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The human face of poverty The poor in India are, too often, reduced to statistics. In the dry language of development reports and economic projections, the true misery of the 312 million who live below the poverty line, or the 26 million displaced by various projects, or the 13 million who suffer from tuberculosis gets overlooked. In this thoroughly researched study of the poorest of the poor, we get to see how they manage, what sustains them, and the efforts, often ludicrous, to do something for them. The people who figure in this book typify the lives and aspirations of a large section of Indian society, and their stories present us with the true face of development.

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Sociologie, société et politique

Travel writing

India

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184757347
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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P. SAINATH
Everybody Loves a Good Drought
Stories from India s Poorest Districts
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
Still Crazy After All These Years
A brief Introduction to the Absurd
Very Few Specimens-But a Lot of Bull
Ramdas Korwa s Road to Nowhere
What s in a Name? Ask the Dhuruas!
The Trickle Up & Down Theory
Health in Rural India
Dr Biswas Gets a Taste of Palamau s Medicine
A Dissari Comes Calling
Malaria For All By 2000?
This Is the Way We Go to School
A look At Rural Education
There s No Place Like School
The Head of Departments
Where Students Want to be Masters
And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth
The Problems of Forced Displacement
In the Army s Line of Fire - 1
In the Army s Line of Fire - 2
Chikapar: Chased by Development - 1
Chikapar: Chased by Development - 2
Banning the Bees from Honey
The House that Luaria Built - 1
The House that Luaria Built - 2
Big Dam, Little Water
Neema: Portrait of a Village Doomed
And Silent Trees Speak
Beyond the Margin
Survival Strategies of the Poor
The Risky Climb of Ratnapandi
Recycling Energy, Godda Style
The Leaf that Topples Governments
The Vanishing World of the Birhors
Orissa s Bricks of Burden
Surguja s Silent Ban on Bullock-carts
The Hills of Hardship
Kahars Take the Count
And His Name was Tuesday
Footloose, not Fancy-free
The Ones that Didn t Get Away
Lenders, Losers, Crooks & Credit
Usury, Debt and the Rural Indian
The Tyranny of the Tharagar
Slaves with Salaries and Perks
The Return of the Moneylender
Of Migrants & Mortgages
Take a Loan, Lose Your Roof
Knowing Your Onions in Nuapada
Crime & No Punishment
Targeting the Poor
Bhoodan - the Last Believer
The Sorrows of Subhaso
Has Anyone Seen My Land?
The Pain of Being a Parhaiya
Bondas in Bondage
After the Second Silence
Where Projects Matter and People Don t - 1
Where Projects Matter but People Don t - 2
Despots, Distillers, Poets & Artists
Characters of the Countryside
The Ex-Man-Eater of Manatu
Hey, Hey, Hey, it s a Beautiful Day!
A Day at the Distillers
Fowl Play in Malkangiri
Minstrels With a Mission
Valia the Honest Chowkidar
The Writer and the Village
The Art of Pema Fatiah
Everybody Loves a Good Drought
Water Problems, Real and Rigged
The Sale of a Girl - 1
The Sale of a Girl - 2
The Water Lords of Ramnad - 1
The Water Lords of Ramnad - 2
Searching for Water in Pudukkottai - 1
Searching for Water in Pudukkottai - 2
Surguja s Politics of Drought & Death - 1
Surguja s Politics of Drought and Death - 2
Palamau-after the drought
With Their Own Weapons
When the Poor Fight Back
A Success Carved in Stone
Women Versus Arrack-1
Women Versus Arrack - 2
Van Samitis & Vanishing Trees
Whose Forest is it, Anyway?
Who Says Money Doesn t Grow on Trees?
To Market for Greens, Back with Elephant
Where There is a Wheel
Footnote
The Sale of a Girl - 1
Poverty, Development & the Press
Appendix 1: The Official Poverty Line
Appendix 2: The Districts: A Few Indicators
Glossary
References
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
EVERYBODY LOVES A GOOD DROUGHT
Palagummi Sainath is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist. He took an M.A. in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and joined the United News of India in 1980. Later he became foreign editor of The Daily and deputy chief editor of the weekly Blitz in Mumbai. In early 1993 he left Blitz to work full-time on rural poverty, after winning a Times of India fellowship that enabled him to pursue the subject. His work in that area won him a further twelve awards and fellowships over the next two years, including the prestigious European Commission s journalism award, the Lorenzo Natali Prize.
