese American. An MBA in international business with a rich professional experience, he switched to goat farming five years ago and is member of an organic farmers’ group.
Every weekend, Khouri could be seen at the Homestead farmers market selling goat-cheese. “I am,” he said, “also a certified organic cook.”
Take another, Darrin and Jodi Swank, a couple in its early forties, who took to farming six years ago and run a successful commercial operation in South Florida. “I never saw myself doing this,” said Jodi, who gave up her career as a travel consultant to join her husband’s dream of farming hydroponically – in a shade-net shade, without soil.
Tens of thousands of young and middle-aged urban Americans want to farm and spend rest of their lives in typical rural setting.
“We,” said Andre, “wanted to reconnect with our roots.”
A vast majority of people are going back to farms as a hobby or lifestyle, Hochmuth said. “But at least a third of them are in with a serious commitment.”
One of their major problems is training. With farm extension services in peril like that in India and university research being taken over by food corporate, the new farmers are finding it hard to self-train themselves in the vocation that demands some skills.
So in some states, like Iowa in mid-west, a new trend is unfolding: it’s called farm matchmaking. A young enthusiast is tied up with ageing traditional farmer in a way that the former helps the latter in farming in return for hands-on training.
This is farm matchmaking, a down payment on the future of rural America.
The idea is being tried as farmers are getting older and working longer: The average age rose to 57 (from 55) and the ranks of the 75-and-up set increased by 20 percent from 2002 to 2007; the number of farmers, younger than 25, dropped by a third.
With problems at both ends, the matchmaking program pairs the two generations. Aspiring young farmers then don’t have to go into deep debt to launch their farm careers and can hook up with a farmer in his 50s, 60s, or 70s.
Lawyers, factory workers, insurance adjusters, even accountants and dentists have applied to a special Iowa program that tries to link aspiring farmers with seasoned landowners looking to retire. The young aspirants, mostly in their 20s and 30s, all have their reasons: a love of the outdoors, a yearning for independence or fond memories of riding a tractor with a grandfather long ago. Recession too is playing a part.
Contrast this with Indian scenario: The past two decades have seen a massive exodus of farmers from agriculture as rural economy suffered a neglect. A biting agrarian crisis has pushed thousands of farmers to the brink of penury and even suicide.
Rural and agriculture employment rate in India, studies show, is decelerating. More than 50 per cent farmers, a National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) survey in 2006-07 showed, wanted to give up farming if they had an option.
The new small American farmer stands a wealthy paradox to India’s distraught small and marginal farmers. However, within the context of American farming, the policies are heavily against the small farm operations.
“Stiff regulatory climate drive us out of the game,” said Margie Pikarsky, who heads a loose cooperative of organic farmers in Homestead. “We want the government to change some of the regulatory climate.” Consumers too want that.
India is following American model – high-cost, high-energy intensive and mechanized farming. Here, things are beginning to reverse for a low-cost sustainable model.
“It’s happening one person at a time,” according to John Ikerd, author of ‘Sustainable Capitalism’ and Professor Emeritus, Agricultural Economics, University of Missouri.
“Our industrial and corporate agriculture is energy-intensive, heavily subsidized and highly unsustainable,” said Ikerd, a leading expert. “This model is not to be emulated”.
Monopoly of seed, farms and food markets is fundamentally flawed, he said. “It will have to change.” The pace of change will be slow. “But new farmers, many of whom are women, will bring about this change over the next three to four decades,” Ikerd said.
America has a little over 2.2 million farms – a fraction of India’s farms and dependent population. About 125,000 farms in big acreages control 80 percent of sales value, while the remaining small and mid-size operations together account for 20 percent sales.
The 2007 Agriculture census found a 4 per cent rise in the number of farms in America, first time since the World War II. That’s because the definition of farms includes of any venture that sells produce worth $1000. The census shows a rise in the small backyard farm operations and concentration of large and corporate farms. Actually, more than 45,000 mid-sized family farms (an average 400 acres) perished between 2002 and 2007.
Yet new very, very small farms were born in the same period – in significant numbers. A good one third of them are women operators or owners.
The face of a new farmer – better educated, net-savvy, enterprising and innovative – is beginning to surface all over the United States to the extent that there is a general acknowledgement of this trend even at the federal level.
“Small farms are bouncing back,” said an emphatic Florida agriculture commissioner Charles Bronson at the inaugural Florida small farms and enterprises conference in August. “Small operations are going to importance once again.”
The new farms are building alliances – among themselves, directly with consumers or restaurants and hotels. They are demanding changes in regulatory climate.
“The current game is heavily lopsided in favour of big corporations – subsidies, market, seeds, inputs, government support, and processing rules, everything,” said Gabrielle Marewski, owner of a five-acre certified organic farm in South Florida. “Together we can seek some changes at local, state and federal level,” she said.
Policies, said Ikerd, will have to change eventually in favour of sustainable farming. “It has a bearing on the health of people,” he said. “We have to change.”
Ikerd said these new farms will “re-invigorate our local food system”. “In 2050, today’s time will seem like a historic period that witnessed historic processes.”
“You will see more of such farms popping up,” said Andre, who’s adding lobsters and a couple of other fish varieties to his product range. “People in his country now want to eat fresh food and not something that is transported from miles away.”
His customers drive miles to pick their weekly quota of fresh fish. Every month, Andre cleans his fish tanks to keep the fish happy, and growing.
The fish farm is really a chain of small and big circular tanks, with fresh water being pumped through the pipes round the clock. He’s switching to solar power to operate his farm to save on the energy costs. The U.S. government has recently introduced a program that supports small farms to make transition to renewable energy.
“All I do is to keep the fish alive and then they keep us alive,” said Andre, cleaning a fish tank he just emptied.” It’s a lot of work, he said, but also a lot of fun.

Sowing the seeds of change via S-M-S

2010-08-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

By Jaideep Hardikar

It is 8 am and on a cloudy day in June Sunita Bhajipale is anxiously awaiting a message on her cell phone -- quite unusual for a female farmer in village Jhilmili in Vidarbha’s Gondia district. As the ringtone on her handset buzzes, Mrs Bhajipale smiles, and checks the message. “Not a good time to start sowing yet.”

The s-m-s is today’s ‘weather advisory’ from Reuters Market light (RML), a professional content service for farmers from the Thomson Reuters group. “RML is my friend,” she says, as she informs her husband that it was not the right time for sowing. She encodes the message: 95% chance of rains, 2 mm rain. It might rain today, she explains, but not enough to commence sowing. “Let’s wait for two days.”

Among the progressive big farmers, the Bhajipales are pool in their entire family land – 100 acres all put together among several brothers and cousins – to introduce new cost-effective farming techniques and new crops – from grains to vegetables to fruits. RML, they say, has augmented their income.

Four text messages a day at an annual subscription of Rs 850, Mrs Bhajipale says, is not bad. “We get all information about weather, crop, commodity prices at different markets, and future projections.” In one year that the Bhajipales have subscribed to the RML, the daily text messages, she says, have helped jack up their profits by at least a lakh rupees. “Until last year, we sold our bananas to traders at Bhandara or Gondia at a price they quoted; now we show them RML message, if they quote less,” she says. “It helps us in making considered decisions,” she says. “Like: should we sell our produce today; or wait.”

Welcome to the ICT-enabled farming – where a complex web of activities are revolutionizing on the one hand, the way content is generated, tailor-made, and disseminated, and on the other, the way peasants use this information to do smart farming, and make considered choices: which crop to sow; when to sell the produce, and where to sell it. “Information,” Mrs Bhajipale says, “gives us an edge and confidence.”

RML – an idea born in Stanford, California, US; incubated in London; and tested in Vidarbha – is making a silent but deeper penetration among peasants in India’s vast rural landscape. From a couple of thousand subscribers who received it free during the test-run in 2007, RML today reaches 250,000 peasants in 13 states, signaling a staggering growth driven by greater rural consumer interest. Also factor this: A farmer who subscribes to RML on his cell-phone invariably shares the information with his fellow-villagers.

“What we do is manage the risks at one level and try to maximize farmers’ gains at another,” says RML vice president (operations) Ranjit Pawar. “We give them information and leave the decisions to them.”

RML’s USP: It’s affordable; easily accessible, and customized for the needs of an individual farmer. If you choose to get information on soybeans and cotton, two major globally-traded crops of Vidarbha, you’ll get it. At any stage, if you intend to change your choices, you could, by dialing a toll-free number.

“When the idea got coined, we said, we now have the device that makes it possible, workable,” the RML managing director, Amit Mehra, says. “It only had to be affordable and accessible for farmers.”

It is simple, and user-driven. All that you do is dial, 18002708090, a toll free number to enquire about RML. Buy a scratch card available at retail shops and Krishi Gramin Bank branches, and in a couple of simple steps activate the service. What makes RML spread fast is it can be accessed from any handset and mobile operator. No language barrier too; one can choose to get messages in regional language.

Conceived at Stanford in the Reuters Digital Vision program by Mans Olof-Oars, a Reuters’ employee, the idea got selected for the Reuters Innovation Program, and backed by funds.

When the idea originated, Mans had emerging markets in sight, Mehra says. India – where two out of every three new mobile subscribers came from rural India – emerged a natural choice.

For, the country’s mobile telephony was booming and economy was expanding at a rapid pace, RML Vice President (Operations) Ranjit Pawar says. Plus, India has 150 million farming households, largest in the world. To top it all, Bangalore is the hub of the Reuters global data operations that the project think tank thought would naturally aid the project in accessing technology and tackling the initial hiccups.

The Reuters innovation foundation formed a team that looked at the potential test field. Maharashtra, Vidarbha in particular, emerged as a choice, driven by several factors: a significant farming population; deeper rural penetration of mobile; marketable surplus of commodities; and internal assessment.

The first year (2006), Pawar says, went into a lot of field research and consumer feedback. “We engaged research agencies to know the top-most information needs of the Indian farmers,” he says.

The research assumptions were obvious: That there was an information asymmetry; farmers did not get timely crop and weather advisories; and the information about schemes and government programs was hardly easily accessible. When consumer surveys were analysed, the assumptions stood vindicated.

Why Mrs Bhajipale subscribed to the service when she first heard of it at a farmers’ convention in the district, is, as she puts it, “I needed this information.” Her need, in essence, is what creates the RML’s business opportunity. This one’s a new segment of customers; and new area for content generation.

In highly volatile global markets, getting accurate market intelligence and a picture of futures trend is crucial to farmers, who had no access to such specific information, says RML editorial head Sunil Tambe.

The RML subscribers benefited immensely last year, when markets were bearish, in contrast to the long term experience. “Our analysis showed that soybean prices would collapse later, because of the bumper crop in Agrentina and South Africa, when usually the soya prices start to climb at a later stage. The RML subscribers told us they sold the crop early and averted the losses. In cotton, our advisories suggested a rising trend in global prices at a later stage, so the farmers decided to take long position with cotton.”

“Content has evolved and been shaped by the subscribers over the time,” Tambe says. “For instance, we equip farmers with market intelligence, and prices of different markets which helps them understand broader current trends and future projections,” he says. “Now farmers growing soybeans in Vidarbha, want to know the plant delivery prices; meaning the procurement price at soya oil extraction plants. This information gives them an idea of the global trends: is the market going up; or down!

Based on the farmer-subscribers’ feedback, RML synthesized prototypes of text messages and sent it to some farmers in Maharashtra, particularly Vidarbha. “They liked what they saw”, Pawar says.

In 2007, the pilot product was launched.

Instead of providing the product on the java-enabled mobile hand-sets RML team chose to provide text services to the universally used handsets; the technological change was from applications based to text messaging, the latter mode making it easier for the farmers to receive and understand the content.

“We could have tested in two-three states,” Mehra says. “But we decided to test it first at a small scale in Maharashtra before scaling up the operations in 13 other states with farming families.”

Having validated that the product is replicable and full-proof now, the RML is ready to go beyond Indian shores. “We are gearing up to introduce the product in other countries of the developing world,” Mehra says. “That’s the reason why we scaled it up in India because it’s a model that works accurately.”

Accuracy of information and credibility, Mehra says, are the RML’s soul. “The fact that we are part of the broader Reuters network brings in the integration of best human resource, content, and technology.”

The value chain, Pawar says, is equally important. The Thomson Reuters does everything on its own: It sources the content; manages it; disseminates it on its own; looks after the billing and sales (it is its own pre-paid vouchers); and also handles customer care and support.

The whole of market intelligence is available for farmers, for whom it reads like a simple text message.

But it’s the synthesis of a complex set of fast-paced global activities: from collecting data, deciphering it and disseminating in a way easy to be read and understood even by illiterate peasant-subscribers.

Global market intelligence and information is sourced from various market reports and analyzed by experts. Granular information and intelligence is collected by market reporters posted at APMC markets.

It’s 2.30 pm, and a motley group of traders begin the auction of local and hybrid gram that has arrived at the grain auction yard number 7 in Nagpur’s sprawling 125-acre Kalamna market campus.

Standing attentively in one corner, Sarang Pimpale, 24, jots down the price at which the buyer closes his deal. “Rs 2160,” he notes, and moves on to the next auction site. At 4 pm, after three different auctions of gram and soybeans in a typical off-season when the arrivals are sluggish he texts a report on his cell.

The first year BA student is a farmer’s son, and RML’s market correspondent. “He’s our eyes and ear at local mandi,” says Shrinivas Pande, chief market reporter. Every day, between 11 am and 5 pm, Sarang taps on the prices at this market of 20 different commodities – from fruits to grains to vegetables.

After cross-checking his message, Sanrang shoots it to a system’s unique short code, after which it gets structured at the Reuters’ data-centre in Bangalore, before appearing in minutes on an internal prices application portal. Sitting in his Nagpur office, Pande surfs through the messages on his laptop, when he taps on Sarang’s entry. It reads: Soybean- Maximum price-2024, Minimum price-1951, Average price-1975, Arrival at Kalamna market-800 quintals, Wheat- Maximum price-1199, Minimum price-1176, No average (since only two auctions took place that particular day), Arrival-700 quintals…”

Pande clicks on “approved”. The message heads for the production desk and is ready for dissemination, within no time, among the subscribers as per their market and commodity preferences.

The content-spread is mind-boggling. It covers 250 crops; 1000 markets and 3000 weather locations.

Just look at the size of operations: 300 people in 13 states source information at granular levels; another 13 editors source information from global markets, and keep tab on global commodity trends, activities at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), and dozens of advisories issued by governments worldwide.

