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On The Hunger Trail

By Jean Drèze

21 May, 2003

The Chambal area of Madhya Pradesh is not exactly a land of milk and honey. Here and there one finds islands of irrigated land, owned mainly by Thakurs, Sikhs, Jats and other powerful communities.

Elsewhere there are only vast stretches of rocky land, degraded forest and desiccated ravines. Marooned in this inhospitable terrain are hundreds of thousands of Sahariyas, who eke out a living from survival activities like selling wood, making baskets and seasonal migration. My stomach churns every time I think about their living conditions in the hamlets surrounding Chharch, a remote settlement of about 500 houses tucked away in a desolate valley of Shivpuri district.

Travelling from Gwalior to Shivpuri and then on to Pohri and finally Chharch is like descending deeper and deeper into a dark well of poverty and hunger. Between Shivpuri and Pohri, one goes through a stretch of 35 kilometres of parched land, with no sign of any economic activity. One wonders how people there make a living. At the block headquarters in Pohri, there were plenty of signs of the devastating effects of drought: falling wages, rampant unemployment, dry wells, dead cattle, a crippling recession in the local bazaar.

The situation gets even worse as one proceeds from Pohri to Chharch, near the Rajasthan border. According to local BJP activists, 52 ‘starvation deaths’ occurred in this area in recent months. Their account of the facts is not exactly objective, and the precise nature of these deaths is far from clear. What is not in doubt, however, is that people in this area suffer from horrendous levels of hunger and undernutrition, and that many recent deaths are (in one way or another) hunger-related. The real issue is not just a few deaths, but the appalling living conditions in the whole area.

Travelling from hamlet to hamlet around Chharch, one is exposed to chilling scenes of undernutrition and disease. The plight of children is particularly heart-rending. Most of them are severely malnourished. Some look like textbook cases of starvation, with their naked bodies, distended bellies and blistered skins. Many have nasty deformities or illnesses — swollen chests, hunchbacks, squints, scabies, to name a few. Adults, especially women, fare little better. Yet, health facilities are virtually invisible in the area. The nearest health facility worth the name is in Pohri, a long and expensive journey.

This year, chronic poverty and hunger in the area have been fatally aggravated by the worst drought in living memory. Crops have completely withered, and other traditional sources of livelihood, such as the collection of mahua and tendu, have also been obliterated. There is virtually no employment in the area, and migrating is like a game of Russian roulette, since work may or may not be available in the destination area.

My journey ended in Jigni, a Sahariya village. Most people here survive from whatever little relief employment happens to come their way. There are wild berries around, but an overdose of these berries appears to cause stomach aches, and in any case they were not expected to last for long. Some residents calmly stated that they had not eaten for days.

Ishwar Dei invited me to see her house. Her husband is ill and she looks after four children. She did not look like the poorest person in the village by any means, yet her tiny hut was bare of any possessions or provisions. There was a large storage bin in the corner and when I looked at it, she guessed my thoughts and said that it was empty. She opened it without hesitation and told me to have a look. The inside of the bin was pitch dark. She offered to bring a match, but by that time it was clear that no formalities were needed, so I simply stretched my arm into the bin. I shuddered as my hand went through thick cobwebs. The hearth was cold and there was nothing to eat in the house except for a bunch of berries tied in a dirty cloth.

There was no point checking the food situation in other houses. It was clear enough that Ishwar Dei’s predicament was nothing unusual in this village.

Some children insisted on taking me to Nathu’s house, saying that he really needed help. I followed them with a heavy heart, wondering if there was any end to this deepening misery. Nathu’s dwelling was a chamber of horrors. His wife is one of the victims of the recent ‘starvation deaths’, and Nathu himself is a living corpse. He was lying prostrate on a charpai, immobilised by some sort of spinal injury. Three young children, listless with hunger and disease (one had a hunchback as well as a swollen chest), were hanging around with nothing to do. I was at a loss to understand how these people were alive at all, until someone told me that Nathu had an ‘Annapurna card’. This entitles him to 10 kg of grain per month for free — that’s about 300 grams per day to be shared between four persons.

The preceding paragraphs were written last December, after a brief visit to Shivpuri. I returned there last month, and travelled widely not only through Shivpuri but also through the neighbouring districts of Sheopur, Morena and Gwalior. I went with the faint hope of finding that the situation had improved, with the expansion of relief works. Instead, I was shocked to discover not only that the situation around Chharch remained much the same, but also that Sahariya communities throughout this entire region live in the same condition of permanent semi-starvation as the families I had met earlier.

Back in Jigni, I met Nathu again. I was happy to find him alive, but dismayed to hear that his Annapurna card was now useless as the scheme had been discontinued. With the new BPL survey scheduled for the middle of May, many more households are in danger of being quietly dropped from the public distribution system. Mid-day meals have also been discontinued with the closure of schools for the summer vacation.

Meanwhile, the summer heat has started descending like a heavy lid on the Sahariyas, threatening to snuff out whatever survival opportunities are still open to them. For instance, in the Pahargarh area of Morena district, many Sahariyas survive by collecting and selling a sort of medicinal root known as sitavar. But this may not last much longer, as the rising temperature makes it harder to extract the roots from the hardened soil, and also to walk long distances without water (Pahargarh is like a desert, dry as a toast and with no shade for miles on end). In many villages, people cling to the faint hope of being employed on relief works. But relief works are few and far between, and wage payments are often delayed for weeks if not months.

If anything, the struggle for survival is likely to get even harder during the rainy season. Even in normal years, this is the ‘hungry season’ for the Sahariyas, when earning opportunities come to a standstill and they are forced to eat grass, roots and other wild foods. This year, they are exhausted and impoverished from the very beginning of this phase of hard times. Growing the kharif crop will call for further sacrifices, as there is no money for seeds and most draught animals have perished of hunger and thirst during the summer months.

Unless relief works are radically expanded, starvation deaths are bound to return very soon.

(The writer is Professor, Delhi University)