Bimla Rani (name
changed) is a 45 year old tribal woman of Bagda van-gram (forest village) in Madhya Pradesh. Her skin is greased,
hair is unkempt and shirt is torn. Her husband died few years back and she
finds it difficult to get two square meals a day. Her house is a kuccha house which is crumbling down
with each passing day. Though she is a BPL (Below Poverty Line) person, but she
has no BPL card to claim entitlements because her name is not included in the
BPL list as a result of the negligence and ignorance of the local
administrative officials.
Mahto, another
person from a nearby village Lakhanpur Bandi, has got a well constructed near
his field under the Kapildhara Jal Yojana.
He can irrigate his field and a fresh crop of wheat is in full bloom even
in this rocky terrain. But still he is not happy because the depth of the well
is around 30 feet and the well will run dry during the long summer season. He
laments that an additional depth of around 10 feet could have made a huge
difference.
These cases are
not isolated incidences; rather they reflect the conditions of all the tribal
people in this belt. Actually we 17 IAS (Indian Administrative Services)
probationers were on Bharat Darshan as
a part of our training. Our tribal attachment was scheduled at Khalwa Block of
the Kandwa district of Madhya Pradesh. The block consists of 80 villages and
the main tribal groups in this region are Koru and Gond. We stayed at the
Tribal Development Centre of the Aonlia village in the early part of January
2013. In the scheduled time, we interacted with the people of the nearby
villages like Aonlia, Lakhanpur Bandi, Badga etc. saw agriculture and
irrigation system, visited the reserved forests and understood related
activities like felling of the trees etc.
A good thing to
observe was that government buildings like Panchayat
bhavan, Anganwadi Kendra, Public
Distribution System (PDS) shop, Primary Health Centre (PHC), schools etc were
present in almost all the villages. Though serious doubts can be raised on
whether they were functioning properly or not. For example, the Government High
School in Lakhanpur Bandi, there was very little attendance and the actual
literacy rate was pathetically low. One prominent reason behind it was neutral
attitude of the parents towards education. Instead of sending their children to
school, they want them to accompany for work. The distance of schools from home
is also a big deterrence in good attendance. Adi Kalyan Ashram School in Aonlia
was working fine but the children couldn’t hide their malnourishment. The same
observation was confirmed at the Anganwadi
centre of Lakhanpur Bandi. The lady teacher and the female assistant of this
particular centre couldn’t give us satisfactory answer as to where the food for
those small children was cooked? We even visited the places told by her, but
the cooking place couldn’t be found. This raises serious concern about some
kind of malpractices in the scheme in that village. Schemes like Indira Awas
Yojana were also being misused by the officials and only a handful of houses
were constructed in past many years.
The biggest
disappointment was in the working of Gram
Panchayat of the Bagda village. There was around 15 lakh rupee sanctioned
in the financial year 2011-12 of which almost nothing was utilised for the
developmental activities in that village. While the common villagers were
wearing dirty and torn cloths, the secretary to the Panchayat was wearing some
very expensive silk cloth. The tribals were so illiterate and ignorant that
they had no knowledge to understand what was going on around them. They were
forced to beg for what was their right. The money was siphoned off among the officials
right from the higher level to the lower level. We tried our best in making the
tribals aware about their rights, many acts and regulations working for them
and schemes which have been made for them.
But this was the
story of a single van-gram, that too
of just two days. Though we bought it to the notice of the District Collector;
but we are not sure whether the situation there has improved or not. Also there
are thousands of other tribal villages in our country where the ignorant tribal
people are being massacred every day. They are being made poor, their
livelihood being snatched by those who are appointed to provide and protect the
same.
The tribal
attachment was really very informative and opened our eyes to the corruption
and malpractices prevalent at the ground. When I see such shocking incidences
spilling out in the broad day light, I promise to myself that I would try my
best to weed out such elements so that I could do justice to my position, myself and my country.