RML sources about 5500 data points, of which 680 are in Maharashtra. For instance, soybean prices at Nagpur market forms one data point. Local level market reporter is the primary source, and foundation of the Market Light product. The Reuters editorial network and its premium services are its backbone.

Weather forecast, Pawar says, is one of the top 4 information needs of a farmer.

Subscribers’ information consumption behavior is changing, Pande says. “Earlier,” he says, “They expected a message once in 3-4 days; now they want it few times a day, particularly in harvest season.” Some farmers call RML reporters any time, curious to know more about crop and market situation, and new government schemes that have been recently launched.

“It can play a big role in extension,” Gondia sub divisional agriculture officer Rajratan Kumbhare says. “I see a qualitative change in the way RML subscribers in our area farm, aided with information.”

RML is evoking curiosity among the researchers. The Oxford University is studying the impact of market light product on the farmers, who use it, to differentiate with those who don’t.

A research paper by ICRIER last year on the “Impact of Mobile phones on Agriculture Productivity” found “evidence that mobiles are being used in ways which contribute to productivity.”

The ICRIER researchers found the RML model – of some other non-commercial parallels – most suitable to the farmers given its customized nature and easy access. A number of subscribers reported that the RML advisories helped them avert potential losses by reacting quickly to weather and pest information, which in turn “generated positive economic benefits”.

Take for instance, Ravindra Lindal, a marginal farmer in Beed’s Rohtalgaon village. Two years since he subscribed to RML, Lindal has preserved every single advisory he received on his cell phone. Last season, he says, he could add Rs 64,000 to his profits, thanks to one particular RML market advisory.

“One s-m-s advisory suggested the soybean prices would drop in a week’s time, and I decided to sell my produce immediately,” he said. “I would not have sold it otherwise. Prices did drop. I was saved.”

Some farmers, like Sarjerao Sahebrao Kharwade, a five-acre rain-fed farmer in Beed’s Gevrai tehsil, are clubbing their age-old wisdom with RML service. “I’m able to sell my produce at an appropriate time due to this information,” he acknowledges. “I am persisting with it, since it’s giving me dividends.” No wonder, in his sleepy village, Kharwade’s now a rising star and one-stop guide to his fellow villagers.

The buck starts and stops with a Jawan

2010-04-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

Bastar, Chhattisgarh:

If he was not injured last month, Aman Singh says he could well be among the martyrs in the Chintalnar attack.

Recuperating from a bullet wound in his leg at a Jagdalpur hospital, the CRPF trooper wonders if the two previous encounters at the same spot were a training drill for the rebels ahead of the April 6 attack that wiped out his entire company.

“They ambushed us on March 1,” Singh recounts. They struck again on March 10, in which he suffered bullet injury. “On both the occasions the rebel fighters were not in big numbers.” In the third assault, Maoists struck in big formation when the CRPF Company – divided in five sections – was returning after a long search operation to Chintalnar camp, which serves as a launch pad for the forces to carry out area domination exercise in the heartland of Dantewada.

Caught in the plains with thin tree cover amid two small hillocks about 500 metres off the kuccha road to Chintalnar from Chintagupha, the CRPF jawans could not break the Maoist cordon from any side, even as they faced a rain of bullets fired from temporary bunkers tucked atop the hillocks. The only way left open was a pathway toward the road to Chintalnar, but it was blocked with pressure mines that, injured jawans say, blew off as they tried to run for a cover.

The attack that claimed 76 security personnel has a stamp of precision planning of several months. The paramilitary forces knew they were watched; the rebels avoided major confrontation with the troopers for three months – a deliberate lull that, as a police officer in Dantewada put it, was disturbingly misleading.

The outlawed ambushed the security men twice in the same area, but not with big intensity or strength. A small error in calculations and the troopers walked into the trap third time following a false alarm pertaining to the movement of a large number of Maoists in the vicinity. The rebels had merely thrown the bait.

“The troopers failed to read a multi-layered ambush point,” Chhattisgarh DGP Vishwa Ranjan said in Jagdalpur on Thursday, even as he vowed to hit back in the heart of the Maoists. Scanning the ambush points is one of the major aims of the ongoing operations in both south Bastar and north Bastar regions.

While this was not the first and won’t be the last incident in a protracted fight to regain control over the 40,000 square km territory of the size of Kerala, the major multi-state anti-Maoist operations are being reviewed after Chintalnar in the face of challenges.

“We’ll intensify the area domination exercise, carry out more surgical strikes and launch more complex formation operations,” Ranjan says. “It’s going to be a long haul,” he says, sounding resolute in cracking the backbone of rebels.

Green hunt and joint ops

After he took over in 2008, Ranjan changed the training modules, raised new forces and gave state-of-the-art equipment to his men, even as the Raman Singh-government launched operation Green Hunt in Bastar after a series of setbacks.

Serving and retired army personnel trained and reoriented the troops in guerilla warfare strategies and special operations, like Andhra’s Grey Hounds force.

The idea of the new strategy in south Bastar, a strategic stronghold of Maoists, is to search, study, hit and come back. “Surprise is the best element; don’t follow the routine,” is what he says he has told his men after a series of earlier setbacks.

Ranjan says the state police operation’s objectives are four-pronged: Large scale removal of land mines; identifying ambush points where troops were frequently attacked; intelligence-based operations to dismantle the camps where Maoists train new recruits; and hold Jan-Jagran or public awareness drives to reach out to the villagers. The strategy saw a nearly 80 percent drop in police casualties in 2009 and a steep rise in the arrest of a lot of Maoist cadres and leaders.

The Centre-sponsored multi-state joint operations are in the peripheral areas of Bastar, while Green Hunt operations are in the areas like Chintalnar, the tribal hinterland of Dantewada-Bijapur, bordering Andhra, Orissa and Maharashtra.

The seven-phase central offensive launched in November 2009 on the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border has now spread almost in seven states. OA-1 involves moving along a north-south axis from Kanker and Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh, and on an east-west axis from Gadchiroli in Maharashtra along the periphery of Abujh Marh. Aim is to squeeze the naxal territory and their area of domination, Ranjan says.

The joint operations in north Bastar aims to pack small areas with large-scale deployment to clear those areas of Maoists and create a secure environment for the administration to start development process.

The new ploy, Ranjan says, aims at keeping the Maoists on the move, rarely give them time to settle down in one area. It expects the forces to penetrate deeper in big formations. “We are living off the bases now for two to three days on the trot,” Sanjay Sharma, DSP (Operations), Dantewada, says. This was never the case earlier. The special police forces would patrol areas in isolation; now they say they do it in coordination with both, the troops from other districts and the newly deployed paramilitary forces, hunting for top rebel cadres.

Ground Challenges:

Ground challenges are massive though: One it’s a territory of 40,000 square km, which includes Abujh Marh, an uncharted territory considered to be a Maoist rest zone where the police and administration never venture. Two, forces face local hostility that stems from years of oppression and poverty. And three, difficulty in transporting supplies.

The current deployments are in accordance with the state police strategy and in places that are beyond the administrative and police control.

Ranjan says it’s mandatory for every trooper to get training at the Kanker-based counter-terrorism and jungle warfare school to increase endurance before being deployed. Serving junior commandant officers of the army train all personnel.

The adoption of the army’s platoon and company level tactics was initially slow but has made some difference, Ranjan says. But experts say all these strategies grossly undermine the Maoists’ tactics and intent, as the April 6 attack showed, and the odds faced by security forces, particularly paramilitary not used to local conditions.

“Weapons are not the problem,” a CRPF deputy commandant in Dantewada says. “We face shortages of medicines and ration in our base camps; we are yet to fix how to treat our men who fall sick in the camps from malaria or diarrhea; we get no doctors here.”

Chintalnar camp, like many other base camps tucked inside the forests in the densely forested Bastar region faces water scarcity and ration shortages. In the scorching summer in the forests, scarcity of food and water means half the battle lost, he says.

For all the television strategists sitting in New Delhi and Raipur, says a senior officer in Dantewada after the Chintalnar attack with sarcasm, ground realities are beyond any comprehension. A CRPF deputy commandant on ground zero echoes that. “Give us medicines, water and food,” he says. “We have enough weaponry.”

The Maoists and their highly spirited local militia groups know these weaknesses of the security forces. They hammer at those at their will.

A CRPF Jawan explains: “They mine the forests to restrict our movement; they poison the water bodies so that we do not get to drink water.” That, in turn restricts, their living off the bases in the unfamiliar forest territory for longer periods, he says.

On top of all this, with no medical aid anywhere in Bastar, the troopers are shifted first to Jagdalpur and then to Raipur in case of emergencies.

The latest attack also bared the big hole in intelligence gathering, without which the infantry can’t fight a faceless guerilla. The police considered the silence in Bastar as a retreat by the rebel commanders. That construct proved wrong. The Maoists were very much holding the ground, waiting and studying to surprise the forces to turn their own ploy on its heat. And they did it with lethal precision in their chosen area.

In the aftermath of Chintalnar, an angry force is hunting for Maoists vowing revenge, but the faces of all those who executed the assault remain elusive.

“Now the forces will pick local villagers and beat them, and Maoists will later exploit that as an anti-people oppression; it’s the same old story,” says a Jagdalpur-based reporter with years of experience in covering the naxal-insurgency.

No dialogue with locals

Central and state troopers say identifying naxalites in villages is a major operational challenge, particularly when the charges of fake encounters and SPOs killing innocent villagers fly against them even more vociferously. The line they tread is thin. Chances of mistaking an innocent impoverished tribal for a naxalite or sympathizer are high, as some cases pending before the Supreme Court point out. Several human rights organizations have brought to light the rising cases of individual killings what they call “genocide,” a charge both the state police and central paramilitary forces deny.

With the accounts of recently arrested and surrendered Maoist cadres all over the country, the security agencies have pieced together sketches of senior Maoist leaders for the ground-level forces with the help of professional artists.

The forces are relying heavily on ex-Maoists and SPOs to crack the Sangam and Jan Militia members, PLGA’s two external cordons that protect the core groups and their movement in the tribal hamlets and villages scattered over a vast expanse.

“Unless we break their militia network, we won’t get the quality kills,” Dantewada SP, Amresh Mishra, said. “So far,” he says, “we could not lay our hands on top leaders.”

In fact, police officials admit that the Maoist information network is far superior to that of the forces and it stems from the trust that the tribal villagers have in them.

That’s where the role of local politicians and administration is important. Across Bastar the Raman Singh-government seems to have handed over every single responsibility to the police. Even the routine dialogue between the administration-polity and the locals has been long broken, says a former legislator from Konta, who’s a tribal himself.

After the latest incident, top police and paramilitary officials went to the spot for an inspection and meeting with demoralized personnel, but not a single political leader from across the state even attempted to reach there. Police officials say they haven’t seen any administration or political effort to open a dialogue with villagers.

No one is asking what’s happening to the villagers in and around that area. Twelve families have left Chintalnar in last one year, according to one of the villagers. “I am also thinking of leaving,” he says. “There is no point in living here in constant fear.”

The state says winning regaining control is a top priority. Control over what -- land or an impoverished people? Will only the gun-trotting troops hunting for elusive Maoist cadres who are killing them with an audacious frequency be able to do that alone? One doubts. In Chintalnar, the security personnel from far away states did not seem to have any rapport with local villagers, a key to get intelligence through trust-building.

The state has little room for error and any silly mistake would only distance itself from the impoverished tribals, who are frankly not on their side in this vexed battle.

A strong political and bureaucratic will is a precursor to conflict resolution. Idea of India can’t be left only to the forces to defend.

Women Up and Rising in Bihar

2010-04-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

Bodh-Gaya, Bihar:

“Self-respect” – that’s her most important earning in two years, quips Sanju Devi Jadhab, 33, after a studied pause, standing in the middle of her two-bigha wheat farm. “We now have an identity.”

Holding her two-year-old daughter Sneha in her arms, the marginal farm woman basks in her new-found confidence that dwarfs the odds confronting poor villagers like her: poverty is just one among plenty.

A lower caste poor, whose husband works as a daily wager, Sanju Devi is member of a village self-help-group (SHG) and resource person (VRP) in Jeevika, a popular name for the World Bank-aided Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project (BRLP) that is steering a slow but certain change in eight impoverished districts. It’ll be a while before her village Navadih, she says, realized that the change was there to stay. By the time her daughter grows up, she believes, her village would have a future. Her optimism, itself, is the change.

“Jeevika is generating self respecting and confident women from the villages,” Budhabhatti Kartikeya, an IAS probationer and assistant collector of Gaya district, said. “The project is creating space for the poor.’

Implemented through an autonomous society – Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, Jeevika had by February 2010 formed 17,044 SHGs with 196,000 members spanned across the eight pilot districts of Muzaffarpur, Madhubani, Supaul, Madhepura, Purnia, Khagaria, Nalanda and Gaya. By 2012, when it is over, the project would have reached 600,000 poorest of poor families living in 4000 villages through a range of livelihood interventions. The Rs 306 crore-project, first to be funded in Bihar by the World Bank after a gap of 20 years, would eventually be scaled up to 18 districts, the officials of the Society say.

The 2009-12 strategy document of the Bank says it would devote more resources – primarily low-interest International Development Association (IDA) credits among other things -- for low-income states including Bihar, with focus on poverty reduction.

The aim is to enhance the income standards and livelihood options for the poor. Bihar’s average annual per capita income is about Rs 7500, or a fourth of the national average. Eighty-nine per cent of its 83 million people live in rural areas with poor service delivery, rigid caste hierarchy and limited economic opportunities. Of the 36 million poor marginal farming households, nearly 2.3 million have large debts.

Two years ago, Sanju Devi learnt about Jeevika being implemented in Sekhwara village, a few km from her own, and decided to volunteer for it. “I sensed an opportunity,” she says, “to come out of poverty.” All she needed was to take initiative with some courage, the short but hard-working woman says. In a feudal and rabidly male-dominated society, she says, it wasn’t easy to break free from the veil.

More than 500 VRCs like Sanju Devi, Jeevika officials in Patna say, are today steering the project that aims on the one hand to augment farm productivity in this rain-fed area through a roots intensification system, and on the other create SHGs (or micro-enterprises) that get access to institutional finance.

Sanju Devi is both, user and expert trainer, a job that fetches her monthly honorarium of Rs 1000. All that you need is a drive and initiative to become a village resource person, Jeevika officials say.

“It’s effective when villagers talk to other villagers about the project benefits,” says Mukesh Chandra Sharan, Jeevika state project manager (Micro Finance). “It removes any doubts villagers may have.”

