Barely 30 kms from Parlakhemundi, Badigam, predominantly a Christianized Saora village, has been lost to the local and state administration. When Annapurna and her University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) students stumbled upon Badigam while visiting Parlakhemundi during their summer field project in 2015, they discovered that this village had no SHGs, no visible education opportunity for women, no skill development initiative among the youth, no health clinic or any sign of health checkup by the state run mobile vans for months and no adequate water and sanitation facility here.
Afterwards, when she went to visit the collector of Gajapati district about the plight of this village the collector asked her Tribal Development agency staff (all of them Saora members of the community) about the status of this village. The members said that it is a problem village; most of the villagers drink and waste away their health and talent. Here we would like to invite you all to visualize this village, its people and the initiatives taken by OSA and Centurion University of Technology and Management (CUTM).
The Badigam We Witnessed
Badigam opened our eyes to the stark contrast between the rural and urban Odisha. It is situated in southern Odisha, part of Gaiba Panchayat, Gumma Block of Gajapti District. We could easily reach the village through the pukka road thanks to the Indira sadak jojana (the road project named after the ex prime minister of India). We visited this village several times in the summer, 2015 and brought in Masters students in Development Management from Centurion University. Most of the University students are from different parts of Odisha, but were never exposed to issues relating to poverty, adult illiteracy, unemployment, and lack of sanitation in general in a rural setting.
As per record, this village came into existence around 60 year ago when a few of the Saoras came down from the hilltop to settle in plain land near Gaiba village. Currently there are 95 households, with a total population of 443. The statistical breakdown between men and women is 192 to 251, women constitute the majority of the population and play important roles in the village economy. Women also make important decisions regarding the welfare of the village.
Landholding and Outmigration
Outmigration of villagers is rampant and is the only viable option available to the villagers of Badigam. The average landholding size per household is about 0.52 acres. About 75 households are engaged in both shifting and settled cultivation during the agricultural season. The landless cultivate leased lands (sharecropping where they share 50% of the produce with the owner of the land). A decade back, bagada (slash and burn) farming used to give the villagers food security. Now with more flatland farming, they are losing food security and can only grow Ragi and hill paddy.
With minimal landholding, when jobs are scarce, people go out to earn either in cashew factories or construction work, but are hardly left with surplus money. As an incentive for commercial cashew crop, the state government allows them to grow cashew on government land. (Tribals in the area in 10- 12 villages also undertook another commercial crop, rubber plantation, but it did not survive around this village.) The merchants mostly own commercial cashew crop farming from urban Odisha and neighboring Andhra and they are doing well. Many villagers have taken credit from the moneylenders to grow them and have become more and more dependent on them. For example, with Rs. 1500 loan, they pay half of it as interest in 6 months time. Young women in their post teens make Rs. 50- 60 per day (a dollar) working as daily laborers and in cashew factories. Thirteen girls go to the cashew factory where they get a low wage of Rs. 15 per kilo and shell up to 5-6 kilos of cashews per day. There are half a dozen cashew factories around, the closest are in Marigada (5 kms away) and in Hadubhangi (12 kms away). We discovered that these girls have not been to formal schools and can only sign their names. Working in cashew factories, they say, “actually the wage is less and it is hard work. But we do not have any money for soap, cosmetics, oil so even with low wage, we have to go to work. We use the lathe machine to shell the cashews and get trained for it on the job. Our body aches, our hands hurt to crush the shell and we use our leg for running the machine so they hurt” (personal conversation). Construction work does not help improve people’s lives, either. After harvest they travel out of state to do construction as unskilled laborers and come back to the village only for Christmas. The landless migrate out for the entire year. Many middlemen from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Hyderabad come to the village to recruit workers. The able bodied young people borrow money to migrate with the hope to improve their situation. Prakash Bhuyan, a married young man with two children, said a middleman from Maharashtra promised him Rs. 500 per day. He took the train to Raipur and then to Nagpur. To his surprise after reaching the site, he was paid only Rs 200 per week for his food and was never paid any wages. So he came back and now works in the village where he earns Rs. 100- 200 per day.
Health
On our visit, we found that children and adults suffered from tuberculosis, chronic cold and cough, malaria, typhoid, teen pregnancy, and alcoholism, among other ailments. Contagious disease like cold, diarrhea, and viral fever are constant; people die due to tuberculosis, fever and blood deficiency. The nearest health clinics are between 7 and 15 kilometers away. The health van is supposed to come once a month but had not come in the last several months. So, there is no respite from malaria or other chronic diseases. Without a medical clinic, the easy solution for people is to seek help from the magico-religious (witchcraft) domain. Lack of education or skill building contributes to marriage at a very young age, hence the high rate of teen pregnancy. Respiratory ailments are caused by exposure to the chemicals used in processing cashews. Poor water supplies and lack of sanitation contribute to typhoid and other illnesses. Out of seven water resources (five bore wells and two wells) only one is functional. Availability of safe drinking water is a major problem as it is difficult for all the 95 households to depend on one bore well which provides usable drinking water for the entire village. The water is hard and has excess iron in it, as mentioned earlier. No house has toilet facilities; however, under “Swachha Bharat Abhiyan,” we saw a toilet being constructed at the premises of the Primary school in the village.The state government has branded this village as a Maoist heaven because the villagers resent their exploitation at the hands of moneylenders and the indifference of the state officials towards them. As mentioned earlier, alcoholism is widespread. Both men and women are addicted to khajuri moddo, local alcohol. The youth told us that at home parents drink, so there is a lot of fight and tension. They informed us that drinking is a way to satiate hunger and to take their mind off their despair and hopelessness.
