Finally in the Field

After spending time with the couple’s adorably badmaash (naughty) child and understanding the basics of the social audit process and the other work they are involved in, we met 8 student volunteers and their volunteer team leader who were the actual workers who sifted through the government records and did the meticulous work of sorting through stacks of papers and creating survey sheets month by month, beneficiary by beneficiary. The records in local government offices are on paper and aren’t computerized, adding an onerous difficulty on the volunteers.

They were spread out on the floor of a huge room doing the detailed work before the actual field visits, tallying numbers and identifying families by name the night we arrived. Most were urban young people studying economics at Delhi University, and for some the audit experience was the first time they had been to a village. But their resolve and persistence in their work was amazingly admirable and impressive, even in the field when the sweat became unbearable and the bugs inexorably vicious. The day after we all drove to a middle school, the headquarters of the week long audit process that culminated in a public hearing, where villagers would come from neighboring panchayats and speak out against injustices, retelling experiences and finding solidarity with other neglected recipients. When we went from hut to hut, several women and a few men gathered their courage and vowed to speak at the assembly by issuing an affidavit, a primary source that documents their plight. Some signed/ thumb printed affidavits saying for example that out of 36 kg of rice allocated in their name, they got absolutely nothing. Others documented experiences of being bribed by powerful members of the village to give fake answers to us. Also, a few government officials are invited. On our first day the student volunteers were culling through the sheets of paper and describing the process of interviewing individuals listed as recipients. Sadly, I cannot read Hindi, that too handwritten, except some printed words (when it is similar to Gujarati), so I could not man a file by myself because the sheets were in Hindi and all the answers had to be written in Hindi as well. I could recognize some letters, so I knew a Sandeep from a Dilip and a Yadav from a Thakor but that was it. The initial explanation process lasted a couple hours, so I wandered through the classrooms, talking to a few teachers and peeking at the students through the doorways. These teachers had a stick in one hand and would hit a student if he was whispering to a neighbor. Child abuse!

One teacher pulled me into the room and I had to embarrassingly choke out few Hindi sentences in front of a classroom of forty 6^th graders. I explained the ICDS – the teacher gave me a piece of chalk and I wrote it on the board! I am sure the kids were thrilled with this unexpected flustering guest speaker. Not. I told him I was Gujarati and he demanded I write a few words on the board. The languages are quite similar actually, so by the end of this trip I can understand 70% of conversations in Hindi. I have a natural comfort with learning languages and being thrown into an environment where English is not an option, forcefully developed my knowledge. Total immersion. Embarrassing nearly all the time, but it works.

Then the fieldwork began. My god, it was hot like a sauna. What are those Swedish people thinking? It was the days right before the rains so the sun was bright and the atmosphere suffocatingly humid. My dad and I joked that showering was rendered useless, we were literally drenched in sweat for days. That was the ultimate discomfort – the feeling that my skin was actually lit on fire. The sticky fuel became noxious bugspray. Only a daily Thumbs Up (an incredibly better version of Coke) seemed to provide temporary relief.

My dad and I, two Delhi students, and an American educated IT man wrestling with potent inner empathy and disillusionment with Western middle class lifestyle walked a km to the nearest group of villages to begin gathering information. With several files in hand that documented government claims by month on one half and space to verify the reality from the beneficiary on the other, we set off to find some answers. First we visited the Yadav cluster. The Yadavs had geographical supremacy –we quickly caught on to the phenomenon that the well off members of a community have easier access to the towns, lie closer to convenient areas like hospitals, schools, shops, and food markets. Brahmins, Thakors, and other higher caste members generally discriminated against Yadavs. The previous chief minister of Bihar being a Yadav was supposed to be a symbol of lower caste empowerment. However, the social dynamics of each locality differ, and in this hamlet the Yadavs were the landholders and the Dalits the laborers.