After the initial skepticism among the targeted villagers faded (like what if you fled with our money or how can we spare ten rupees when we don’t have anything to eat), Jeevika took roots.

“The project is about to take off, now that the institutional structures are really solid,” says the World Bank consultant on the project Vinay Kumar. “The next level is about economic integration.”

Navadih adopted the system of rice and wheat intensification – called as SRI and SWI – in 2008 and the marginal farmers have got an enhanced yield – and income -- even in this year’s drought, officials say.

The roots intensification technique, adopted from Madagascar in Mexico, focuses on better root growth as it feeds the plant, according to Jeevika’s Debaraj Behera. He boasts of dramatic rise in the yields with this technique on the 22,000-plus paddy and wheat farmers in the pilot districts across the state.

Farmers, according to Jeevika officials, have clocked an average yield of 7-10 tons per hectare over two years – that’s roughly twice the yield before the introduction of this technology.

“If we take care of the roots,” Behera says, “the roots take care of the plant.”

The pitfall is that the system though not input-intensive requires more labour than in traditional way. It needs farmers to rinse the seeds in warm water before treating it with vermin-compost, cow urine and jaggery in a bucket. The germinated seeds are then transplanted maintaining the specified space.

“Though the technique is giving excellent results on the small holdings in Bihar, we will need to evaluate and assess the technique before scaling it up,” says Biswajit Sen, Senior Rural Development Specialist at the World Bank. The WB, he says, would in few months be doing a mid-term assessment of Jeevika.

Jeevika’s soul is the women’s groups. Ten to 15 individuals form a self help group; around 8-15 SHGs form a village organization; around 25-35 VOs form a Block Level Federation. There are currently a hundred such federations in eight districts. Alongside, the SHG members form a producers group as first step of building institutional capacity for an economic activity. A critical number of producer groups form a cluster; clusters join hands for producers’ organization that are then integrated with commercial sector, cooperatives, banks and service sector. The principle is that the community takes decisions and prioritizes its needs for lending and borrowing. The pyramid structure forges unity and individual skills.

Baijayanti Devi, a vocal resource person, and others burst into giggles and a sense of pride when they recount how their unity forced a local muscleman-cum-contractor to build a village road as per the locals’ instruction – a road that had been sanctioned seven years ago but remained un-constructed.

Jeevika is steering other interventions too; such as a play-school for the children of the lower caste Musahars in Marha village, about 20 km from the sacred city of Bodh Gaya. Languishing at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, the landless Musahar community had no access to education. This is the first time that the 40-odd children attend a pre-school under the drum-stick tree around one corner of the village.

Others, like Bank Mitra Rinki Kumar, 20, helps the Sahdeokhap villagers do banking – she fills out forms to withdraw or deposit money, apply for loans or explain the various schemes the bank runs.

“She’s an important interface between the illiterate villagers and the bank,” says Sunil Narain, the manager of the Sahdeokhap branch of the Bank of India. All praise for the project, he says, Jeevika made a major difference in the lives of poor villagers. “Its major achievement,” he says, “has been that people now have access to institutional finance which has in turn broken the stranglehold of moneylenders.”

Jeevika members echo his sentiment. Kunti Devi of Sekhwara village, for instance, managed to pay the mortgage money to an upper-caste money lender to free her one-acre land after coming into the formal credit net. In the first two years, says Vinay Kumar, much of the lending borrowing business within the SHGs has been to free the mortgaged lands and pay the health bills; two very pressing urgencies.

Typically, private loans come at a monthly 10 percent interest, while the bank loans at nine percent per annum with no collateral. Narain says SHGs’ repayments are very good and timely. The SHGs are using the money to buy livestock, agricultural inputs or setting up small shops, all income generating.

An increased access to bank has seen a decline in the number of money-lenders, says Baijayanti Devi. “The Sahukars are now a dying breed,” she says, as her SHG colleagues sing the Jeevika song. One of the women, Ramrati Devi, butts in to say with a chuckle: “We have now learnt to speak for ourselves.”

BREAKING THE BREAK

2010-03-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

After a long break, I am re-working the blog. This time around, I would be penning the stories on the move. From the rural parts of Vidarbha, which is once again staring a scarcity of incomprehensible proportion. A grueling summer is in the offing.

Need a World Parliament

2008-11-29T22:45:00.000-08:00

Do we need a world parliament? I think it’s time for one, given that the issues and problems and crises ripping apart nations across the globe are rooted in factors that are inter-continental and inter-national. The United Nations have no teeth, perhaps a world parliament could build political consensus among the countries democratically, on the larger issues that plague us – it may also bring about the voices of citizens to be heard.

Terror Live 24X7

2008-11-29T06:13:00.000-08:00

Mumbai terror attack was unprecedented. It had multiple messages from the radicals, and the Indian intelligence agencies would now need to unravel and study the most barbaric and chilling terror attack on the country. For ages, the pictures from the scenes - the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Oberoi-Trident and the Nariman House - would remain embedded in the collective conscience of the Indians. There would be a lot of discussion within and by the media on the systemic flaws, intelligence failure, mishandling of the situation etc, etc.

The last three days, however, also provide a lot of scope to discuss Indian media. 24X7 news channels in particular, who were not only badly exposed for their incompetence, but also for a complete lack of coherence and understanding of the situation. Tracking the western media made more sense for those who were seeking insightful detail of the incidents than following those petulant noises on the news channels, for whom the story was not the dramatic scenes unfolding before their camera-eyes, but about themselves. One of the most fundamental lessons that one gets to learn in the newsrooms is when you report, you are just a medium. The story exists and unfolds; you are just a narrator, not a stakeholder or a character in the act. The more I saw of those channels, including the more famed ones, the more I felt sad: Indian media is abjectly ill-prepared to cover and report on such exigencies. Not only do we have dearth of talent, we don't actually have it. Most news channels were reporting their own acts of bravery, their own shock and awe, and scenes they felt could keep their ratings up. It was another sort of Media Deluge!

Thankfully, the Print stayed an exception. The newspapers indeed covered the event far more insightfully, and kudos to them.

What was however most unpardonable of the TV channels was the total lack of sense while reporting those pictures live, this - when the terrorists were no rookies and had access to some of the most sophisticated weaponry. Also, the ATS and NSG were saying that the terrorists were tracking their moves on television channels.

I was reminded of one of the biggest blunders by the reporter of a leading news channel during Kargil war. The hysterical reporter reportedly gave minute details of the positions and locations of Indian army troops, putting to grave danger the lives of troops. That was understandable. It was perhaps the first war that an infant television media was covering then. Ten years on, we are no more infants. We are just toddlers though. We committed the same mistake this time too, and much the same way, by reporting live every move that the NSG commandos, army troops and ATS was preparing for. Shivraj Patil, who would go down in the history books as one of the most incompetent and incapable Home Ministers, did not lag begind. He joined the media bandwagon by spelling the exact number of commandoes being sent to Mumbai to combat the terrorists, who had unleashed a dance of death, and other such detail.

There should be no space in reportage for ifs and buts, and theories of "we believe", "we hope", "we understand", "could be" or "would be" while telling stories live.

If you don't know, you don't know. Simple. There's no harm in saying that some time. But as one saw the coverage, one got confused, if the reporter was sharing information, or his/her own thought or belief!

Would there be any debate on such media: their role, their positions? Perhaps no. Would there be some introspection within the electronic media. May be, yes. But specific beats that gave journalists to study and research the complex issues of out times have ceased to exist long ago. Saste mein mast! And who has got time for research or study?

I am terrified at the thought of how insecure our future is. Not because of terrorism or terrorists, but because an ill-equipped, un-trained and incompetent TV media are shaping a collective public conscience and opinion through a totally superficial content.

A Voice From The Woods

2008-10-08T07:29:00.000-07:00

By Jaideep Hardikar
August 15, Hemalkasa, Gadchiroli:

Little has changed over 35 years in this part of the country, except that there’s a better road and mobile connectivity in literal sense. Yet one or two showers are enough to snap both for days during monsoons, as it did earlier this month.

On the mental plane the distance between Hemalkasa and the rest of the world remains what it were in the 1970s – that was when legendary Murlidhar Devidas alias Baba Amte expressed his wish to start working among the Madia Gonds, and his son Dr Prakash Amte volunteered to join him with his bride Mandakini.

While there’s been a notable change in the way the Madias now see the outside world, there’s ironically hardly any change in the way outsiders view Madias.

Explains Dr Amte: “There’s more awareness among the tribals about education, health and economy, but the opportunities are far less and far between.” The Amtes remain a pillar of hope and service for a tribe living centuries behind the urbane India here in the dense forests of south Gadchiroli, 350 km from Nagpur.

Amtes never broke the simple rule that the tribals follow in the forest-ecosystem: Man can co-exist with animals, but he has to be a part of the ecosystem. This wisdom remains the basic tenet of life in Hemalkasa: Don’t confront; connect.

That’s why when you follow the 60-year-old doctor on his daily routine, all that you ask yourself is how often in a day does one break the simple rule of nature – to live and let live. “This one’s banded Krait,” he tells you while deftly lifting a yellow-colored sluggish snake from a tank and holding it with care. “It’s 19 times poisonous than cobra,” he informs you. “It won’t harm you unless you harm it.”

A couple of year’s ago, Dr Amte survived a major scare: Russel’s viper, a poisonous snake, bit him as he was educating the daily visitors at his animal orphanage, rescue and rehabilitation centre.

“Perhaps, he did not realize his grip on the snake had eased a bit while talking to the visitors,” says his son Aniket, who looks after the school administration now.
By the evening, Dr Amte’s blood pressure dropped alarmingly and he was gasping for breath as the snake venom circulated in his blood.

Next morning he was fighting racking pain, for his life, in the ICU of a private hospital in Nagpur. It took him ten days to come out of danger, and his family to overcome the scare on his life. Through out those ten days, Dr Mandakini did not panic. Neither did Dr Prakash express the pain he experienced.

“It was my mistake; I broke the rule and troubled the snake, it was not at fault to bite me,” an unassumingly simple Dr Amte said smilingly when he got back to his work. Animals don’t hurt you, if you don’t hurt them; they understand the language of love – that’s the first lesson that he is teaching his grandson, five years old Arnav. That’s the lesson he learnt over the years and has tried imbibing in thousands of visitors. Karuna (love), he says, was the teaching of Baba (Amte).

It’s a spectacle to watch him caress Jaspar, the Hyena, or George Bush, the fox, or bear. It used to be a grand feast for the tribals from surrounding village to see the doctor couple and their volunteers take ‘Negal’, the first tiger of the centre, to a nearby river on morning and evening walks in the eighties, without a chain. The animals – from tiger to leopard to hyena to dogs to wild cats to owls – co-exist with man clinging on to a common thread of love in Amte’s animal orphanage.

In the early seventies, when the Amte couple started working among the Madia-Gonds of Bhamragarh, animal hunting was very much in vogue. After a decade of their work, their appeal to the tribal not to kill the animals worked wonders.

“They stopped killing the animals, but brought the injured and orphan animals to us, and we had to tend to them here,” Dr Amte informs. “I wonder how these wild animals understand our language,” he says, “it’s a mystery.”

Dr Amte’s morning round of the animal orphanage and hospital after breakfast at 7.30 am, is an education: One by one, he enters the cages to cuddle the animals and feed them. Each animal here has a history. “This had got separated from his mother and trapped, villagers brought him here,” he says of Jaspar, the Hyena.

Two Leopard cubs have arrived recently from Nashik. And surprisingly, the two are playfully gelling well with their senior counterpart Raghu in the orphanage.

The giant squirrels hop on to his shoulders to eat nuts – these are extinct now. The monitor lays sluggish in its cage. All the animals in the centre, christened Amte’s Arc by a visitor, are in pink of their health, personally cared by Dr Amte.

Don’t break the nature’s rule, which is don’t confront. Just love, and you will get the results. At five, Arnav has no inhibitions. He is learning from his grandpa that the rule of the nature is supreme. One has to honour and obey it.

Then he treads slowly to the out patient department, where tens of tribal patients wait for him patiently, and he starts conversing with them one by one in Madia – the language they learnt, to be part of the eco-system and culture.

“This man,” he points to a man squatting on floor of what’s a shade for the patients, “he has come from Sironcha, 170 km.” The man’s nothing but a bundle of bones with slender skin cover. “He’s severely malnourished with tuberculosis."

Patients come from remote parts of Gadchiroli and neighbouring Chhattisgarh, some time all the way walking, to the Lok Biradari Prakalp hospital, which is an indication that the government hasn’t put in place the public health care system in those parts, now infested with the Maoists. The government’s norms to grant a primary health centre are peculiar: A PHC is granted based on population. This is an area, where the tribal population is scarce but scattered over several miles.

“Approval for new roads is easy to come by from the bureaucrats sitting in the Mantralaya, but if you ask for a new PHC or a new school, it’s difficult,” admits a senior officer at the divisional health department office at Nagpur. “In that sense, the mental distance between the Mantralaya and Gadchiroli remains the same.”

What’s remarkable is the distance the Amtes have traveled to win the faith of the tribe. “It took us years to win their trust,” recounts an ever-smiling Dr Amte.

Now, as Dr Digant informs, the patients plead with them to treat them at the LBP hospital despite its limitations. “Last week a woman came walking for three days from a remote village of Chhattisgarh to us. Her right was precariously hanging from a shred of vein; it was almost dislocated from the elbow. A crocodile had attacked her in a river, and we wanted to refer her to Chandrapur immediately. But she insisted on staying here and told us ‘do whatever you want to, but don’t send me anywhere else’. We had to amputate her hand with local anesthesia, though it may have been saved. And she happily went back after recovery.”

The LBP hospital continues to get some of the most bizarre cases, and the Amtes continue to tackle the medical exigencies with resilience and sincerity, despite the limitations. “Some times we refer the cases to our doctor friends in the cities like Chandrapur and Nagpur, and they treat the patients free of charge. We can’t expect anything more. We feel very indebted at such times,” says Dr Amte.

For the tens of daily visitors to the LBP, an animal rescue centre and orphanage that was christened by a visitor as Amte’s Arc, remains a major attraction, which in a way also underlines the way urban visitors perceive the work.

“There are exceptions too”, smile the Amtes, “tens of serious visitors also come here to study the tribal life, understand the developmental paradigms and our model of health care, which really gives us encouragement to work on.”

