DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Orissa Tribals Face Starvation

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Amit Sengupta

Kalahandi, INDIA, May 4 1998 (IPS) - With a fierce summer setting in, people in the poverty-ridden Kalahandi region of eastern Orissa state, called India’s own Ethiopia, face another season of starvation.

“Every two years there is a severe drought here,” says Purushottam Thakur, editor of a fortnightly newspaper published from the small town of Kariar in the Nuapada district of the Kalahandi area.

Crop failure this year, caused ironically by excessive rains has already forced an exodus out of the ravaged and deforested landscape but neither state nor central government has begun action to avert a mass tragedy.

Says a bitter Gomti Majhi whose husband died of starvation in 1996, “Why should they (the government) be interested? What is the need for them to save us from starvation. We don’t exist for the world. We don’t exist at all.”

Majhi has reason to be bitter. She was the centre of media attention just two years ago when her husband died and visitors to her hut included politicians, bureaucrats and even members of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

Now she is back to square one. Her only child, now 16-years- old, is among the thousands of people who have recently migrated out of her village of Mahulkut to escape certain starvation.

Gomti was given an advance of 25 dollars for her son’s unquantified labour at a brick kiln in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state. She did not know the name of the contractor or where exactly he could be reached.

All she could say was that her son was among 58 men and 26 women who were bundled into a truck in the middle of the night and taken away by the contractor. And that was three months ago.

Now she waits hopelessly in her hut for word from her son. The village is almost completely vacant, There is no food in the house, no work in the fields and no hope for the future.

The few tribals who returned have tuberculosis and tales of horror about the forced labour in the brick kilns. The owners pay five cents for every one thousand bricks made although the law says they should pay 25 cents.

Other women in this neighbourhood of landless agricultural workers have similar stories to tell. Many walk 20 kms every day to collect firewood from the nearby forests which they try to sell as firewood in Khariar town.

But nobody buys the wood till it is sunset when the women are forced to sell it cheap to hawkish traders, buy a handful of rice and race back home barefoot so that they can cook it for their starving children.

The next day, the fruitless toil must begin again. Or else the women must follow their men to work the brick kilns or find employment as construction workers in western Maharashtra state or pull rickshaws in central Madhya Pradesh state.

But experience over the years has shown that migration could mean that the women end up as sex workers and contracting sexually transmitted diseases and the men taking to drink.

Several villages in the interiors of Nuapada district, which was a part of Kalahandi till 1993 are now faced with the choice of risking slow starvation by staying or migrating to an uncertain future.

Presently, the much touted ‘work for food programme’ is at a standstill. A local nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and traders regularly siphons out the funds.

Most of the farmers are heavily indebted to local money lenders and traders who have already foreclosed mortgages on their land. The tribals who could subsist on forest produce in the past have been hit by the deforestation and the collapse of the local economy.

Even the relatively well-to-do farmers who have land are unable to embark on cultivation because of the dry spell. And the unseasonal rains in February-March have rotted the paddy says Moinuddin, a farmer in the Khariar block.

Says Dr. Fanindam Deo, senior historian at the local Khariar College, “Actually everyone is a bonded labourer here with suffering relative degrees of poverty and exploitation. The real victims are those who own nothing but the others are not much better off either.”

Dr. Deo says there are no job choices available and hence the notion of “free-labour”is itself doubtful. Everyone is forced

to work in conditions which approximate bonded labour or face starvation.

In the Barpadar village in the Sinapalli block are a group of villagers who are supposed to be cowherds except that they have no cows. Here the children walk about with the bloated stomachs, jaundiced eyes and dry skin that speak of extreme malnutrition.

Barpadar and several other villages in Nuapada district are showing the sustained impact of poverty, starvation, unemployment and displacement. The district was carved out of Kalahandi as an administrative measure to fight drought and starvation.

Some non-government organisations (NGOs) are engaged in relief work but they are too scattered to make any dent in the situation. With nothing to fill their stomachs, thousands continue to migrate, leaving the old and the children to somehow fend for themselves.