Dalit Tolla

Powerful worker-master relations brewed and overflowed into the child development and anganvadi attendance (preschool) schemes we were documenting. Marx got the worker master relationship dead on.  Many of the Yadavs had stucco houses and brick temples, several cows and livestock— a few even had tractors (seemed like a palace made of diamonds for the other total have-nots). They ended up being compensated 500 rupees per child for anganvadi uniforms, instead of the 250 they should have received. They also got more rice and beans when it was clear that though they were by our standards not exactly rich, they were clearly above the poverty line, even well off compared to the poor in their village. Spending on comfortably living rural families is unjust, when the pool of those who qualify for the malnutrition provisions is vast. But the Yadav clan had strong connections with the local panchayat – one even ran the local anganvadi and probably was in cahoots with the sevika! There were several claimants for the few spots that qualified –five brothers… think about how many “malnourished” children must be running around in their own households and how many women become pregnant or lactating over the years to qualify for those categories as well!!! And their powerful influence caused some of the other clans who depended on the Yadavs for their livelihood to hesitate before telling the truth. We could tell some gave us rehearsed answers.

My favorite kid ever

We continued on, wandering through the mud huts, asking locals with curious expressions where Mr. X lived, where the wife of Mr. Y lived, the names of their children. Throughout the three days we were there, we often walked through the same communal spaces between huts 6-7 times in a few hours, wandering directionless. They didn’t have addresses, so there was no way to locate anybody by a piece of paper! That added to the tedium. Also, many of the husbands of the other clusters, the Yadav Tola (neighborhood) was only one out of several where the muslims, dalits, tribals and others lived separately, went to Delhi or Panjab for labor, not finding sufficient arable land in their backyard. The women went to the field for backbreaking work from 7 till 5 in the afternoon, nurturing the few crops on the small plot of land they either owned or most likely tilled for a landowner for a kg of rice and a 1/4th kg of beans or some flour and Rs 5-10 a day (meager supplies). That is when 3 kg of rice and 1.5 kg of dahl a month make the most vital difference! Enough whereby a man could stay back for a couple months to be with the mother and child instead of migrating hundreds of miles away to provide for them.

The sheets of data

The process of getting affidavits by getting the person's thumbprint

Moving on, the Mahadalits (lowest of the Dalits, how low!) lived in huts made with intertwining bark and patched with glops of dried cow dung. They received nothing out of what the sarkar (government) said they did. Most of them didn’t even make the list. Others didn’t even know they were on the official Indian government ICDS scheme list. Most pregnant women got a few kg near the end of their pregnancy cycle but none when their baby was born. One women was supposedly allocated 60 kg rice, 30 kg dahl. She got 1 kg rice and 0.25 kg dahl! It is outrageous, in a country with the world’s most malnourished children. If some knew their rights and were enlightened by the social audit process and complained to those who handed out the supplies, the officials said take it or leave it. In our tallies, numerous got sub-standard rice.  There is a government social ladder, and each official from the small village to Araria to Patna gets a slice of the pie. For example, out of 11,000 rupees allocated to the anganvadi schools, government officials usurp 7,000!!! It’s absolutely madness! The IT volunteer who was part of the process for 6 grueling weeks told me that the issue isn’t only corruption. I was warned to understand that the government employee who oversees the entire anganvadi and ICDS scheme for the area receives a pittance for his salary. Believing he deserves more, he takes some from the pot. To appease higher officers, they get some too. Only 4,000 are used for the people, and then the land holding well-off few in the village take another chunk.

I believe when you read about my encounters with people in this last few days, how they each gently pulled on the strings of my psyche for a collectively forceful jerk, you will understand what has begun to fester in my heart.

The children in the Muslim and Dalit tolas we visited were mostly naked, the boys ran around underwear-less till the age of 5. The girls didn’t put on a top until 7 or 8. The women wore rubbed and torn polyester saris in the suffocating heat; cotton is breathable but expensive and easily browns. The men rarely had on a shirt. The old women didn’t wear a blouse. What a tight budget, when you have to worry about cloth for underwear or one blouse! Think about that situation! Let it sit in your mind!