The Role of the Local Church, NGOs, and Government Programs
For the last 22 years, the local church, which includes 82 of the 95 households, has played an important role in bringing people together, for example, conducting marriages, and allowing villagers to use church premises for feasts and festivals. However, the church has not played any role in education, health care and economic advancement of the villagers.
We heard that World Vision did some developmental work beginning in 1996, but left the village in 2011 for reasons unknown. The local NGO, The Adivasi Development Society (ADS), is supposed to be actively engaged in youth education and skill-building programs, but we did not see any visible impact it has made in Badigam.
The state and central government initiatives on tribal upliftment and empowerment are plenty but they have not reached the village. For instance, the government has introduced the Odisha Tribal Empowerment Program (OTLP) to improve the quality of life, we did not see any visible signs of improvement on the people. The village has also been declared below poverty line (BPL). As a result, the government provides 25 kilos of rice and 3.5 liters kerosene to each BPL member. The BPL elderly receive Rs. 300 monthly pension.
Education:
Ninety percent of the villagers do not know how to read and write. Few of the village children attend school because they help the adults engage in field labor. Young children take the cattle for grazing and girls, among other responsibilities, take care of their younger siblings . As a result they do not have time to study at school.
We visited the two-room, coed primary school (1st to 5th grade), which has been functioning since 1975. The language of instruction is Odia, even though the villagers speak Saora, their tribal language. We were struck to see that the children were literally self-teaching. For example, in the first classroom, the teacher was reading the newspaper and the children were doing their own reading, writing and drawing. One child was drawing beautiful figures in his notebook. Some were dozing, while others were loitering outside.
In the second classroom, the teacher was busy doing paperwork while a child wrote numbers on the blackboard. When we asked, none of the students could read the numbers on the board. The teacher blamed it on their lack of Odia language skills. When it was time for midday meal, many children gathered at the school. We found out that the children go to school every day mainly for the mid-day meal.
The present initiative by OSA and Centurion
Contrary to all the reports calling the Saoras most primitive constituting the majority in this region, the youth show a resiliency in their social systems to take advantage of opportunities under conditions of scarcity. When we asked the young members, majority of women, who had never been to school because of structural and cultural constraints, they told us that they were interested in learning how to read and write and acquire skills to land them jobs in the larger economy.
We were deeply moved by our experience and discussed our findings with the administrators at Centurion University (www.cutm.ac.in) as well as with like-minded friends from Odisha in the United States. We helped establish a sewing machine center and a night school for the young women in Badigam. A recent judgment of the Supreme Court regarding women’s economic empowerment applies to these women’s initiative. In directing the Chhattisgarh government to appoint a woman Excise Sub Inspector as Deputy Superintendent of Police after granting her relief in the upper age limit, the justices observed that “It would naturally lead to empowerment of women, which is the need of the hour… Empowerment of women… is perceived as equipping them to be economically independent, self-reliant, with positive esteem to enable them to face any situation and they should be able to participate in the development activities” (Jain, Devaki, A judgment for Women’s Rights, The Hindu, February 15, 2016).
Now two teachers are working with the youth in the village. One runs the night school and the other teaches sewing to women in the village. Currently, the night school has 30 students and 17 women are learning to sew and are ready to sell some garments they have produced in the nearby local market. Together we have invested in procuring six commercial sewing machines with the cooperation of Centurion. The university has engaged one intern to coordinate this project in Badigam. The Government of India has initiated ‘Make in India’ campaigns and has collaborated with World Bank, USAID among other international bodies to impart employable skills to the youth, especially women for their economic empowerment. The Skill India initiative seeks to build vocational skills across the country, but most of the centers are located in the urban areas. Instead of luring the youth away from the village to cities like Bhubaneswar and far away places where they feel alienated, our focus is, first, to take educational skill training institutions like Centurion closer to the grassroots people.
Odisha Society of the Americas (OSA) has taken up the Badigam initiative as an Adopt-A-Village service project. This year Ms. Erin Ramsden, the Co-curricular Program Coordinator at College Nine, University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) focused her course titled Global Action on learning about the interconnected issues that affect the women of Badigan village and coordinated a fundraiser to benefit the women of the village. This annual student-taught course seeks to focus on an international social justice issue and take action to make a tangible difference on the issue. Approximately 70 students from the university took up the project to support the night school for youth and teaching tailoring to adolescent women in Badigam village. The class organized a fundraising event in February 2016, to supply the sewing machines to the women of Badigam. They raised 2600 dollars to keep the project going. OSA has played an instrumental role in making arrangement for these funds to be transferred to Centurion, which is managing this project.
When we first visited the village, the state government had dismissed it as a problem village. However our dream for Badigam is to see these women economically empowered and politically active in the decision making process in the village and larger community. Our hope is to help the women to become the models for others in their village.