“When we began our work here, we had no expectations; we still don’t have any expectation. It’s the love and faith of the community that is overwhelming for us and people from all over the country and world have supported us,” says Amte, 60, as he discusses their journey into Hemalkasa until now and the ways ahead.

One of the most inspiring changes that their work has brought about among the tribals is education: there have been six doctors from the tribe in the vicinity, and all of them were groomed in a modest school that the couple started in 1976. Also the population rate, which was on decline then, has begun to significantly rise.
The LBP residential school has grown from 15 students in first batch of 1976 to 650 today, giving free education to all the children up to HSC. That opens up a little chance to join the mainstream economy and come out of perpetual poverty.

In terms of approach, Anandvan and LBP are poles apart. “Anandvan is very outwardly and mammoth in its expanse and work, whereas ours is a localized and very inwardly approach,” explains a much-relieved Dr Amte, whose sons Dr Digant and Aniket now shoulder most of the responsibilities of the project.

While Digant and his wife Dr Anagha tend to the OPD and healthcare, Aniket is looking after the administration and school project, with a professional outlook.
“We have started in a small way vocational training for tribal children taking the education in our school, to hone their traditional skills,” informs Aniket. The LBP is also going places through its exhibition, again a brainchild of the two brothers.

Breaking the jungle rule!

Increasing Maoist violence is now a growing concern for the Lok Biradari Project. The Amtes came as outsiders in this region and became one with the ecosystem. But two outsiders came in the eighties – the Naxalites, who pretended to be the liberators of the poor tribal population, and the police, who claimed to be their protectors from the armed-naxalites. While the two detractors fight with the guns Hemalkasa gets sandwiched. Amtes never speak or grudge about it, but one can sense their work is suffering in the face of fear and death all around their centre. Three sub-centres of the LBP hospital located in remote hamlets of Bhamragarh closed down, because the tribal staff feared being apprehended by both, the Maoists and the police, for no fault of theirs. The mobile unit run by the hospital can’t travel into the jungle for the same reason. While the two sides fight for supremacy, the tribal life goes for a toss without much improvement in life.

Comrades in arm!

Hemalkasa grew on the simplicity of the Amtes and their comrades in arm – five couples, who gave up a thriving career in the cities to embrace the mission. Vilas Manohar and his wife Renuka were among the first to join them in 1974. Gopal Phadnis and wife Prabha looked after the school since 1975. Jagannath Machkale walked 60 km to Hemalkasa in 1974 and never went back; he heads with his wife Mukta the Lok Biradari Nagepalli project, a base camp for Hemalkasa LBP. Then, Manohar and Sandhya Yempalwar are working as volunteers since 1982 with the LBP hospital. Tens of other individuals come from different parts every year to this place and contribute their bit to the Amtes’ mission. Some of them are part time teachers, or part time doctors, donors or simply the self-help volunteers.

'My father was opposed to our marriage'

2008-08-16T23:44:00.000-07:00

It's not easy to forgo the comforts of a cushy urban life to shift to a jungle to serve the tribals – that too when you are a doctor, with a promising career ahead. But 35 years ago she chose to tread a road less traveled and go with her heart. Giving up a comfortable Nagpur life, she chose to join her fiancé on a mission. At 62, Dr Mandakini Amte nee Deshpande has come a long way as a completely transformed person. As she puts it: "I would have been a lecturer in college or private doctor, but my marriage with Prakash completely changed my life for the better."

The couple's three decades of tireless and selfless service for the betterment of Madia-Gond community in the remote and disconnected areas of Gadchiroli has won them this year's Ramon Magsaysay award. DNA caught up Dr Mandakini in their Lok Biradari Prakalp (LBP) at Hemalkasa, Gadchiroli, 325 km from Nagpur. A peep into her astonishing journey:

Q: How does it feel to win the Magsaysay Award?
A: It's a big award, and I am very happy; it is sort of an acknowledgement of our work. But we never expected it.

Q: Does it change your life or work in any way?
A: Yes, it does. Our work will reach more people outside our own world. And it will eventually help us to serve the community here in a better way.

Q: You came from an urban family. And you had to leave that life immediately after you finished your medical education, so how did it all begin?
A: After my MBBS, since I had no interest in gynecology, I had decided to do my post-graduation in anesthesia while Prakash was on his job in surgery after his MBBS. That's when we met. We worked together in the same operation theatre. That's when we found our values matched and we gelled well, which finally led us to a decision of marriage. Prakash had informed me that he would be working in some forest area. That was when I had no idea about forests or the work of his father (Baba Amte). I had heard of Anandvan and Baba, but had never visited Warora. My ideas about forests were lofty and rosy. I thought it would be a place like Chikhaldara (a hill station in Amravati), and I came from a staunch RSS and VHP background; my father was a hard-cord RSS man. When we decided to marry, Baba (Amte) called me over in Anandvan and asked if I was ready to live with Prakash in a jungle for the rest of my life. I said yes, I am. He stamped it.

Q: Did your parents agree to your marriage? Particularly your father…
A: (Smiles) No, they were dead opposed. My father feared that I would have to live among the lepers and in those days, there was great taboo around leprosy. It still remains very much a taboo. He was very opposed to our marriage initially, but when he saw I was firm, he gave his consent, and we finally got married.

Q: When did you come to this place, Hemalkasa?
A: We were yet to get this place at that time. But we came for our honeymoon here to see the area (smiles); we had stayed in the house of a forester, which was very comfortable. I had completed my post-graduate diploma in anesthesia but Prakash was yet to finish his post-graduation, so we went back to Nagpur where I took up a job of lecturer in the medical college, while Prakash went back to his studies. In the meantime, Baba came to Hemalkasa after the government gave him land and began a small centre with the help of volunteers from Anandvan. Prakash did not complete his post-graduation since he was not interested in the general medicine, and decided to shift here. I was angry with his decision not to complete the course. But he was not convinced. So I gave up my job and we came to Hemalkasa. That was in early 1974. There was a small shade and a hut, where we lived. It had one small room and a store, where we would stack foodgrain.

Q: Social work is not everyone's cup of tea. And with your background, how did you take it? Was the decision to come here difficult?
A: No. Once I had decided and made my commitment, there was no hesitation or resentment at any point of time. My marriage with Prakash changed my life, and for the good. I am very happy about it. The journey has been tough but of thrill. We have learnt lots of things together on the way. And I am happy my children – Dr Digant and Aniket – too have joined us in this journey. India still lacks in the passion for social work. But there are young people who want to serve people.

Q: It must have been a very difficult phase for you both. What were the initial challenges that you had to face in such a remote area? How did you cope?
A: It was difficult and challenging, but we faced it together slowly. There were no roads, no electricity and no water. We would fetch water from a nullah, boil it and keep it for a day before it could be potable. Snakes and reptiles would be all over our living space. The Madia-Gonds would fear the civilized people, so we had difficulties in connecting with them. They would run away from us. This phase of great difficulty remained for about two-and-a-half years. In monsoons, the area would be cut off from the rest of the world for four five months. But we had been joined by volunteers, who came from Anandvan, to work with us. First we tried to learn the language of the tribal community here; we took the help of local foresters and built our workable dictionary. Then, we went to the villages walking to try and establish some connection, offering them medical help. We had to farm to grow vegetables and paddy for ourselves; for me it was totally new. We'd work in the clinic to treat patients and in farms to grow vegetables.

Q: When did the breakthrough with tribal villagers come?
A: A Madia boy, who was suffering from epilepsy, was burnt 40 per cent when he fell in fire in an attack of fits in Hemalkasa village. The parents had tried with village remedy, but when his condition worsened they gave up hope. We asked them if we could take him to our clinic for treatment, they allowed, and we treated him with modern medicine. In five months, he got cured. We also began treating him for epilepsy and he showed drastic improvements. When the village saw our medicine worked, the first impact had been done. Others started coming to us thereafter. There were also times when we could not cure serious cases like cancer patients, patients with snake bites in last stage… they'd stop coming then. But as we kept treating patients, villagers found our medicines worked; their trust in us grew with time. People come from far flung and remote areas now.

Q: Did you not face limitations? You got all sorts of patients – from fractures to deliveries to snake bites…
A: We did have limitations, in terms of instruments, infrastructure and medicines and we had to gauge what are the things that we could do with our knowledge. But this was a very, very remote and backward area, with no facility of any kind. When patients came, they came with full faith in us and felt we could treat every disease – from an infection in the eye to cancer. We had no choice – either we treated them or they died. We could not consult other doctors, because there was no facility, or refer the patients to city hospitals, because they had no money or means to go to a city. So we studied and read from medical books, learnt things, and charted out our ways through the challenging problems to cure patients.

Q: Did your work and service change your parents' perception?
A: Yes, they were very proud of what we were doing, though many of my close and distant relatives did not come here for the first ten years.

Q: Science believes in logical explanation. But as a doctor did you every feel compelled to believe in miracles?
A: No. I never felt there's anything called miracles. It is science, and one has to apply his or her knowledge with full dedication, and you get the results.

Q: The name 'Amte' has a larger-than-life image. Is it difficult to live up to the family name?
A: No, it's never been the case. Baba (Amte) was very motivating.

Q: How do you think you have influenced the people you work with?
A: I think there's a sea change in their awareness levels today than what it was when we came to work here. There's more awareness about education now. But I have learnt more from them – about life, about nature, about living.

Q: What, in your view, should be done to improve public health system?
A: The doctors and staff must work sincerely, it will bring a change. Also, there has to be some rethinking on the way we run our medical education. If only the affluent families send their children to the medical colleges, no one would come to the villages and remote areas to work, because it's now become money game.

Q: Your daughter-in-law, Anagha, a doctor by profession, joined you in the Lok Biradari Prakalp, following on your footsteps. How does it feel?
A: I am very proud of her. She responded to the matrimonial advertisement that we had placed in a newspaper for our elder son, Dr Digant. The only condition was that the girl should be willing to live in Hemalkasa; she approached. Now she's handling the cases as we did in our initial days; both of them, in fact.

Q: Does Magsaysay change your life or your work in any way?
A: It'd be with renewed vigor that we'll work. There's still a long way to go…

Here, every village is a 'Khairlanji' today

2007-09-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

Bhandara and Gondia, Sept 28:

There is a palpable tension in the dalit basti of Pimpalgaon Kohali village, some 80 km from Bhandara in Lakhandur tehsil. The village is going in for panchayat election, and 'caste-card' is in play once more. Or leaders would ensure it does.

"This year our basti had to buy two tractors to complete 'our' work in the fields, because 'they' refused to lend us theirs," reveals Sumedh Lade, a neo-Buddhist (Mahars who have embraced Buddhism). Earlier this year, every Ambedkarite – the neo-Buddhists or converted dalits, as they are called here – in his village faced social and economic boycott.
"We were not allowed to shop; we were not offered any work," says Bhaiyyalal Motghare, a villager. "The entire basti was erased from the BPL list (below poverty line), but we fought to bring back our names into it," he informs. Things have eased a bit off late, but only just. "We know it's all superficial; a small trigger is enough."
The village saw the dominant castes turned against the Ambedkarites, when one of the farmers from the latter registered a case under Prevention of Atrocities Act against a farmer from the former community during a village get-together. The matter was trivial, say villagers, but local leaders blew it up. Result: the tension triggered the rift, followed by complete isolation and boycott of the Buddhists.
Pimpalgaon is a sample of what's happened – and is happening – across the rural Vidarbha, particularly in Bhandara and Gondia districts, exactly a year after four members of Bhotmange family were brutally killed in Khairlanji sparking a wave of violent protests in Maharashtra. Today, it's "they" versus "us"; but Buddhists are isolated, ostracized and living in fear and insecurity in village unto villages.
"You can see the reflection of this polarization and total isolation of Buddhists in village elections," notes Vinod Thakre, a BJP worker in Lakhandur, Bhandara. It's a stark reminder that the caste divide is a reality, but in the absence of any reconciliatory efforts on either side, it's growing worse for the Buddhists.
Every small incident, charges Bhandara ZP member Vasant Einchilwar, is given a caste colour and tagged as a case of atrocity by the small time leaders. "Threats by the dalit activists have become common that they'll slap an atrocity case even if the matter is trivial and could be resolved at village-level," he says. On the other hand, politicians from dominant castes exploit the situation to consolidate their base, by antagonizing the impoverished people of Buddhist community.
This, coupled with fiery speeches and statements by the Republican leaders from outside, has fuelling the caste division farther, Einchilwar suggests. "This past year has seen a spurt in the atrocity cases, though many were actually very trivial and personal issues," says a senior police officer in Bhandara. If there was any chance of reconciliation, political class ensured the tension remained. Yet, he admits that the genuine Atrocity cases fall apart due to pressure from the leaders of the dominant political class. "Anger against Buddhists is growing."
"Nobody opposes the installation of Babasaheb Ambedkar's statues in villages, but there will be reaction if their leaders publicly humiliate us and our religious sentiments. This is what has happened over the last one year during such events in and around Bhandara, vitiating the village harmony," says deputy sarpanch of Pimpalgaon Ramchandra Parshuramkar. "Agriculture work suffered due to it."
Ostensibly, the exchange and interaction between the Buddhists and dominant castes in villages has stopped. In Surewada, a teacher from OBC community sprinkled cow-urine on dalit students to purify them six months ago. The teacher was transferred, but the incident further antagonized the Buddhist community.
"The matter is serious. Every village is a Khairlanji today," warns a senior police officer. "While the four members of Bhotmange family were hacked to death in one stroke, the poor Buddhists would die a slow death everyday, being isolated and ostracized," he fears, in view of the alarming social fallout.
"Last month, an engineering student was denied accommodation by the landlord because he was an Ambedkarite," says Gondia-based journalist Kishor Borkar.
Adds Rajendra Gajbhiye of Dhusala: "Our community farmers did not get farm labourers this year, and Buddhist labourers didn't get work from dominant and upper caste farmers." Denied work, Buddhist farmers and farm labourers from Bhawal village in Bhandara, for instance, migrated to Dhusala where they got work from the landed farmers of their community. Migration shot up this year.
One year of protest, hatred, isolation and riots hasn't resulted in any benefit or economic empowerment of dalits, including the more organized neo-Buddhists.
"The naxal outfits are waiting to exploit the opportunity, the government must step in to intervene and talk to the leaders from both the camps," says a villager.
For, what's more serious though is isolation of this single community. Even the Hindu dalits (SCs who haven't converted to Buddhism, such as Khatiks, Burads etc) are also distancing themselves from the Buddhists. "This is a disturbing indication that the polarization is against us," says a local Ambedkarite leader.
"Polarisation is sharp, but I hope the strong bonds that existed between the OBCs and Buddhists would not crumble in the selfish political game," hopes Prakash Ambedkar, leader of the Bharip-Bahujan Maha-Sangh. He told DNA over telephone that there had never been any tension between the Buddhists and the dominant Kunbi community, but after Khairlanji incident, it has been made out.
Locals feel the only solution is social engineering. For, there is a volcano waiting to erupt. And political class on either side is ready with the matchsticks.