Making Bubbles!

All pictures from the Muslim tola

The children were stained with dirt, their hair washed rarely. Rural poverty has a distinct smell, from the villages of Gujarat to the fields of northern Bihar. It has a pungency, an overpowering sensation of being engulfed and enveloped in the odor. It isn’t gross, it doesn’t make you gag or anything. But honestly, with the men gone for months and the women gone all day, the children are not watched over at all. We shouldn’t make these trips personal; we shouldn’t rant about the poverty, claiming it blows our minds. There is an injustice in that rudeness. However, I could not help but feel individually affected by the trends I saw. So many the girls above the age of 5 had a child on their hips. In the Mahadalit tola, almost all children but a handful had a skin condition – bumps, rashes, patches of white flesh. Others had eye cysts or inflated eyeballs, as if these signs were right of passage through childhood.

I was talking to a woman in the Muslim tola. She asked me if I was married. I smiled, I’m only seventeen. But most of the women, actually girls, are married off as soon as puberty hits, at 12 or 13. Those my age were pregnant with their second or third child. Puts my life into perspective in a glaringly, disturbingly, questioning way. Not even one woman, from the Yadav to the Thakkor to the Muslim to the Dalit tola signed their name on the affidavit. Few of the poorer mothers sent their children to school. To say schools are overcrowded is an understatement –50,70 students in one classroom. No place to sit!

Local anganvadi (kindergarten)

Teachers, some claimed, discriminate against lower caste members, hitting them with sticks if they forget an answer or a pencil, even down right ignoring them. Teachers may show up late and students may wait hours to get in a few lessons. Then there are private schools; often low quality institutions run like profit maximizing initiatives for a few enterprising individuals. We saw tuition classes at night with lanterns among the poor tolas. Several students get the fourth/fifth grade and cannot read a word. A grandfather can read and write better than his grandson. Is that not twisted?

One of the few people in the Dalit tola reading

The need is overpowering: we can’t say education is the most urgent need or healthcare is the pressing need or preventing land displacement is the only need. They are all so heavily interconnected and twisted. I also have some problems with the countless NGOs or government officials focusing their efforts on building schools or setting up clinics. Building is the easy part! What about teacher or doctor salaries? What about medicine or textbook costs? Who is going to make sure regular maintenance costs are covered? How are you going to prevent overcrowding? If someone has malaria, are you going to treat them with Chloroquine or medicine for TB b/c it’s the only tangible thing left to do as addressing the root cause is too hard to accomplish? How are you going to prevent local caste discrimination in providing services? What are you going to do to make sure the facility is running in 5 years? We saw a few abandoned schools near our field visits on the trip, and it glaringly pointed out the futility in individual thing based development.

Anyways, I had sooooooooooooooo much fun with these children. I loved that we were there for four days, so I kept seeing the same kids playing with sticks, carrying their siblings, day after day. I would say hi to them on their way to the town or on their way to school and I would get a bright wave in return each morning on the way to the villages.

Those smiles are tattooed in my heart. The kids absolutely fell in love with the camera – all of them became high fashion models. Move over Tyra. They were really shy at first, but soon they were climbing all over me and never stopped laughing. I hate those stupid foreign photographers who take pictures of poorer children all sad and forlorn. I highly doubt that for the time a new outsider comes to their village they ever stop showing their affection, generosity, and mischievousness. I resolve to do an exhibition on children where they are all smiling. Because that is my truth.

Unlike the rally in our earlier stop, we outsiders weren’t allying with the cause of the locals, we weren’t staging a demonstration for the city people and local media. It wasn’t romantic work. People who rightly claimed we were only there for a few days sometimes initially faced us with hesitation, skepticism or even some hostility. They cried that if some of the locals told the truth about their exploitation and the corruption or inadequacy of the anganvadis, then they would face the wrath of the people that they depended on for survival. It was less risky to lie to us. Our meetings were also brief. But through conversing with the locals, listening to their anger, showing solidarity, picking up their babies, I was able to selfishly gather a kind of happiness and tranquility I have rarely ever felt. I hope they felt at least a ray of that glow.