Sainath has been a visiting lecturer in journalism, development and politics at universities in India, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. He has been directly involved in training journalists and has also been on the faculty of the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, for the past ten years. A regular contributor to The Telegraph in Calcutta, he also writes for the fortnightly Frontline and the daily Business Line in Madras.
This one s for Appan
Introduction
This book is based on a series of reports I filed for the Times of India from some of the country s poorest districts. My visits to those districts began in May 1993 on a Times Fellowship. The last detailed tour I made of one of them for the purpose of researching this book was in June 1995. The reports, then and now, are on the living conditions of the rural poor.
The idea was to look at those conditions in terms of processes. Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too.
You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger-again just one aspect of poverty-is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging-and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.
What is the access of the hundreds of millions of rural poor to health and education? Do they enjoy the same rights and entitlements as other Indians? If not, what prevents them from doing so? Often, the forms of exploitation that breed and sustain poverty get no more than a cursory glance.
Less than three years ago, an expert group set up by the Planning Commission submitted its report on the Estimation of Proportion and Number of Poor . The group, which included some of India s leading economists, recommended changes in the Commission s methods of estimating poverty. Their approach found the number of those below the poverty line to be 312 million. Or close to 39 per cent of the population. Now, the government says a later survey than that used by the group shows that those below the official poverty line came down to 19 per cent of the population in 1993-94. To get to this result, the Planning Commission has, in part, recycled old, discredited methods of calculation. In the process, it has done away with the suggestions of its own expert group.
Oddly, the same Government of India waved a different wand at the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen. And that was less than nine months before it found a fall in poverty in the country. At that summit, it presented a document saying 39.9 per cent of Indians were below the poverty line. It was, after all, begging for money from donors. The more the poor, the more the money. At home, less than 300 days later, it produced the 19 per cent estimate. (Those intrigued by the mysteries of the official poverty line can look at Appendix 1 at the back of the book.)
While conceding the importance of that debate, I have largely ducked it in this book. The idea here was to focus on people and not on numbers. Not that the two are unrelated. The people in this book are much like millions and millions of other Indians in many other districts. (Of the poor in India, around 40 per cent are landless agricultural labourers. Another 45 per cent are small or marginal farmers. Of the remaining, 7.5 per cent are rural artisans. Others make up the rest. Most of those in the districts I visited belonged to the first two groups.)
But I did want to escape what Swami Vivekananda once described as the propensity of the Indian elite to discuss for hours whether a glass of water ought to be taken with the left hand or the right hand. So the focus remains on people and their problems.
I mostly visited the districts in the off-agricultural seasons. The question for me was: What do the poor do in some 200-240 days during which there is no agriculture in their areas? How do they survive? What are their coping mechanisms? What kind of jobs do they find?
The answers led me to far more than the ten districts I had set out to cover. In most of these areas, huge sections of the population simply upped and migrated after the harvest. Often, they took their families with them. So I ended up travelling and living with the migrants in districts other than my own. At the end of it, I had covered close to 80,000 km in seven states across the country. The sixty-eight reports in this book, though, are mostly from eight districts that I concentrated on. These were Ramnad and Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, Godda and Palamau in Bihar, Malkangiri and Nuapada in Orissa and Surguja and Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh. There are also a few from old Koraput and Kalahandi, both in Orissa. (I was unable to complete work on two districts I had chosen in Uttar Pradesh.)
I spent around a month in the villages of each of the districts during my first year and a quarter on the project. In some cases, I returned to the same district more than once. At the back of the book is an appendix with some basic data on the places I went to and the periods dur