The man and his mission

2007-08-05T06:03:00.000-07:00

Nagpur, August 2007:

I learnt two important things from him: what the heart does not feel, eyes cannot see. And there is no Invisible India. If at all there is one, it’s Blind India. He says, “Invisible India is an elephant in your bedroom that you don’t want to see”.

Palagummi Sainath, the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award winner in the category of Journalism, literature and creative communication arts, has inspired many a young journalist like me, not only in the country, but also beyond the borders.

When the news broke on Tuesday, July 31, afternoon, we were about to start for Nagpur from Pandharkawda in Yavatmal, after three days of non-stop traveling in rural Vidarbha, visiting half a dozen suicide households and meeting people. It was typical of Sainath that he was doing what he loves to do the most: visiting the rural households to understand the newer processes that affect their lives.

Those calling him on his cell phone were not the powerful editors from the national and international media, but people who are part of his long journey into the hinterland – many like me, Sainath’s foot-students and friends.

Excited, happy, pumped up – many of those callers were from rural Andhra or rural Karnataka. Desperate though to meet his deadline, he had time for all.

They all felt, and I could sense that joy, as if they had won the Magsaysay. For, why a Sanjay Bhagat would throw a bash for his friends and relatives in rural Yavatmal, so excited that he ended up inviting almost everybody of his town! Or a Ram, a taxi-driver who drove us to far flung places and became part of many of our journeys, distribute sweets and proudly flaunt the newspapers to his friends to claim that he has seen the man work twenty four by seven the past few years.

In every part of India where Sainath has traveled, it was time for celebration. What’s more, a few farmers, deep in despair, too made calls to convey their wishes. They were happy to read about Sainath deservedly receiving the award! Many of them are now part of his ever-extending family – a microcosm of India.

“If you don’t know rural India – or if you stop covering the rural poor, you have actually decided not to cover 75 per cent of India,” Sainath feels, “but that is now changing. Today, there are more journalists wanting to cover the rural issues.”

And much of that change came due to his dogged perseverance with rural issues and inequalities that shape modern day India. Covering it for days unto months unto years is not easy. There are many sacrifices on the way you have to make.

“It’s going to be the worst year for this region,” Sainath, who is covering agrarian crisis plaguing the country for a decade now, fears, as we emerge out of a farm household in rural Akola, where yet another farmer ended himself last month.

Not overawed by the Asia’s most coveted award, an equivalent of Nobel, Sainath says: “I am very pleased with it; awards open up spaces in the newspapers.” In the era of what he calls “journalism-for-shareholders”, receiving a Magsaysay for covering deprivation only legitimises his work and cements his strong belief in a legacy Indian journalism inherits from the country’s independence struggle.

He says his interest in rural issues has got two origins: “First, in 1984, when I was in UNI and we were covering drought. I realized we were not showing the real picture; my stories were not really telling the very complicated processes. The second in 1990, when I was in The Blitz – the issue of malnutrition deaths in Thane evoked quite a few passions among the journalist and made us angry. But I thought, had we been doing our job properly, many of these kids wouldn’t be dying in the first instance. That led me to the idea of looking at India’s rural poor and telling the stories that were beyond the comprehension of beautiful people.”

Even today, farmers wouldn’t have been dying the way they do today had the journalists been doing their basic duty – that is to signal the weaknesses in the society. “Today’s journalism is more or less stenography to the rulers,” he quips.

In the era of flashy journalism, Sainath's work is serious and importantly he enjoys doing it. It is his mission. And there is no sacrificing commitment and credibility at any cost. At times, he is the most acerbic critic of the media that they are today.

“When Indian press decided to look only at top five per cent after 1991, I decided to look at the bottom five and let people decide on the real face of India,” informs the author of the award winning book Everybody loves a good drought. Sainath spends more than three quarters of a year in villages reporting on rural poor – be they the cotton farmers of Vidarbha, or vanilla growers in Wayanad, or toddy tappers in Tamil Nadu, or Orrissa migrants, or Andhra’s chilly growers…

Those are the voices from rural India that Sainath listens to on a priority. “The often used clichés like ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ and stuff life that is rubbish. When you say they are invisible; they are voiceless, you are turning them dumb and blind. In fact, we are the ones who are dumb and blind. A farmer wants to tell his story. “Point is do you want to listen? Do you want to see how he lives?”

Super moms of the suicide-country

2007-07-08T06:56:00.001-07:00

In Vidarbha, where an average one cotton farmer ends his life every six hours, Mangalabai and Kamalabai are mothers who singularly stand out. After the death of their husbands, they learned every thing and are raising their family with unnoticed resilience. This one's the picture of the widow, of a farmer who committed suicide two years ago, and her two children in a village in Akola district, in western Vidarbha.

Nagpur:

When Prabhakar Digambar Mohadkar, 55, hung himself from a tree to take his own life, which was steeped in unfathomable debt in September 1998, his widow Mangalabai stared at a long and treacherous journey, full of hurdles and thorns.

But the resilient woman did not blink. What if her man had forsaken the world, she still had a role to play – a role that was far bigger and far more important.

"I still had three daughters to marry, after we performed weddings of our five elder ones," recounts Mangalabai, who, post the suicide by her farmer-husband, single-handedly managed her seven-acre farm in Rampur village in Yavatmal. "I had no time to mourn his death," she remembers wryly. Big loans had to be repaid; three daughters had to be seen off; and then there was the farm.

Mangalabai is the super-mom of the suicide country Vidarbha, where an average one cotton farmer ends his life every six hours, even as the agrarian distress turns worse. These are mothers, who singularly stand out and raise their family in the face of a crisis and loss of their men. Vidarbha's farm widows are also mothers, who, very often, get junked in the debate over farm suicides and biting distress.

"Time passed so quickly," says Mangalabai, now in her late sixties, nonchalantly. It's hard to be alone, she adds. "Now when I look back, I wonder how I managed my responsibilities!" But, she adds, there was no time for her to live for herself!

Remarks Kishor Tiwari: "Those who think lowly of these women, the widows, as victims or sufferers and pity them, should come and see their resilience. We see their struggle every day! Make no mistake, these women, these mothers, have an unmatchable strength and undaunted courage. They are inspiration to all of us."

"Many of them are illiterate; had no idea of accounts or banks; but after the death of their husbands, they learned every thing, when our agricultural systems are not women-friendly. Rural tragedy is still unfolding. There is no health care; there is no support system; and, there is no money. Even then these rural mothers fight their way out, even while some of their own people mock at them," says Tiwari.

Tiwari's organisation, the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, felicitated Mangalabai and 20-odd farm widows like her, in March 2007, for their astonishing struggle.

Mangalabai repaid all her loans by saving every single penny and cleared her burden. She married her three younger daughters and refused to pay any dowry to the grooms. "To my luck, all my sons-in-law are very good," she says. And she saw to it that all her daughters came to her for their first deliveries – a custom, she followed very religiously, notwithstanding her fragile financial condition.

Saraswati Amberwar, about 50, is still waging the battle that began some 10 years ago, when her husband Ramdas ended his life in Telang Takli village, in Yavatmal's Kelapur block. It was the first suicide case to have been widely reported by the media in 1998 – and the only outcome of it was that she got a lakh rupees in compensation. "The cash of Rs.30,000 was exhausted long ago, and the monthly interest that I get on the remaining RS.70,000 is abysmal to run my household," she says. Saraswati now tills her ten acres alone.

The banks and her creditors troubled her, year after year, for the recovery of the loans that her husband had taken from them. But the woman did not budge. Last year, she lost her eldest daughter to brain tumour; and the youngest is diagnosed with clinical depression ever since the death of Ramdas Amberwar. Saraswati says this girl needs medicine worth Rs.200-400 every month. Treatment is costly but inescapable.

In 2005, when the creditors did not stop chasing her, Kishor Tiwari shot a letter to the cooperative bank officials in Marathi. Loosely translated, it read: "Last night Ramdas Amberwar came into my dreams. He told me that he is waiting with the money in heaven and has asked you (bank officials) to go there to fetch it."

The banks have stopped troubling her since, says Saraswati. That has eased the pressure. But the pressure of farming clearly shows on her face. But there are two daughters to be married off still, she notes, and piled up debts to be cleared. "These women are the face of the Vidarbha's agrarian tragedy, but they also portray a resilient face," says Tiwari, whose organisation has singularly focused on the plight of the region's cotton farmers.

Added to the problems of debt and distress are the in-built social pressures on women – the land laws that weigh inherently against them, the pressures from in-laws, the rigid caste and class structures which turn these women even more voiceless and much more. Their struggle in the face of such odds remains unheeded and unnoticed, points out Tiwari.

Cut in to Jalka, a village about half an hour's drive away from Rampur, where Kamalabai Bandurkar is about to wed her fifth daughter. "Three more to go now!" she tells us, smilingly.
Kamalabai's husband consumed Endosulphane in January 2006, with mounting debts finally becoming a fatal burden. Shattered, she hooked on to an unforeseen hope that life would change for better. While her income rests fragilely on the only buffalo she has, a 50-something Kamalabai is not giving up. The mother in her stands up, every time the untidy yet playful if somewhat noisy house, sinks in money and food crunch. A family of ten, minus her husband, is now swelling; she's now a grandmother of four. "Life has to go on," says this mother of nine, "crisis or no crisis". If only the path was a trifle easier, she'd have been relaxed.

But Kamalabai, who also tills a nine-acre barren farm-plot, knows she's not alone in the cotton country waging the great agrarian crisis today. There are hundreds of moms striving to lift their families out of the plight alone. There are hundreds of them holding out the promise across the suicide-ravaged region.

As Robert Frost wrote: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep; but I've promises to keep, and miles to go, before I sleep…"

Burning down standing sugarcane crops

2007-07-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Yavatmal, May 2007:

Panjabrao Jagtap was attuned to the cotton woes. But the 45-year-old farmer in Yavatmal's Datodi village has just tasted the bitterness of sugarcane as well.

"I burned all my standing crop because there was no buyer for it," says a flustered Jagtap. He set ablaze over 200 tonnes of his standing sugarcane crop a week ago, shouldering huge losses. His only hope wrests on government compensation.

Close to 1500 tonnes of sugarcane remains uncut on the land of Datodi farmers. It will all wilt in the flames over the next week. They've no option but to burn it.

Across Maharashtra, especially Marathwada, estimates from the Sugar Commissioner's office in Pune and various other independent agencies suggest that an overproduction of sugarcane is crushing farmers. Roughly 50 lakh tonnes of cane is uncut and uncrushed. Farmers are in dire straits.

"It's an irony," notes a local Panchayat Samiti member Vijay Raut, "sugarcane is burning in cotton-rich region."

Datodi village, located in the catchments of two rivers Painganga and Arunavati, turned to sugarcane when the Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, called on the debt-ridden cotton farmers of Vidarbha to shift to the sweet cane last year. They are now paying the price.

"Our fertile soil and irrigation facility make sugarcane cultivation possible, so we thought of giving it a try last year," says Prahlad Patil Jagtap, a veteran and a director of now-defunct Shankar Sugar Mill, Bangud, Yavatmal. There was one more strong reason for the farmers to opt for sugarcane crop, instead of cotton.

Vinay Kore, Chairman of Warna Sugar Mill and Maharashtra Transport Minister, decided to run on lease the defunct Jai Kisan Sugar Mill at Bodegaon in Darwha tehsil of Yavatmal district last October. The Warna management promised local farmers that they would buy the entire sugar cane crop, whatever be the costs. Datodi villagers obviously thought they would benefit if the mill revitalised.

But as the international sugar prices collapsed and a bumper crop rolled out in western Maharashtra and Marathwada, the Warna management packed up and left the area, leaving the local farmers to grapple with the shock of huge losses.

Ironically, the host management of the mill, chaired by the former minister and senior Congress leader Manikrao Thakre, has no concern for farmers either.

Just factor this: When Datodi farmers were sinking in despair, the entire cabinet, including the chief minister, was in Yavatmal to attend the wedding of Thakre's son. The problem of sugarcane is not as acute here as it is, say, in Marathwada, but it assumes a different dimension in a debt-ridden Vidarbha, farmers note.

"In a region devastated by deepening agrarian crisis, promotion of sugarcane is a prescription for disaster," warns Vijay Jawandhia, a farmers' leader in Wardha.

Why would the farmers not take the extreme step, in such a case, ask farmers of the village. In Yavatmal, about 11000 hectares of land have come under sugarcane. But farmers ask who will purchase the crop next year, when mills are defunct?

Take this: As many as 13 of the 16 sugar cooperative mills in Vidarbha are closed – an estimated liability of all the mills put together is to the tune of Rs.1500 crores. What is more, the celebrity politicians of the region own all the sugar mills.

Only one is operational in its full capacity, while two others are operating at 50 per cent capacity. Mismanagement and lack of sugarcane availability in the areas are among the major factors for the closure of sugar mills in entire Vidarbha.

One sugar mill can crush up to four lakh tonnes of sugarcane in a crushing season. Farmers say there was no point in sanctioning so many sugar mills in Vidarbha, when the government knew sugarcane couldn't be cultivated in the region that is almost entirely rain-fed. "It's a massive loot of the public money," they say.

"I can't dare cultivate sugarcane this time around, after this bitter experience," says Vishnu Patil Jagtap, another farmer who has had to burn his crop on five acres of land. "The Bodegaon mill bought only half of my yield," he informs.

Datodi's total loss on account of unpurchased sugarcane is a meagre Rs.15 lakhs, compared to the phenomenal losses borne by the Marathwada cane farmers. For the entire state, the cane problem is getting worse with farmers burning the crop in the fields. But the fallout of sugarcane crisis in Vidarbha could be manifold.

"A small trigger is enough to knock the fragile village economy in the region," warns Jawandhia. "Indebted farmers will have no option but to die."

Now teachers turn to moneylending in Vidarbha

2007-07-08T06:39:00.000-07:00

Akola, Yavatmal, May:

Chaya Thakre, 38, is still to come to terms with the blows. Bruised, and shaken, she sits on a bed in Akola town’s general hospital, her two sons by her side.