After spontaneously going to the beautiful Nepal for a day with friends of friends, we have finally arrived home to Gujarat, back to familiar places and faces. No more sleeping on the hard stone floor, no more toilet troubles, no more sweat, no more red ants, NO MORE RICE. Well, I can't promise myself all those luxuries, but I am adamant on the last one.

Bihar Begins..

Hey all! I regret that I am posting the next leg of the race right after the bit on Jharkhand –which may feel as if you are reading one of those rambling novels instead a series of posts –but before you shake your finger at my delays, know that I haven’t had internet connection this entire week. Having Internet at my fingertips or turning on the TV on Wednesdays and Thursdays to watch So You Think You Can Dance seems like a distant memory I remember with fondness. It is an odd feeling – those comforts manifest themselves in my mind every few days, especially as I try to fight off the relentless mosquitos in vain or go to the bathroom in filthy holes, but I don’t feel an intense longing or insatiable itch to re-immerse myself in those peripheral pastimes.

After leaving Jharkhand on the 9^th morning, we arrived in Araria, Bihar that night. Araria is a district headquarter town, less than two hours away from the Nepalese border. There, we stayed with two young activists who astound me in their ability to take up a meticulous and unflattering task in order to push the government to deliver its promises to rural poor. Very sweet, very accomplished, very sharp, and very brave in their resolve to live simply. I could see why my parents had visited them earlier and became good friends. This was the first time on the trip we had stayed with people our family was previously acquainted with, but only for two nights. Then, we were off to the field!

First off, I need to explain the work the couple, Ashish and Kamayani do. They do social audits, reviewing government welfare programs by going hut to hut in the villages and asking specific questions, to see the discrepancies between the government records of how much x was “given” to a person and how much, if any, they actually got. Petty corruption systemically built into the government sponsored schemes to address rural poverty and various medical, educational risks associated with it are omnipresent – few of those in need actually receive the benefits the government said they do.

I don’t want to begin this post cynically, because I do feel the schemes in theory can vitally stabilize a poor man’s life and aren’t a lost cause –they can and must work if the nation seriously contemplates bottom up development and addressing basics like malnutrition. Unlike in the United States, the idea that India is a welfare state is not disputed; no one says get government outta my life, even the right wing nationalists. With the gap between rural/urban, rich/poor, educated/illiterate ominously plunging several backwards through the ages, it seems widely accepted that only a government can provide a minor safety net for these individuals.

Let’s talk about the government schemes. The sangathan – solidarity group that the couple and their rural youth counterparts founded, audits the schemes. One program is MG-NREGA, Mahatma Gandhi (added to EVERYTHING in this country) National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It aims to provide 100 days of work for the landless or marginal farmers whose income evaporates during off-season or who have families and therefore cannot migrate to the venomous slum life of urban cites. The program is directly related to rising food prices (when we stop by marketplaces to buy mangoes or bananas or some vegetables, even we hesitate) in a country where the large majority spend the bulk of their income on food. I cannot convey the anxiety that arises when we realize how expensive basic foodstuffs are. With transportation costs factored in, food becomes more expensive in the smaller town-villages than in Patna! Talk about a subsistence economy. How must the poor survive?! With packaged biscuits and crackers?

The scheme aims to provide labor for public works projects like roads and other infrastructure necessities locally, where the dirt roads between villages and nearby towns are often nonexistent or really shitty, raising difficulties for the sick, pregnant, etc. If the government cannot provide 100 days of work, it is supposed to give unemployment benefits to the workers. Also, the scheme tries to strengthen rural democracy by enabling panchayats (elected village council) to lead the decision making process on public works needed in their villages. There are innumerable problems with the scheme: most receive far too few days of work.  Some of the Dalits are completely rejected and cannot secure labor cards, meaning they did not fulfill the precondition for even being in the pool to receive work.  Most don’t receive the full wages for work they do. Often projects are stopped halfway due to insufficient funds. In the Baba’s village near Robertsganj, we saw a paved brick road that appeared as a ruby in the midst of such stark deprivation, but it abruptly stopped right on the outskirts of the actual village community, not even reaching most houses.  Corruption also usurps the actual pool of funds and most allocated money ends up being spent on bribing officials among the government hierarchy.

