Non Categories
(Reading time: Approximately 5 minutes)
I deviate today from my usual choice of Marathi language for writing my thoughts, observations and stories, and write in English instead. This is the primary language which I have to use for my work in the field called “development sector,” where people professionally do ‘not for profit work’. (This second sentence is just for many of my friends who wonder how on this earth my clients are not earning money for themselves and I still get paid J)
So a few days back I returned from Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh where I visited some typical villages of Bundelkhand region. Mostly drought affected drylands where people struggle to make ends meet on day to day basis and wrong societal norms are still a formidable hindrance to the just and equitable socioeconomic development in this very year 2021. This is the place where you have to keep aside your expertise on million dollar start ups and trillion dollar economies at least for a while and give a serious look to the basic necessities of existence.
1.
So there I was sitting with a group of mostly middle aged women from Sahariya community which were previously organised for realising their basic human rights and government entitlements. The women were frankly not very happy to talk about their struggles of dealing with gram Panchayats and government offices. Once we started to ask them about the daily lives and the hardships, their faces seemed to have lit to a greater degree. I think not many people coming from outside have asked these things earlier. The women, mostly beyond their 30’s seemed very weak and anaemic. Almost each woman had faced some or the issue of health. One woman told about her own experience of how she had fallen down fainting while being alone deep in the jungle and how she got injured with the bundle of wood she was carrying on her head. The stories of her fellow sisters started flooding our discussion. It all boiled down to lack of medicines, nutritious food, support from the family and community and also the government. We started asking them more questions about these aspects.
One thing that they highlighted that most of the government as well as non government aid programmes help pregnant and lactating mothers and children to overcome the malnutrition during that stage. Once a woman is past through that stage, there is no help whatsoever and they are left on their own. This is all as if the women are important only to the extent of the children they are bearing for building the future of the country. I find it highly criminal but in the current scene of developmental efforts there does not seem to be any category called middle aged anaemic women.
2.
I was talking with the head of one organisation. She was narrating the experiences she was having in implementing a HIV AIDS prevention programme. I had not had much discussion with anybody till that date regarding the social issues associated with this and many aspects were new to me. There is a particular vulnerable group which is on the rise these days and that is homosexuals.
While, the government has accepted a third gender category called transgender. From the stories, I could see that there is systematic social push for driving men into that category of transgender or gay. Many times men get into sex with other men out of the sense of adventure and exploring their own sexualities under the influence of social media and porn. She told that there is also increase in the sexual abuse of young boys these days. This particular section of society then gets blackmailed or many times not accepted by their families and communities even if they want to come back to regular social norms. Many of the times these people then end up in their own gay ghettoes. Then follows the worst of thing where there is normalisation of their sexual abuse and enforcement of a gay identity. Still worse many young men find refuge in hijra camps where the heads of camps not just make them beg but by forcing them to undergo hormonal sex change therapies which completely destroy them so that there is no chance of reverting to their previous lives and they become almost like slaves.
There is elaborate legal framework, helplines, police protection and community level programmes for victims of violence against women. HIV AIDS programmes which work with these men have the limitation to the work of just preventing the spread of the virus. There is just no category called male sexual abuse and no recourse of the victims.
3.
Well this is quite different and actually partly tested in the field right in Lalitpur back in 2012. This is based on that reminiscence.
When anybody tells us about stories of soil and water conservation and watersheds, one always freaks about how people have worked in the hot sun burning their skins and the pleasure of seeing water and the greenery after such great physical pain. This is really well found in the history of watersheds in India when it all started in the 1970’s in the face of severe droughts and extreme poverty.
About the year 2008, when I got engaged in some of the initiatives of soil and water conservation work, it was all about mobilising NREGA and how government had huge funds allocated for NREGA and how it could be mobilised by running after non responsive corrupt government officers. I was extremely annoyed with this scheme then. Now in 2021, I find the same trumpets being blown. I am still annoyed (read pissed off) in spite of the fact that corruption has considerably reduced at the grassroot level government offices and responsiveness has increased to a great extent. The reason is quite different.
A number of watershed interventions like farm bunds, farm ponds etc can be done using tractor mounted machinery at about 50% of the cost and nearly 10 to 25% of the time of that of the manual operation. A few calculations that we had done in the past showed that the actual costs can be recovered in maximum of 3 years as there is increase in the agricultural yield. So there is a scope that this can be done using cash contributions or even credit for that matter. When I repeatedly share this idea wherever I meet people from the development sector, the response is either negative or outright blank. People are happy with some sort of status quo it seems.
May be, in the world, where exercising right of getting 100 days of unskilled employment is more important than improving lands and increasing agricultural yields speedily, mechanised watershed development is just not a category to be looked at.
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