“It was a close shave for her,” says her husband Sahebrao Thakre. “We’ve lost our land; I am lucky that my wife is still alive,” he says, completely shattered.

Two days ago, an “ideal” teacher in Lakhmapur village, some 60 km from Akola town, and his family tied Chaya by ropes and mercilessly beat her in her field.

Her fault: she had tried to stop her tormentors – the family of her moneylender from claiming possession of their farm and working it for the coming season.

“It is my land, they have grabbed it by deceit,” cries Chaya. “It’s the only thing we owned, and now it has been grabbed by this moneylender,” she complains.

Two years ago, when banks turned him down, a desperate Sahebrao borrowed Rs 20,000 from Sheshrao Sontakke, a recipient of President ‘ideal teacher’ award. In return, the teacher got him sign sale deed papers for his four-acre land.

A year later, as per the deal, Sahebrao repaid double his loan amount – Rs 40,000, to the teacher, and sought back the deed papers. But the Shylockian lender, who is alleged, to have in possession tens of acres of land grabbed from the distress-ridden farmers like Sahebrao against loans, coolly went back on his words.

Sahebrao lost his land, and money, but local Shiv Sena MLA Gulabrao Gawande won him possession of his land last year along with hundreds of others through a campaign against the moneylenders. Yet, legally, Sontakke still owns the land.

On May 22, when Sahebrao was away from his village, the Sontakkes entered the field and tried to claim possession of the farm. That’s when Chaya says she took on the moneylender and five others, including his wife Usha, and got thrashed.

This one’s a growing trend in Vidarbha – teachers turning neo-moneylenders.

In 2005, a farmer in Janunagaon village in Akola district, Santosh Sontake, lost both his father and land as a result of the growing racket of usurious lending. His father Gopal had “mortgaged” three and a half acres in the same fashion as the Thakres did to their moneylender. He too had borrowed only Rs 20,000 and in his case too, the lender was a primary school teacher and a big landowner.

“The land was worth Rs 5 lakh. He coaxed my father into signing the deed and staying with him for a while. The trouble began when I made my father see what was going on,” says Santosh.
Hired killers murdered Gopal Sontakke, and the police arrested Santosh. “The effort was to frame me for killing my own father.” However, the case collapsed the day one of the hired killers was nabbed. The teacher-sahucar is still free. And Santosh hasn’t got the deed of sale of his land scrapped. He has lost the land.

“It’s sad, but true,” says Congress member of Arni Panchayat Samiti in Yavatmal Vijay Raut. “If husband and wife both are teachers, they bring home Rs 30,000, and lending a huge chunk of it to desperate farmers guarantees high returns and land, if borrowers fail to repay loans,” he informs. “Interest rate could be as high as 60 to 120 per cent annually,” he says. “And that too at a compounded rate.”

Admits an executive member of the Vidarbha Madhyamik Skhikshan Sangh, an organization of middle-school teacher, in Yavatmal: “I’ve no hesitation in saying some of us are big moneylenders and land lords in villages, but that is not new.”

He says the recent Akola incident is a blot on the teachers’ fraternity. “Since the teachers covet respect in villages, the law enforcers often don’t look into the cases of money lending involving teachers. Now even gram sevaks are in the game.”

A teacher with the Zilla Parishad School at Dotodi village in Yavatmal’s Arni block admits on the condition of anonymity: “Many of us do lend money to the farmers in the village. Since we live here, we have to help them in their need.”

Mortgages are long out of the game; now legal sale deeds are in vogue. The state government ran a drive against moneylenders. Now it has been relaxed.

When you borrow money, you sign a deed saying you have 'sold' your land to your creditor. This deed is registered at the district deputy registrar's (DDR) office. The oral promise is that when you repay loan, your creditor tears up the document. But, he does not. And you find you have been robbed of your land.

Adds Raut: “Not all teachers, who lend money to farmers, are usurious though. But an overwhelming majority of them are into money-lending business.”

Explains farmers' leader in Wardha Vijay Jawandhia: “The governments awarded fifth pay scale to its emlpoyees as an acknowledgement of high-cost economy, but kept farmers in low-cost rural economy. This is one important factor that is aggravating the agrarian crisis and fueling the economic inequalities.” He says a farmer prefers to sell his 10-acre land and pay the fee of his son’s B.Ed. course, for, he feels a teacher’s salary is better than the returns from his agriculture.

Jawandhia says a Zilla Parishad teacher earns several times more than a small and marginal farmer does, annually. “Will the government ever realise this huge disparity and rectify it by giving farmers the prices in lieu of cost of living?”

Meanwhile, for Sahebrao, the episode has brought back the ugly memories of his father Gulabrao Thakre’s murder. Gulabrao was done to death on the issue of land grab allegedly by Sontakke’s relative in the same village, Govardhan.

“I am lucky to have my wife still by my side,” Sahebrao says.

Meanwhile, Gawande, a former minister, warns that there would be a bloodbath if the police don’t proceed against the moneylender and put him behind the bars.

But, Akola Superintendent of Police Shantaram Waghmare says he is helpless in this case. “The High Court has ruled in favour of the Sontakkes. Why did this woman try to stop them from tilling their land in the first place.” The verdict says Sontakke owns the land. “We can’t take action.” And that’s the saddest part.

We live in a brazen world!

2007-05-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

Early one morning through our summer academy at Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, my new Afghan friend got a call from his home town. He had lost his 22-year-old colleague and friend. Some one from a speeding car had pumped three bullets into his forehead on a street. No one knows the reason for his killing. No one would, perhaps, ever know the truth. But life is all worth a bullet in Afghanistan, our shattered and bereaved friend told us stoically. The other friend from the same country explained us the chilling realities of his war-ravaged country: “It could be me or him the next time, or any time.”

The past two weeks of our training at the ACJ, we – about 25 journalists from all the south-Asian countries – shared, discussed and learnt the strife across the sub-continent; the conflicts we are riddled with; the challenges; and hypocrisies of our nations with regard to acknowledging and resolving the conflicts.

We live in a brazen world. And all the while we talk about democracy. India, the world’s largest democracy, is plagued with conflicts within: of people falling off the basket in the lopsided economic progress; of Nepal catapulting to a new system, which hopefully would be democratic, after a decade of strife leading to the toppling of Monarchy by Maoists championing what they call the “people’s cause”; of Sri Lanka, groping in dark for over four decades now to end the ethnic violence; of Pakistan, for sure, a country which is yet to realize what’s good for her; of Bhutan, which is only now about to discover the word called democracy; of Bangladesh, standing perilously close to the brink of sabotaging democracy.

But we also realized that life goes on…It has to…And there’s always a lighter side to a more serious affair. And with us, the journalists closeted in Chennai for the past two week, there indeed are a few lighter shades! Here’s a glimpse:

Ekta’s fan from Afghanistan!

Ezmaray can hardly communicate in Hindi. But this heftily built, well-chiseled journalist just loves “Kyunki Saans bhi kabhi….”. “I can’t miss that serial; you know ‘when mother-in-law was a daughter-in-law once,” the fair-complexioned naïve-looking Afghani confessed, in his broken Hindi, at the welcome dinner on the first evening of our course. What’s more, no matter the hell breaks loose on to his country, he tries to catch what’s happening in the K-series! Afghans just love Ekta’s serials in Pashtun!

When he’s on a song!

Ruwan’s singing adventures are by now well known in our group. This Sri Lankan journalist’s Hindi is as good as his English. But, play a Rafi song, and there he goes, romantic and berserk, in a way! I beg a pardon Mr Rafi, but lyrics aren’t really all that important when the Sinhalese is on the song! Literally! So, he could flounder, but, we know, that’s okay. “Feel the emotions man!” We know. Last evening, when we heard Colombo was in panic following a threat from the LTTE, Ruwan sang: “Hay mayre vhatan ke logon, jara haankh may bharalo…”

Life’s a chill(y)!

A quarter of a kilogram of green chillies – that’s the staple food for three of the Bhutanese journalists. Shhhhh! You would scream, but they erupt if the banquet has no chilly corner. Last week, Tashi, the journalist with Kuensel in Bhutan, told the guy behind the stalls “we will starve if you’ve no chillies on the platter.” The ‘Anna’ has since started keeping a kilogram of fresh green chillies. He invariably finds the three-some savouring them with relish, much to the amusement of all of us, who sweat when they eat! You know why Bhutan is a peace-loving nation. There’s no time for feuds when life’s a chill(y) for these guys up on the terrains.

Three’s a party!

One’s a journalist in the making; so she fires a volley of questions, which may not always be ‘quostions’. The other’s already in the profession, but may not always communicate. The third isn’t sure about his fate yet, like that of his ex-Prime Minister. But confusion and mess is a routine for my Bangladeshi friends!

No full stops and commas for the Pak friends!

What with the 9am-to-9pm packed course schedule, some of us shudder when friends from Pakistan start debating, arguing and questioning in a long and some time boring lecture session. Good thing is we can catch nine winks through their longish and almost never-conclusive arguments. And we thought, Mr Sen, only Indians were Argumentative! It’s only when some thing goes awfully wrong with the accent of one of them that we wake up to burst into giggles. One of them, a diligent journo speaks in English punctuated by Punjabi and Baloch accent. Thets nyot quarrect! Aha. We heard ‘Tendulkar hits Muralitharan for a six!’ as: “Tyandulkar hates Murlithyaran for a sex!”

Meanwhile in Vidarbha…

Violent protests on ever-increasing power cuts continue; farmers’ suicides have crossed 325-mark this year; and a Principal from rural Bhandara’s government-run school has been suspended for pouring cow urine on dalit students.

‘Need a fresh suicide case!’

2006-11-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

A ‘phoreigner’ stood perplexed and evidently tense at my door early one morning in February, last. Rubbing my eyes and still yawning, I tried figuring out if this creature was a Chinese, a Korean, a Japanese or none of these! He was a Korean, a South Korean, accompanying a team of journalists from his country’s state-run TV channel. Their purpose: A documentary on the dying farmers.

After the customary exchange of pleasantries, the Koreans were firing a volley of questions at me – from credit issue to input prices to cotton imports to subsidies. As I spoke, the Korean translator explained it to his friends and vice a versa.

The taxi driver, the same Ram who has driven me to tens of villages for the past six years or so, had brought them to my home straight from the airport. That’s how they had discovered me, and I discovered them, bang at my doorstep.

But the week they spent in the region was indeed a hard work. They had done a thorough homework of the issue. They knew the composition of districts, people who were in trouble, factors at play, features of state politics and much more.

Reflecting their sensitivity, the Korean journalists did a fabulous job in the end.

Tens of foreign correspondents have been flocking to Vidarbha to do stories on continuing farmers’ suicides in this past year or so. The region had never seen so many ‘esteemed’ visitors in its history ever. Many of them though discovered Nagpur for the first time and some even had difficulty in pronouncing Amravati. Worse still, Buldhana. A majority of them knew Wardha, thanks to ‘Bapu’.

Yet they came. They were sent, so they came. Many had left their hearts at home. Still they wrote; pieces after pieces, exploring new angles. Some are still trying to “discover” what’s new in the story, and what all could they cover afresh. Alas suicide is too sombre a story to be written about; and farmer, not very “hot”.

Then there was one, who wrote to me she wanted a “fixer” not realizing that the connotation is a ‘slang’ in India, even if it means genuine money in the west.

Soon after, a scribe from a US newspaper followed another from his rival paper to “find the truth.” No, not the truth behind the farm suicides per se, but his rival’s tour itinerary in the region! Did he at all visit the villages in Vidarbha? As this guy discovered, he did. His search for truth ended in Yavatmal, where he himself encountered a family, which had lost its headman and was starving.
Post PM’s visit – since July 2006 – there were two such high-profile journalists coming in and heading for the suicide country almost every month. We needed translators from Italian to English to Italian; from French to English to French. Sadly, there was not one! To that extent, we missed this “opportunity.” Isn’t that the word used for professional excellence? “Opportunity.” There’s lot of it here in farm suicides, I am slowly discovering from many of those esteemed guests.

To be fair to our own “national patrakars”, 2005-06 and 06-07 would surely go down in the history of journalism for a much better coverage of this issue.

Conversely some local journalists are in a sense of disbelief. Some of them have actually begun to question their own volition. By saying that not all suicides are genuine! Geek! Farmers are genuinely dying, but reasons are not genuine. May be, they are dying due to unbearable stomachache or too much of alcoholism, or domestic quarrels, but not due to indebtedness. Some of them are dying, as some journalists argue, due to newspapers’ reporting of suicide, or because the state government pays Rs 1 lakh compensation to their families post their death.

Actually, there were – and are – three streams of tourists coming in: One, the bureaucrats and researchers, the scientists and the politicians (I’ve clubbed them all into one group), the other, of course, the journalists, and the third one, (guess who?), the spiritual gurus, the ‘Babalog’. The third one is here to stay forever.

But the most bizarre query of all was (and this one was from a TV crew): “Is there a fresh suicide, the freshest the better. Great, if it happened moments ago. We will simply go live!” Oops! A dead farmer, live on the TV! “It would make the story hit the conscience of our audiences.” To their luck, they indeed got one!

They dared to speak up; were slaughtered

2006-10-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

“Surekha’s only fault was that she’d challenged the village upper-castes and that too the landlords. And she’d dared to crave for self-esteem and dignity,” says a broken Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, 50, a dalit farmer, a shadow of himself today. Last week, he helplessly saw brutality and barbarism knock on his door and wipe off his family – his wife and three children. His worst fears came true September 29.

As Kherlanji wears ghostly silence, ostensibly sheltering injustice, Bhaiyyalal packs up his house – a cramped hut with nothing in it actually – to move in with his in-laws at Deulgaon village, 20 km away. But fear and terror emanates from his swollen eyes, mirroring the truth that the entire government administration, the police and the political class are fighting hard to cover up for a week now.

But the Kherlanji’s bestiality is too hard to be suppressed.

Bhaiyyalal’s wife Surekha, 44, his daughter Priyanka, 18, sons, Roshan, 23, and Sudhir, 21, were first stripped naked, dragged from their hut to the choupal 500 metres away and hacked to death by the entire village of the so called upper-castes, but not before demonstrating the savagery that sends shivers down the spine of a mauled Bhaiyyalal, the lone survivor and fallen family’s headman.

The meek farmer is yet to come to terms with the incident that he witnessed from some distance hiding behind a hut. He’s broken and shudders every moment, uncertain of his life, confused and fearful. It has been a week but nobody has spoken to him from the government administration about the mass killing.