There are other problems that hamper the effectiveness of the programs drastically. But still, the few days of wages can sustain a family on the brink of severity for some weeks; it can nourish hungry stomachs for a temporary time. Yet it is obvious government officials have no interest in actually making the programs work and merely engineered the program to provide an illusion of caring about the disempowered. At least now they can say they have something for these people but no longer bother to uphold the façade after the NREGA implementation. So you can see how we are hazily wrestling with these schemes and the process of increasing their efficacy. We find some merit in them but beat ourselves in the head due to the labyrinth of uselessness that arises from observing reality.

However, in Bihar JJSS (Jan Jagaran Shakti Sangathan; the grassroots group Kamayani & Ashish helped found) had initiated a first of its kind social audit of the other government scheme that faced similar issues discussed above.

They added ICDS, Integrated Child Development Scheme to NREGA for the social audit purpose. This scheme addresses the plights of four groups: pregnant women, lactating women, malnourished children, and severely malnourished children to supplement their nutrition through giving chaval and tur dahl, or rice and pulses. The first three groups receive 3 kg rice and 1.5 kg dahl supposedly on a monthly basis (I never actually saw this out of the hundreds of names my group went through). The last group receives 4 kg rice and 2 kg dahl. Also, only 99 TOTAL qualify out of a thousand, and the selection process is arbitrary: we regularly saw poorer women and babies with severely inflated tummies not even qualify for the scheme, when those better off did. So few actually were listed as recipients, and on top of that the large majority either received nothing or a small fraction of what had been written in the records (I will explain the dynamics of this later, there is so much to tell… conveying experiences and feelings of the moments is overwhelming!)

Still, we cannot be so cynical that it impedes us from performing the routinely, often boring tasks of visiting these huts and tallying the numbers to see the actual truth of who gets what and how often. The process can be perfunctory and at first I was really skeptical of this approach of finding how many kg of food random villagers received since we already recognize that there is corruption or that the system is flawed to its core. But there is a huge difference of being an overly critical observer of the government scheme or the process of the social audit led by the couple who do it out of their own volition and aren’t associated with the government, and actually doing the tasks and seeing its enormous merit both for our personal development and broader awareness and attention calling purpose.

COAL DAY

July 7/11: Driving through the coal districts. Everything black. The huts stained with black rain. The sand on the side of the roads black. The smell of coal burning and smoke rising. Streets stained with volcano ash. Coal powders blackens the cheeks of already dark adivasis. Black sediments flow into their lungs.

On the other side green fields for rice, turmeric, okra, onions. Cows plowing the fields, tilling the rich brown soil. Red huts pepper the forests. We drove through the roads and villages in contrast from each other. What a juxtaposition!

JMACC, the Jharkhand Mines Area Coordinating Committee; monitoring, organizing & advocacy arm of BIRSA organization for the mines affected people, took us to both the scenes so we could witness the contrast between the districts where coal companies have dominated swaths of previously green farm/forest lands and the sites of the andolans (movements) who were able to hold off mass scale coal mining and retain their freedom. One black and the other green. Going to both areas was extremely important because the experience showed that people led struggles that encompass decades, involve courting jail and getting beaten up by the coal mafia, even personal expenses from meager pockets CAN AND DO WORK!

ABOVE: Both areas of Jharkhand with coal deposits close to the surface of the earth and only a few hours away from each other. See the difference? And the difference is not merely the preservation of some bucolic beauty or a nature lover’s paradise.  The difference is hard-core economics. Land that is rich in soil and water can take 2, 3 even 4 crops a year. These are tangible yields that continue to compound and form a self-sustainable economy for generations. The yields generated in one or two years dwarf the one time compensation offered by the mining company for the loss of land that has been a part of families for several years.

