By Keya Acharya
GUNDUR, India, Jun 16 1999 (IPS)

Twenty nine-year-old Periachami or ‘big god’ in Tamil, one of southern India’s four major languages, stands abashedly aside, holding his little son in his arms, while his wife, Soundarya (beauty), is nonplussed by the attention.

Periachami has a bright, airy house, with shining plastic- moulded furniture, electric lights and a radio-cassette player, even cooking-gas (liquefied petroleum), unaffordable to the poor in India.

The couple earn daily wages in a coffee estate near Gundur, the village named after the Gaundar tribals of the Shevarayan hills in the Eastern Ghat ranges in southern Tamil Nadu state.

Periachami’s brother, 21-year-old Mahadesha, with beautiful, dark-etched eyebrows in a sultry, rebellious face that turns shy when questioned, is seemingly less content as a “sub-teacher”.

Sitting out in the twilight and carving a knife-handle, Mahadesha says he dropped out from the government technical institute at Salem, 25 km away, unable to afford the 3,000 rupee (roughly 70 dollars) fee.

A secondary-school graduate, he now teaches at the village school and earns about 25 dollars monthly from the government- paid school teacher, who finds it easier to share his salary than traverse the difficult road to Gundur.

The Gaundars are the largest indigenous group in the mainly tribal Shevarayan Hills, and they have done well for themselves, making good use of government-aided programmes for tribal development.

Periachami’s colourful brick and concrete house was built five years with money (691 dollars) given to him under the Indian government’s Tribal Self-help scheme. The scheme has now hiked the allowance amount to 1,047 dollars for every household.

Being allowed to use local technology for housebuilding has meant the Gaundars themselves acquired the requisite skills and found a new source of income.

Other income-earning schemes for tribals include subsidised loans for starting self-help societies for women, helping farmers sell their produce and stipends for skill-learning endeavours.

The government also provides free education, concessional student fares, cash gifts at marriage and pregnancy, financial aid at the death of the head of the family, subsidised fuel and other schemes for the welfare of India’s roughly 200 million tribal population.

All 75 of Gundur’s house-owners own land given to them by the government, mostly through the tribal ‘patta scheme’, whereby the land faces forfeiture if not cultivated within five years of allotment.

Some Gaundars own land given by the state’s Coffee Board on condition the produce is sold back to the Board. Now decentralisation of the coffee-trade has made them independent owners.

Other Gaundars have found work as daily-wage workers on trucks plying from Salem to Yercaud, the hill-town 19 km above Gundur.

Provided with government ‘ration-cards’ they buy cereals, kerosene and sugar at highly-subsidised prices, and mutton at an expensive 100 rupees (2.4 dollars) per kilo from the village butcher who manages to sell one goat every Sunday.

The Gaundar community is a socioeconomic success story, escaping the schism of caste prejudice widespread in India.

Reverend Selvaraj, the Episcopalian pastor says there might be “a little bit of untouchability” at Maramangalam, on the hill-range across from Gundur, but Periachami’s grey-haired mother doesn’t remember it being a practice in her lifetime.

Different religions and beliefs seem to co-exist. Soundar, the Episcopalian Gaundar ‘missionary’ says he is a “Christian” in church, but part of the village community otherwise.

Christian missions have long been a part of these hills, big land owners with over 4,000 acres in coffee-holdings alone. While the century-old Salesian order of the Roman Catholic church is the oldest Christian presence, others include the Lutheran, Pentecostal, Episcopalian and Seventh-day Adventist churches.

But the tribals have cannily made the best of the ‘benefits’ they offer. Mahadesh, 14, is Episcopalian, yet studies free at the Salesian Catholic school in Yercaud, and grins when asked if the Salesians know he is Episcopalian.

Having scored a good enough 68 percent in his examinations,

Mahadesh has his own plans for the future. “I want to train in computers,” he says.

About 50 percent of the seventy children studying for free at the Episcopalian school in Salem are girls. Their mothers are illiterate, but the new generation will change the gender status, says Rev Selvaraj.

In the absence of government health care, missionary-run clinics are left to deal with a variety of problems. But “we have no testing kits and no expertise to say if the repeated chest infections or increasing sexually transmitted diseases is to do with AIDS,” says Sister Michael of Providence Maternity Hospital in Yercaud, run by the Holy Cross nuns.

The Episcopalians have now introduced ‘morality lessons’ at their night-schools. Healthy sexual practices, safe sex and the danger of child-marriages, still prevalent, is their way of trying to tackle the problem.

“The government does not pay attention to health issues in interior tribal areas,” points out pastor Selvaraj, worried that the success in some areas could be neutralised by the neglect of others.

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