Surekha and her daughter Priyanka were humiliated, bitten, beaten black and blue and then gang-raped in full public view for an hour before they fell dead. “The marauders had pushed sticks into their private parts,” says a policeman, asking not to be named. The two sons were kicked and stabbed repeatedly. The assaulters then mutilated their private parts too, disfigured their faces and tossed them in air before the twosome lay dead on the ground. “When the dusk had settled, four bodies of this dalit family lay strewn at the village choupal, with the killers pumping their fists and still kicking the bodies. The rage was not over. Some angry men even raped the badly mutilated corpses of the two women.”

“Not a single woman, save one, from the village tried to intervene or stop their men from doing it,” cries Bhaiyyalal. “I was too terrified to run to their help.”

Intriguingly, the post-mortem report says Surekha and Priyanka were not raped.

“Doctors were managed, and the police bribed,” alleges Rashtrapal Narnaware, Surekha’s nephew. “Every one in Kherlanji knows what happened with my aunt and cousins, every one was a witness to the heinous crime,” he says furiously.

The police now await the report of second autopsy that was done on October 5 by a team of doctors after exhuming the bodies buried at Deulgaon following mounting pressure. Police admit the bodies were without even a shred of cloth.

Bhaiyyalal says the Kherlanji villagers, who perpetrated the crime, called for a village meeting an hour after the incident with bodies still lying on the road and issued a ‘fatwa’ that nobody would open their mouth about the incident.

In Kherlanji, villagers don’t speak. “They won’t,” says a policeman sent here to maintain ‘law and order’ situation. “But frankly,” he says, “the incident shows that there was no law and no order for years; there isn’t any even today.”

Police say the assaulters threw the bodies at different places in the periphery of the village. Priyanka’s body was recovered from a canal only the next afternoon, and that was how the matter came to light. But the police and administration, dictated by a political regime that sensed deep trouble, saw to it that even the Dalit leaders kept mum, as the incident would have been explosive during the October 2 Dhammakranti anniversary programme at Nagpur’s Deekshabhoomi.

Kherlanji is a village of 780 people – about 170 households, some 50 km north of Bhandara town off the Tumsar road. From Nagpur, it would be about 120 km. It falls in Mohadi tehsil. The Bhotmanges were one of the two Mahar families of the village that is dominated by the OBCs, the landlord clans here. Bhaiyyalal had moved to this village to farm his mother’s 5-acre land about 18 years ago. But it was Surekha, who tilled her farm and fought for regaining the hold over a portion grabbed by the upper castes, which is a decisive political force in this part.

A cramped hut of the Bhotmanges stands proof of their abject poverty. Despite that, Surekha toiled hard to send her children to school and then colleges.

Priyanka, a NCC cadet who dreamt of joining the armed forces, was preparing for her HSC this year, Bhaiyyalal wails. “My wife saved some money last year and bought her a bicycle,” he tells us. “She was very intelligent.”

The two sons helped them in farming and earned extra money by working as labourers. “Routinely the villagers drove tractors over our standing crop.”

“Surekha,” says her inconsolable sister Sudan Raul, “was taught a lesson because she fought for her land. She feared their end was nearing.” Just a week ago, says Sudan, Surekha came with her daughter to visit us, and said the villagers would not spare them. But no one had ever imagined such a shocking end.

“Not one of her children could survive,” says Drupata bai, Surekha’s old mother, with her eyes fixed on the ground. “Did the murderers not have a heart?”

The plot was meticulously planned. First, the village heads tarnished her character. They propagated that she had illicit relation with the Police-Patil of neighbouring Dhusala village Siddharth Gajbhiye, who was actually her cousin. Siddharth, a dalit too, was the only person who stood by this family.

The District Superintendent of Police, Suresha Sagar, holds: “This incident is the height of brutality.” He clears Surekha had no illicit relations with Siddharth.

He admits the Andhalgaon police did not attend to the calls of the Bhotmanges, or investigate the crime immediately after the incident. Siddharth had in fact made a desperate call to the police station when he learnt that the Bhotmanges were being slaughtered. “The call was made around 6.15 pm,” says Bhaiyyalal.

Thirty-two persons have been arrested so far. Many more arrests would follow. As of now, the main perpetrators are still free, say the Deulgaon villagers.

The SP reveals he is issuing the suspension orders to a PSI and a head constable at Andhalgaon police station, under which the village falls.

But the police lapses seem far more and too grave. The police had refused to lodge the complaints of the Bhotmanges for over a decade now. That is since the woman took up the cudgels to recover the lost portion of land. They clearly sided with the landlords, says Rashtrapal, and that was the reason why even Siddharth went to Kamptee and got himself admitted to a private hospital after being beaten almost fatally by the Kherlanji village lords on September 3. That was the provocation of the latest tension that culminated into the September 29 mayhem.

The things had come to a boil. “The villagers had pronounced that killing a mere Mahar family of the village wouldn’t harm any of them,” alleges Bhaiyyalal, fighting hard his tears, as he recounts living in years of the village-regression.

Siddharth’s younger brother Rajendra took him to Kamptee in Nagpur district, 100 km from the village, because he knew it was safer.

“Here, it would have been too risky for him,” says Siddharth’s son Rahul, who’s doing his engineering from a private college at Ramtek.

The doctors at the private hospital realized that this was a police case, and then referred him to the government hospital at Kamptee. The Kamptee police lodged an offence and referred the case back to the Bhandara police for investigation.

That was when the offences were registered against 14 persons of Kherlanji, and when the police paraded the accused for identification, Surekha and Bhaiyyalal identified them, notwithstanding the reigning threat of a village-goon and one of the masterminds of the heinous crime. On the morning of September 29 the 14 persons were arrested and produced before a Mohadi court and released on bail. No sooner had they been set free than the persons first drove down to Kandri, a village ten km from Kherlanji, in search of Rajendra and Siddharth. But when they did not find them, they rushed to their village baying for the blood of the Bhotmanges. When they reached the hut of the dalit family, they found Surekha and her children preparing the evening meal; Bhiayyalal was not at home. They were armed with sharp weapons and sticks, informs Bhaiyyalal, who was at a stone’s throw away distance when the assaulters were dragging his children and wife having stripped them off their clothes. Rajendra was with him. And they both witnessed the murderous assault unfurl before them over the next one-and-a-half hour or more, before the two slipped out in to darkness to safety.

(Post script: No MLA or MP from Bhandara has visited the village or Bhaiyyalal, more than a week after the gruesome killing took place. Two MLAs from Nagpur, ostensibly sent by the Congress higherups, visited Kherlanji, but did not make any noise. The police are not acting fast and the only two prime witnesses are under threat. Not a single villager's statement has been recorded. Neighbouring villages are living with fear and terror, especially the minority lower castes.)

When the ‘Madam’ came calling…

2006-07-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

It was a small gathering, but powerful one. A district collector, two sitting MLAs, three contractors, a head of the district unit of a national party, and a leader of another national party, now in the opposition – by all means, each one enjoyed a clout in the government, and a position in the politics of this Gandhian district.

The year: 2004. Month: September. I sat sheepishly on a corner chair in the third row facing the revenue collector of that district in his chamber, watching, for two and a half hours, hectic activities and discussions between him and the members of that august gathering. There were of course a number of intruders in between. And cell phones rang with impunity. Many of those calls got cut brusquely.

Well… there were many important issues to be fixed in quick time. Who will lay the road? How much budget? Who will bring the garlands? How many? In how much time would the money be released for the emergency op? Guest list? Who would manage the media? And who should receive the compensation-cheques?

The first few questions were resolved quickly, I noticed. Within a few minutes, in fact. The three contractors were indeed going to get the contracts for laying roads to the villages where Madam would go. The two MLAs, would get the cut in that. The leader of the district unit of the party now had to ensure that the administration selected at least one farming family from the constituency of the state president of the party. Otherwise, it would be a dampener on his growth prospects, and possibility of getting the party ticket for elections. The last question – who would get the cheques – was therefore very hotly contested for much of the time.

Each of the MLAs proposed a name of the farmer who had committed suicide in their respective constituency. And the leader of the opposition proposed the third name. “Three families, that’s final?” asked the collector. “No,” interrupted the district party president. “Take one from our madam’s constituency,” he pressed. “Remember,” he told the two MLAs, “we must take one from her area.”

Thankfully, this district had no dearth of dead peasants – those who committed suicide in distress.

“Take that family, what’s the name? Yes, Deshmukh. That will be good. The surname is perfect, and it suits madam,” he suggested.

“Is that final?” the collector asked again.

The opposition leader said, “it’s okay, as long as you are including the family I proposed from my constituency. What’s the name, I forget? But good, there’s an old man, an old woman in there. It would also make a good picture.”

“Okay then, one from madam’s constituency, one from your area Mr Opposition leader, and one from your constituency, Mr MLA (one of the two, he pointed his fingers at), so this is final. Mr Joshi (the collector’s deputy), these are the final names. Madam and the chief minister will visit them,” a much relieved district collector said handing out a chit to his deputy.

“You may now release these names to the press by the evening, we have only three days left.”

The deputy took the list, penned down a few notes and left.

As this was over, one of the three petite-looking contractors mumbled: “Sir, the sum will be released soon? See to it that it does. We are not waiting for it, I just thought since it’s emergency situation, it would help us get the work done fast.”

The collector smiled wryly and nodded his head with eyes embedded down on a piece of paper in a file.

“Don’t worry, your work will be done in time,” he remarked.

The contractors smiled in happiness. The other dignitaries in the chamber joined the chorus. Every one shook hands. The meeting was successfully over.

The contractors had to lay the road to the three villages, where, in the next two days, a huge caravan of the country’s top-most political leaders would travel, in their pursuit to play guardians of the ‘aam-admi’, a month before the state went in to elections.

Vidarbha countryside was burning, and it burnt for all four years that this government was in the power. So the opposition had an edge. The sitting coalition had managed to convince Madam that her visit was necessary in the run-up to the elections, lest they shall lose the ground to the saffron flags.

It was all the more needed because just a fortnight ago, the opposition coalition’s top leadership traveled in a few villages, distributing money for the photo-ops to the mourning families of the farmers who had taken their own lives in that season.

If the party wants to return to power, Madam must visit the region and distribute aid to a few families, to show that her party still stood by the poorest of the poor.

Madam, feeling empathetic to the deceased farmers, decided to come.

Three families were in despair; each had seen a young farmer member of their family commit suicide, unable to see the growing distress in the family, mounting debts, biting hunger and no hope at the end of the dark tunnel.

Two farmers had left behind their widows and young children, struggling to take education.

The third had left his old parents, and an unmarried sister. He was a graduate himself.

All three farmers had committed suicide by consuming pesticide – Endosulphane, a poison that knocks ones life within seconds of consuming it. In Vidarbha that's what farmers have been consuming to kill themselves.

The list of the farmers ending themselves in the region was burgeoning. And the three families chosen for the ‘compensation award’ were the ones who were first rejected as ‘misfit suicide cases for compensation’ by the same administration.

Hours before her arrival, it was decided that Madam will now visit only one family in a village, and the other two at the makeshift helipad. These families would be transported to meet her at the spot in official vehicles. The district administration decided that Madam would deliver cheque to the widow she visits in the village, while the two other families would get the cheques at the hands of the chief minister, who would also travel with his party president.

That way the picture would look balanced. Apparently, this subtle change was made at the behest of some one from the party ranks. It was silently pushed in.

The aid: Rs 30,000 in cash and Rs 70,000 as postal deposits that would give a monthly income of Rs 457.

To distribute 3 lakh rupees, the government spent, not less than, Rs 50 crore on the high-profile visit – hiring vehicles to preparing a helipad to managing the media, the spending on the one-day bonhomie was not certainly going to be a small affair.

After all, it was election time. The money the families would receive could neither wipe out their outstanding debts, nor bring back the lost one. It would, though, make or break the party’s election chances.

The village got a facelift, overnight. Hundreds of policemen occupied its every nook and corner, its every square inch.

Several houses got painted free of cost, and internal cramped roads leading up to the Deshmukh house got tarred.

The small village forgot its tragedy in that euphoria, and the family, its pains. Madam’s visit to their place was no small a fete for them.

In the death of its headman, the family had hogged the limelight suddenly – journalists, photographers, bureaucrats, there was no dearth of visitors to this household.

Madam had come calling on them. The two other families forgot their grief too. They sat in a car for the first time, perhaps savouring one happy moment.

A month later, when I visited the three families, it was a scene of more despair and grief.

The widow of Deshmukh had lost her money to the private lender, who had lent her husband money for inputs. Her son and a daughter had dropped out of school. Two years on, the woman still does not have her farm well dug, or electricity dues waved.

Alas, they were just high-profile pre-election promises not really meant to honour.

In the other two households too, money provided no relief, no panacea.

The old man in one family died for the want of medical attention in October 2005, a year after he lost his son, who committed suicide in his farm. The old man could not marry off his youngest daughter.

The third widow has migrated to her maternal home in Amravati, where she works as a landless labourer, in addition to the Rs 457 that she gets from postal savings.

And farmers’ suicides continue to haunt the dusty countryside of Vidarbha.

Madam’s visit paid off to her party in a big way though!

It could salvage some of its lost ground and wrest a few seats in the region where farmers were seething with rage against the ruling coalition. It returned to power in the state that year.

The killing fields...

2006-04-10T22:37:00.001-07:00

For the New Year revelers, it was just the beginning of a party – a bash sunk in spirits and lined with a vulgar display of firecrackers, which burst one by one and illuminated the moonlit skies all over.

Not far from the dazzling display by the city’s noveau rich, in the dusty by-lanes of a village in Vidarbha’s countryside, one more farming family sat mourning the suicide by its headman.

The farmer had finally decided to call it quits from a long-drawn struggle that looked endless. He lay dead in peace. For his family though, it would be a road full of thorns ahead.

Next morning, back in my house, as the telephone refused to stop ringing with the New Year greetings pouring in from the callers, my attention was focused on a figure dotting the headline of a language daily. It read: 201, and counting.

An independent worker’s list though had kissed 210 by then.

May be, this language daily was a trifle behind the surging figure.

Whatever, the New Year, surely, does not look any better for the near three million cotton farmers of the region. And by the end of March, I was right. The number of suicides had crossed 400. How do you rate the year gone by? Ask market watchers, and they’d say “excellent”!

And it’s true. For the market players, it was a good year. But that’s exactly what lies beneath the crisis, which is matching the great Indian depressions of the late 19th and early 20th century: hunger on one side, and endless free lunch on other.