The companies have enticed farmers in areas where agitation has formed a veritable locally built opposition by increasing the payments of land manifold, though they are still often below the market price. The mining interests may be compelled to raise their offers, yet the one time compensation comes no where close to what most families derive from farming and related activities.

This coal rich area few hours to the north of Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, has been the darling of both colonial and corporate forces. The first railway in the entire India was established during the British times to export coal from Dhanabad, in this this region, to the ports of Calcutta for global trade. When Indira Gandhi nationalized coal companies the entire process of coal mining intensified. As Jharkhand’s movement for autonomy began to gain clout in the 1990s, a movement that originated so that adivasis and rural backward castes had more political power, the mining companies began to flock to the region. Many of those who fought for a tribal state in the 70s and 80s ended up being part of the Coal Kingdom! Think about America’s creation in the mid 1700s: instead of a process of development that had to reconcile a long history and diverse rural and urban populaces, the founding fathers had the opportunity to construct a state from scratch, and thus launched the modern republic based on Enlightenment philosophies. In Jharkhand, (I may be simplifying it a bit) as political legislation was crafted and land designated as the government’s was sanctioned, the process of mineral capitalism could be easily expedited.

The principal issue of coal mining in these areas is that the coal companies dig open casket mines because there is coal close to the surface of the earth, and open mines are cheaper to operate than underground mines. Yet the companies, after the 7-8 year operation of digging in a circle, leave the site as quickly as they can to extract the most amount of money from various projects and move on. They leave these massive canyons open, refusing to fill it up with the original dirt, rock, or proper sediment. If they do, the companies do shoddy work and fill up the canyon superficially. The people sometimes build villages or huts on top of the land, but entire houses have fallen in like a vacuum when the surfaces have little sediment packed underneath. There are massive piles of the sand that has been dug out to extract the coal that literally sit behind a village as if part of beautiful scenery. After years, trees have grown on top of these mounds.  Its as if a company built a subway in Charlotte or Ahmedabad and left the mud dug out of the ground in 10-12 story piles in Myers Park or

CG Road.

Mounds of black sediment sitting on the ground idly for years

The black lines are coal deposits and the gray lines are layers of stone.

More piles of sediment left behind

So JMACC isn't advocating the end of coal excavation. They want the ground to be restored after the diggings, so people can go back to their lives at least a little, though the ground would still be barely fertile and the lives of previous inhabitants have been on halt for more than 7-8 years. Seems like a simple, humble plea right? But companies revolve their mission around profit, and spending some months and expenses to restore the soil subtracts from the immediate gain of starting a new project of coal digging few km away. They become profitable only by externalizing the costs, a mantra that remains rigidly in place worldwide. JMACC tries to find these projects out in advance, demanding compensation, stopping excess of land being taken away, and attempting to create some effective policies in the state legislature to end haphazard land displacement. We also must reduce the rampant pace of this excavation.

When there is more coal beneath the open mine, underground mines start to become created. Ten times more deadly. Two things happen. Sorry I’ll have to simplify this because it’s a chore for me to understand scientific processes in Hindi J. With these excavations, methane is released into the air in pervasive amounts, killing miners.  Mining kills at least five people a day, guesses an activist of JMACC. There is some carbon or something in this methane that makes it more dangerous than the methane some use for cooking or that comes from cow mmhmm or our mhhmm (though that is a HUGE pollutant as well). The deaths are isolated and due to accidents or sicknesses, so it doesn’t seem like the epidemic it is. Also, water pressure builds up fast miles beneath the surface, and it has been unleashed on entire communities before, killing several and destroying fields of crops. Dynamites intended to burst ground to get at the coal are fatal as well.

