Power, Pelf and plunder

 

 

Badwar stands perched on a hilly scrap, ready to jump off into oblivion. This tiny hamlet, more a squeezed collection of low roof, mud huts over platforms, is one that does not exist even on the Lalitpur district map. We’ve left behind the only other signs of life some 27 kilometres away in a village called Dhansa where officials have arrived to inspect NREGA job work. From there, a rocky, undulating, heartbreakingly lonely landscape stretches to Badwar, home to about 70 Sahariya families and one of the state’s last posts before Madhya Pradesh.

While the absence of roads has kept away government officials and health workers from Badwar, the loan sharks have been more determined. In 1994, more than 50 Sahariyas discovered that they had between them unpaid loans of Rs 75 lakhs. True, some years ago they had put their thumbs to papers that promised loans for a better life, but when the credit did not materialise they had been told by the officials of the Cooperative Bank, Dhaurisagar that the papers had been destroyed.

The loans had never come but the recovery agents kept their date with the Sahariyas. Criminal cases were registered against the “defaulters” and more than two dozen Sahariyas were detained and tortured for a fortnight at the local thana at different times. Over the years that list of defaulters has grown to 165 while the unpaid loans stand at Rs 31.4 lakhs.

Basudev, general secretary of a Madawra based voluntary organisation, who has documented and collated the loan saga tells us it is just a matter of days before a petition will be filed at the Allahabad High Court by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).

From Panch Pehra in Mahoba to Padui in Banda, the loan shark story is one we’ve heard repeatedly. What makes the Badwar tale more painful, is the poverty and backwardness of the people who’ve been trapped in it.

In 2003, the Sahariyas (18,267 of them according to the 2001 census) were placed by the Government of India in the list of Scheduled Tribes. While neighbouring Madhya Pradesh offers them special incentives, the UP government is yet to formulate a similar package for these shy, primitive people, with no language of their own. This absence of incentives means they will lose out to the better-educated Scheduled Castes when it comes to garnering benefits of specialschemes. In Badwar this power play is immediately obvious in the village primary school, where the mid day meal cook, Urmila, a Lodhi serves the Sahariya children the smallest portions of food. The Lodhi and Thakur children fare much better.

When we ask for job cards, Ram Lakhan hands out his. He says he got it a couple of weeks ago. According to the entries, however he has already worked for 124 days in the last two years. The truth: just three days of work this year. Most of the 50 job cards in the village are similarly fudged. “We are being punished for not voting for the pradhan (Bahadur Singh, a thakur). He says it openly that since we did not support him, he will not help”, Ram Lakhan shrugs.

Singh, they claim gets people from outside their panchayat (Bhamoripur) to work. But the entries are made on the Sahariya job cards. The state government recently announced that NREGA payments would be made through cheques instead of cash handed out after on the spot inspection of muster rolls. The unlettered Sahariyas tell us that would simply add some more bank officials to the list of those who’ve exploited them over the years. Since last year, almost one fifth of the Sahariyas have migrated in search of work. Those who have stayed back will continue to subsist on the collection of minor forest produce from the foothills of the Dhasan and Bandi hills. When that becomes unviable, they too will be forced to move out of the only home they’ve ever known.While Bundelkhand’s district machinery is obviously corrupt and slow moving, it reacts swiftly to imagined finger pointing at its’ ways.

Four months ago, Manoj Kumar Pankaj, a people’s rights activists, learnt it the hard way when Mohoba’s chief development officer (CDO) served him a notice asking for proof of Pankaj’s claims that the NREGA was short changing women and upping migration. Ironically, two days after the notice was served the District’s Rural Development Agency announced a two crore scheme aimed at capping migration in the area. The CDO understandably did not press for any further explanations.

Bundelkhand’s problems have spawned approximately 500 non-governmental organisations. While many have done commendable work exposing corruption there are a greater number whose operations are mystifying. At Chitrakoot for instance, a huge, well-funded NGO with a website of its own, refuses to share with us details of its area of work. We are cold shouldered over the phone. “We need to prepare before you come visiting,” the secretary of the organisation tells us.

Manna Singh Sengar, principal of the Gyan Sthali Public Inter College in Jhansi says the NGOs have had made “exhibition bits of the people of the region to get funding”. “Since the 9th century when the Chandellas set out to destroy Buddhism to the present descendants of the 16th century Bundelas who still prefer being called rajas, though they might own just five goats, Bundelkhand’s history has been seeped in deceit and treachery”, he says.

RB Singh, assistant professor of social work at Jhansi’s Dr BR Ambedkar Institute of Social Science adds that Bundelkhand’s problems are not just geographical or political. “A lack of entrepreneurial spirit, the love of an easy life, a feudalistic social order and the acceptance of corruption as a given have contributed”, he says.

Add to the list: vested interests, banditry, alienation, lack of leadership and participation, alcoholism, drug addiction, a resistance to change to get a clearer picture of what has done in this region of over one crore people.

Thus unlike Badwar, while most of Bundelkhand might have been electrified, the darkness that engulfs the village and the region is identical in its menacing, deep, all pervasiveness.