Suicides are just an underlining aspect of the Vidarbha’s agriculture crisis, and not the only.

The farm crisis is about much more than that. It’s about inequality that breeds exploitation and legitimizes oppression. It’s also about cornering of the resources, land, water and forest, besides minerals, by the corporate. It’s about the state slowly withdrawing itself from its bounden responsibility for the welfare of its people without any prejudice or bias towards lower castes, tribe or any poor. And it’s about the state’s withdrawal from essential sectors – water, power and employment to name a few.

Everything is being corporatised. It is not just the number of farm-related suicides that is mind-boggling. The way the governments have reacted – or not reacted – to the situation is equally baffling.

At least sixteen committees and panels – from the National Farmers Commission led by Professor M S Swaminathan to the Planning Commission’s fact-finding-mission led by a bureaucrat named Adarsh Misra – came this year in to Vidarbha, apparently peeved and concerned over the appalling if explosive situation.

This is apart from tens of journalists – from the esteemed national and international media hatchets, who made a beeline for special stories on the farmers’ suicides.

A small difference though between bureaucrats’ visit and that of the journalists was that the former caravan spent a little more time than the latter community on the field.

Many journalists, save exceptions, simply came rushing by the morning or evening flights (and thank God for that, there are flights to and from Nagpur), and went equally rushing to the place they came from.

But they wrote something this time in their respective publications; most of them confused whether to write about families’ problems, or sorry state of widows, or poverty plaguing the cotton farmers, or private moneylenders (whom the government made out to be the draconian villains in the whole game), or – as one national newspaper concluded with strong 18-point-bold headline – lack of market reforms in Vidarbha region.

Many journalists also discovered that Vidarbha is an eastern part of Maharashtra, and Maharashtra is bigger than Mumbai. The bureaucrats thankfully knew that already.

Then there were independent researchers and study panels in addition to the ones commissioned by the Maharashtra Government.

They too studied the situation, and submitted voluminous reports with some recommendations.

Many of the visitors simply came as a part of their duty – some one ordered and they came – on what is now termed as “distress tourism.” Poor farmers are dying, so we need to know why?

All of them came to study problems, when the cause was much near them, at the places they came from, in the huge corridors of power.

It was not that nothing came out of it. Professor Swaminathan’s recommendatory suggestions would go down big way in reversing the situation.

A few other study committees mapped the complex problems with magical finesse. But the sum total of all that exercise, I am still wondering why, is zero.

The governments at the state and center aren’t unduly disturbed by the suicides or keen to act decisively.

Why? Is that because there aren’t any elections now? Or is it because there are no opposition parties to corner the governments on the issues? Or is it also because the media are making no noise, as they do over the other flimsy issues. The rage among the farmers is growing, the distress deepening and the hope sinking.

Only a few days ago, angry farmers hurled onions at Sharad Pawar, the Union Minister of Agriculture, as he spoke from a huge dais in a public meeting at Nasik.

Luckily, Pawar did not dare come in Vidarbha and address farmers ever since he took over as the agriculture minister of the country, though he did come to Nagpur before the BCCI elections (ostensibly to draft his strategy for the elections of the richest cricket body). And you can’t hurt the minister by cotton.

The Numerologist

2006-03-31T06:55:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 31, 2006

The old man was furious. “Hey! Heeyyee!” he yelled at the top of his voice. The waiter finally cared to turn and look at him.

The cantankerous man sitting on the table opposite us fell silent. So did the discussions on other tables. All eyes in the restaurant stared at us through the hazy smoke of cigarrette that was in the air. The old man, sitting opposite me on my table, was still effervescently angry. He was unable to calm down.

Usually, the coffee house at this bustling square in the city’s heart turns into a bazaar at noon. Poor waiter, he could not hear, in that noisy chattering, the old man’s calls – rather wails – for a cup of coffee.

Nothing wrong in that. But the old man thought it was a criminal mistake!

“These waiters don’t think I am worth anything. Bull shit, I pay for my coffee you see! I tell you they’ve lost their sincerity,” he said in his husky voice.

You? Did he mean me? I mean, is he talking to me. Huh, I’d better avoid!

The old man was angry. The waiter had not answered his calls for the last, may be, six and a half minutes (but the man reasoned with me that he was calling the waiter for the last hour or so! Exaggeration? Yes, but who’d argue with a fatherly figure, so I went with his estimate: one hour).

“Get me one strong coffee”, the old man thundered again at the waiter, as though he was purchasing the whole coffee house at a go.

He must be a chain smoker, I felt. I must stay off, I told myself, like a cool customer. For, chances are that such people pick up a topic with you and then bore you. They normally discuss, ponder over, and then coin new suggestions for solving all the world’s problems. Usually they blame the young generation for that mess. I knew of an old man, who was also a cribbing creature.

I must complete this book before 1, I told myself. Then, I must start for my home, take some rest, and then, may be, call on an old friend, party in the evening…or check out with the latest movie or whatever.

“I am …,” the old man butted in, keeping the cup down in the saucer, after relishing the first sip of the coffee.

It was an unwelcome infringement. He had snapped my day-dreaming.

But the old man had calmed down, and settled. He had by then taken out a chit of paper and a pencil to scribble something on the paper; he drew a box, sketched some lines… I looked around, the coffee house was on fire again.

Customers had returned to their table-discussions. The noise was deafening as it was before Mr (I hadn’t got his name properly) Angry Old Man – yeah, that’s what suited him perfect I thought – yelled at the waiter. I paused, to realise that even I was back to reading the book and day-dreaming!

“What’s your name?” He was a little pushy this time. I noticed he was smoking a hand-made cigarette, with a bundle lying open on the table near the saucer.

I reluctantly, and in subdued anger, introduced myself as a journalist, a writer and a researcher. He looked amused. And naturally so.

In a small town, a person with all of that was an improbability, he must have thought. His looks gave me that impression.

“I am an astrologer. Better still, a numerologist. Tell me…”

This time I cut him short. “You are not starting it on me now, I hope,” I said with a smile.

“Oh jast a minute,” he said lighting a new bidi. He sounded soft this time, much like that of a grand-fatherly affection.

Belching the smoke right from his lungs, he resumed: “ha..tell me your birthdate.” The bidi lay hung from his mouth perilously, as if it would fall down any moment. But Mr Anrgy Old Man looked perfect with it. He appeared used to it – Smoking and talking simultaneously, with a bidi in his mouth.

I gave up finally, and revealed my birth date. Then, I got myself buried in the book again.

Intermittently though, I glanced at the old man. He was still buried in some calculations. I saw that he scribbled hastily on the piece of paper and then fell silent for some time, as if he was lost in thoughts. Then he murmured something to himself, before falling silent again, and gazing through the smoke he just belched after a puff of bidi. The process, I saw, continued till he thought he had found a break-through. This was followed by scribbling something on the paper again.

What do I do now, I wondered. I can’t move. I can’t leave the coffee house, because by now – honestly – I was too curious to know what was in store for me in my lacklustre life. I better know what his calculations suggest, I felt.

“Boy,” he announced, keeping his pen in the pocket and adjusting himself on the chair. He looked set for a long sermon.

“Oh boy!” I pitied myself, “You have a situation!”

But he continued. I was – admittedly – a bit nervous now. What’s in store for me in future?

Looking into his notes, he said, “You are laying your foundation for a big leap. Remember, you are about to take off three years from now. The fruits of your efforts and hard-work are in sight. Wait for a couple of years patiently.”

I felt great, elated, and on cloud nine. And much relieved too. Who won’t feel great after hearing such good things about self?

“Trudge carefully though for the next six months,” the old man advised. (I’d by then dropped the word Angry from the Angry-Old-Man.)

I will, certainly, I nodded, keeping aside my book, with a growing interest in his findings.

“What do you wear on your fingers?” He asked me.

Nothing, I shrugged.

“You’d better start wearing the stone,” he said, his eyes locked at something that he’d scribbed about my birthdate on the piece of paper.

“What’s that?” I asked him worriedly.

“A little scar on your otherwise good future, wear a stone and every thing would be alright.”

And how does a stone make the future alright? I asked.

“Do not ask questions. Just do as I tell you; it’ll be good for you,” he scoffed back.

Then, taking a deep breath, he ordered one more cup of coffee. And this time, the waiter did not take any chances. He was prompt and quick.

“So, where do I get this stone?” I asked him.

“Go to any good jeweller,” he said. “And offer prayers to the rising Sun when you get up, he’s the lord of your destiny,” he advised.

“I get up late since I work late nights,” I told him bluntly.

“That’s okay, whenever you get up, first offer your prayers to the sun,” he said.

“And, also keep a photograph of your parents with you. Offer prayers to them every Thursday and Saturday,” the old man said.

Then, he added a few more dos and donts to that list, before winding up.

Meanwhile, I paid for his coffee bills too. After hearing so many good things about myself, I was obliged to do that little service to the old man.

“Come home sometime,” he said, getting up from his chair and about to leave the coffee house.

“I am alone, normally.” He added with a tinge of sadness. “I stay in a small room nearby. Come some time, I will be very happy if you come. I love company of young guys like you, in fact I love to be amongst people”

“Oh yes, why not. I’d come certainly.”

“And do respect your parents, son,” he said softly, his voice a bit chocked this time. “You’ve a great future. But don’t forget your parents in your long and tedious journey ahead.” He patted me and left. But soon turned back and walked towards me. “Don’t be like my son. He dumped me after the death of my wife. He took all my post-retirement money and drove me out of home.”

The Old Man left the coffee house on his old bicycle. His last words made me deaf to the loud and irritating chattering in the restaurant.

I sighed! Poor man, I said to myself. He’s all alone in this world, dumped by his young son, whom he must have raised bearing all the hardships.

I came out to see him drive down the othe end of the road. He was soon gone in the thick crowd on the busylanes of the city.

Looking at the sky, I saw the Sun. He was there, as ever. But it was never so shinning and bright for me as this time!

The Dormitory

2006-03-31T05:49:00.000-08:00

the dormitory

Sunday, January 16, 2005
Mumbai:

It's always an experience to be a part of this room, a dormitory of a hotel in Mumbai's bustling Dadar locality. I prefer to stay here whenever I visit this mad mad city. I know this place for some years now. It's fun, besides convenience, to put up here for a short visit.

It has six cots, each accompanied by a small almirah to keep your luggage safe in the room. Two young funny guys sit outside. They are the room boys.

It's neat and clean and tidy. And by Mumbai's standard, it's quite cheap - 300 bucks for a day's stay! Cheap! Ummm?

And Mr Sinha, one of my five dormitory-mates this time, also feels the same as I do. I met him the evening I checked in. He has the looks of a man who has held top positions. He was an IAS officer; retired just a year ago, I learnt from him within minutes of our interaction. I trusted him. After all, I had no other option. I am a journalist, I said. And he trusted me.

The subject was politics, as it always is in a gathering. And Mr Sinha went burst. "These bastards, what are you talking about them! These bastards don't have brains to run this country. Saale humko kehte hai...tumko akal nahin! Now these aanguthachhaps will teach us the business...." Mr Sinha must have had a bad brush with some leader, I thought.

His intervention in my conversation with other guy in the room had prompted me to introduce myself and know about him. Which he did without any problem.

In fact, Mr Sinha was very eager to introduce himself. He spoke loudly so that the other occupants in the room could also hear him . Others had no option. I was of course the worst hit, for I had started the conversation. He had, alas, found in me an audience.

And what brings you to Mumbai? I asked him in the momentum of the conversation, only to repent later. I should not have asked him another question, I felt.

Mr Sinha was in Mumbai to deliver lectures at a workshop organised by some company on marketing principles. He earned heavily from that, he said as if trying to impress me. Mr Sinha was quick to add, to avoid any misconception that, he thought, I could have had.

"Actually, you see, I can stay in rooms at any hotel. Money is no problem. Those bloody companywallas pay for my stay. Why will they not? If they bloody want my expertise, they better pay my bills. I get good money for my lectures also. I've written 12 books."

As he continued, I fell silent.

"But I prefer to stay in this dormitory; I had had a heart attack once while I was travelling in Mumbai..."

Oh! I said. How long back was that?

And Mr Sinha, who had earlier told me that he was in hurry to go out for dinner, sat firmly on his bed, and took a complete one hour to narrate the whole story. Intermittently, when I threw a look at the other samaritans in the room, I could see a deep sympathy for me in their eyes.

A fatherly Mr Sinha has no other audience in the room. A Sikh businessman from Chandigarh replaced one Mr Puri from Delhi who left for Pune yesterday. Mr Arora has been kind enough to share some of my responsibilities. He too is giving a good audience to Mr Sinha. And Mr Sinha now addresses him as well, so that I can do the work that brought me to Mumbai.

I still have to hear him in the evenings.

Mr Sinha has settled in Kanpur with his wife. He got married after his first serious love fell apart because his strict father, he said, was opposed to his affair. The memories still upset him. Or at least he pretends to be very upset over his failed affair. But more than the failure of his affair, he's annoyed with his father, who did not allow him have his way. The woman whom he married on the insistence of his mother is still his wife, by the way, Mr Sinha said.

He's been doing most of the talking. At 59, he looks 70. And that is enough to lend credence to his story. But he's joyous. Tragically for his age, he's too many diseases to deal with. One, he's already had an open heart. Two, he's a diabetic. Three, which is good for him and bad for others, he loves talking about himself! Yup, most of the time. There's no dearth of stories...

For instance, he'd tell you how he fired a Minister once on a policy when he was secretary; or how a gathering of Mumbai's leading industrialists (include any name you want, from Ambanis to Wadias to the Tatas) listened to him in awe as he delivered a sermon on the latest Marketing funda. Did he not tell me, he's an ex-student of IIM, Ahmedabad. He did. Ya.

If you've any problem, Mr Sinha is more than eager to solve it. That he would end up aggravating the problem is a different story. But Mr Sinha would not shy away from taking a chance to offer his ideas. He's now invited me to his home. He was very happy when I generously offered him a chance to solve one of my problems in the room.

Mr Sinha will be here for some more days. So far, from the day he has been in Mumbai in this dormitary, none of his family members has called on him. Neither his wife, nor his son.

"You see, it's a busy world, beta!" Mr Sinha said last evening when I opened the subject. "Nobody listens to me at my home. Nobody heard me ever. Never did my father, or my family," he said with a smile that looked superficial.

Mr Sinha was sad, as he tried to control his tears. His new story had just begun in the process. And I was there giving an ear to him.