The land displacement phenomenon appears here as well. Adivasis get their land taken away by Tata or Indian Coal Company or some public coal corporation with little to no compensation that their family of 6-8 can subsist on. Few of the local community become proletariat, a working force that many of the corporations delude or threaten into working by razing their crops. Then, they are on the move. Entire villages are abandoned. When some from other districts come to temporarily work as laborers excavating the mineral, they occupy the huts for a few years. Many come from all over the region in adjoining states, UP, Bihar, MP. They can’t go back after the labor is over, because there is not work back home. So what do they do?

People gather some coal and try to sell it to urban households. Human nature is so perseverant and enterprising… they make do with the pittance of opportunities surrounding them. We saw countless men who piled bags of coal on their bicycle and literally walked it to a nearby town, anywhere from 7-20 km away. My tear ducts became moist as these men, many with white hair creeping onto their scalps, trudged on with coal stained flip flops. Forget me, even the men from the ages of 30-45 who were in the car with me would struggle to hold the coal-burdened bicycle let alone to it. These men walked km after km in the blazing heat with their muscles that were fading due to lack of proper nutrition. Some set off at midnight to reach by morning. Others make bricks, trying simply to make some kind of living. The shiny film on top of the coal blocks that we saw is oil, to grease engines etc.  

This man is selling bits to houses in a provincial village. He’s relatively fortunate enough to have a cart (though questionably strong) instead of a bicycle. I couldn’t capture the men on the road; we were travelling too fast in the car.

This man is selling bits to houses in a provincial village. He’s relatively fortunate enough to have a cart (though questionably strong) instead of a bicycle. I couldn’t capture the men on the road; we were travelling too fast in the car. 

We know the situation. Appalachians face similar sufferings, if not so drastic, as Duke energy plunders their communities for the resource that our entire lives so obviously rely on. Yet the resource curse strikes again, and the Appalachian community is the poorest in the US. Coal is the number one source of energy in India, China, and the US by far. We want blazing air conditioning and then want to wear sweaters, we want our SUVs, we want to keep the lights on even when we don’t need to, we want to watch TV, we won’t moderate or restrain ourselves for these poor people. We are middle class! They are standing in the face of modernization, of necessary industrialization. Why shouldn’t we enjoy, right? Too bad for them, maybe next life they’ll be able to work their way out of poverty! My comfort depends upon driving these people off their land. I get cheap energy because the coal companies spend negligible amounts in rehabilitation for them. I mean I can’t avoid admitting it without soaking myself in hypocrisy.

Because of the coal canyon, water cannot hold in the ground in nearby fields, so all the water flows to the site of construction and leaves the khetis. We all know water flows to the lowest point. So how can people cultivate crops nearby? Wells for drinking water are drained. Here is the sick part. Corporations have to do some kinda service to ease the minds of us consumers at least superficially right? They have to say, hey, we are doing welfare for the native people. So they tell the locals here, take the same water that came from the coal pits to drink, bathe, wash clothes with. The water hasn’t been purified AND is highly acidic because it came from coal rich areas all the way underground, but what can the people do? Their wells are dried. And these excavation projects are numerous and omnipresent in their area so they cannot divert water from a nearby river or lake. So they drink it. Then they get sick, catching cholera etc. There is little love in these times though.  We stopped by a center that serves as an organizational structure when these activists go in the field and also a dispensary for malaria, TB (you catch it if you breathe the coal dust air for your entire life) etc. They started 12 years ago after a cholera epidemic killed 50, and since there hasn’t been one death! What local pioneers those women are!  They gave me great inspiration in this bleak area.

We stopped by a haat (local, makeshift market) where BIRSA was organizing a memorial for a community leader who self immolated (set himself on fire) to protest the fact that the government was embezzling funds from village laborers building a well in their community. BIRSA was able to interview him on the way to the hospital, and he died few hours later. He felt that, as an educated young village leader whose position was to deal with the government representatives for this project, the burden of the corruption fell upon him. Of course it didn’t, but he gave up his life to draw attention to such injustice perpetrated against people who do not have the experience or education to interact with fraudulent officials who are determined to make as much money for personal profit as they can.

I don’t have access to post the videos of the interview, nor believe the majority of you have the heart to see such burns. 

Inscribed are his last words – spoken just before his death.

Self immolation makes us shudder with pain, yet it does in fact happen once in while – when people drive themselves to such drastic measures out of desperation and frustration, hoping the brutality of their self infliction will rouse support for a cause that is eclipsed out of the public eye. It set off the Middle East revolutions with the Tunisian fruit seller, it became a face of the Vietnam war with the monk on fire, it even set off Prague Spring. Ironically, out of curiosity I attended a seminar on the Red revolts in Eastern Europe at Harvard when I was visiting the university (among a couple other classes) in Feb. The hour class was all about the first martyr of Prague Spring, who set himself on fire in protest of the USSR’s puppet regime. The fact that these elite institutions have bookish academics who study these “phenomena” and debate its justification and impacts forty years later while it happens in real life for new, more pressing issues bothers the hell out of me.

Also, the open market had stalls where people were selling meat. “Fresh meat” took on a whole new meaning here! A vendor had a herd of goats tied by a rope behind him and a stone. Guess what happened. Exactly. Then I saw him skinning the goat, taking off his fur by turning him, well now it, upside down. Don’t worry, I’ll include pictures. I guess its not more gross than the American meatpacking industry, which is a mechanized and mass production method of treating animals with cruelty by confining them in miniscule places in their filth and then executing them by the millions each day. The form of butchery I saw has been going on for thousands of years. I just wish I had had the sense to close my eyes.

See the goats on the right and the dead animal on the left? Yeah, that process of living to dying probs happened in like 10 min.

Wanted a close up didn't you? Haha that man on the left is staring at me like what the hell do you want?

Sorry, several sad stories in a row. Let's move on to the green and freshening part of my day.

We drove to a village where a local Ambedkar and Buddha reading, Che and Birsa loving, Dalit empowering man and his family were staging a successful struggle against the mining companies. There were 37 coal companies in the region vying for control, 63 coal blocks, and 208 overall villages that would be displaced if the companies stationed their excavations.

This poster was hanging in his modest room! The quotation at the bottom is cut off but is terribly important: Minerals are ours, not just stakeholders but OWNERS! Remember Birsa Munda? And that’s the quintessential pic of Che.

Showing us all his books! Ambedkar essays, science of mining, Buddha and Ambedkar juxtapositions, social change literature... He was joking, “I end up spending most of my money on books whenever I leave my home!" Sentiments my family can relate to...

By relentlessly attending public hearings, (the next one was craftily and intentionally held on the day the farmers had to sow the seeds for the next season) they were able to foster a veritably loud andolan to prevent massive land displacement, holding the biting sharks at bay (temporarily, because the struggle continues daily). Occupying newspapers frequently, staging demonstrations, and exposing corporate lies became routine for this man and his organization, which started as a Dalit (“untouchable” case) supporting group to educate those existing on the margins of society and building their confidence by initiating more than 20 Dalit owned and operated stores in nearby villages.

The man’s father and mother themselves were beaten by dundas by the police.

 He took us to some fields so we could see the cultivations. I have never seen such beauty! (I say that a lot, don’t I?) Yet the factories continued to mar the landscape in the distance.

What is so freaking depressing about this is that the natural beauty of this area is unbelievable. I call it civilizational nature – fields, forests, huts, cows, farmers—that seem to flow intuitively in the landscape. It isn’t man (or woman) dominated. At home, its like we live in the urban world and then go camping in the mountains to “take a break”. Being here restored my “liking” of nature. I was joking with my dad that I’m an urban girl – I can’t love nature. I can like it. I’ve always liked walking barefoot in the dirt, or planting flowers and vegetables, or going for hikes along nature trails. Here, nature doesn’t seem separate from society. They mesh effortlessly.