Water warriors find a recipe to cope during drought
Community kitchens forge unity in waterless Bundelkhand in Central India
It’s nearing 6.00 PM as we enter Kadesara Khurd, a dry drought affected village in Lalitpur district of arid Bundelkhand in central India. The main lane of this village in Uttar Pradesh wears a deserted look with several houses sporting padlocks. An emaciated cow is sprawled on the doorstep of one of the abandoned homes. “Over 200 people from this village have migrated to Bhopal, Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur in the last few months . They have left their livestock behind,” says Sahodari, a middle aged housewife who has turned a Jal Sakhi or water warrior, motivated by Parmarth Samaj Sevi Sanstha, an Orai (Jalaun)-based non profit organization that has been working in Bundelkhand since mid 90s.
As we speak to her, two wizened old men wearing tattered clothes and bent with age limp past us. Sunnu and Jhabua are on their way to the community kitchen that the women of the village have been running since January to feed the old and vulnerable.
The parched land of Bundelkhand is a story of devastation wreaked by water scarcity. Thanks to 13 droughts in the last 15 years, crops have repeatedly failed causing acute food scarcity. Canals are bone dry. There is no wage work available. Although there are signs of some government undertaken canal construction work, the villages are uninterested in MNREGA despite recent rate revisions. They want work that will fetch daily wages, and crib about the slow transfer of funds (sometimes it’s four months) in the government scheme. Hunger and thirst have compelled many to become water refugees and flee the region. Estimates suggest 9.8 crore people in Bundelkhand are affected by the water crisis and that migration has gone up by 65 per cent in the last few years.
Yet there are many who have stayed back and chosen to fight it out, organizing themselves into self help groups. Spurred on by Parmarth, which works in 500 villages in the region, at least 18 villages in Lalitpur district have recently begun to run community kitchens that operate in the morning and evening. Only the extremely disadvantaged are fed as right now there are not funds to feed all. The villagers were asked to draw up a list of the really needy and then make up an estimate of the supplies needed. These are fetched from Talbheat, the nearest nagar Panchayat city.
NGO workers tell us that the UP government has announced a special relief package for the region as part of which which BPL card holders in the drought affected villages will receive 25 kgs of rice, potato, oil, sugar and pulses. But it has not filtered down yet to the villages. A few villagers do tell us that they have got 5 kilos of rice per household and a kg of sugar but it barely meets their needs. “There is nothing for the APL facing equally bad times,” says Jagdish, whose fields lie barren.
Women as change agents
But even as the government has been found wanting, and the crisis mounts, the locals have been slowly empowering themselves to cope with scarcity. Women have played no small part in this change, the Jal Sahelis working tirelessly to monitor the use of water and spread awareness on water management.
Supported by bodies like the European Union, ActionAid, Water Aid, and funds from a few government departments, Parmarth has catalysed the women to take charge. As Sanjay Singh, secretary, Parmarth, says, “The burden of fetching water falls on the women’s shoulder and hence a women-centric approach was needed.” Also the government’s water projects have focused on dams and not on village level projects — the result is a water tanker mafia flourishes.
The community kitchen certainly seems to have brought the village together. Women of all ages, many with children in their laps, gather in a square and cut vegetables and knead dough chatting away, the worries over water pushed to the back temporarily. “Initially, the villagers were disgruntled that not all were being fed, but now they themselves come forward to tell us who is more in need, ” says Manvendra Dwivedi, a field coordinator with Parmarth .
The other remarkable thing, Lalita Dubey, a Jal Sakhi at Badauna Guggar village points out to us is that all the castes in the village — the Ahirs, the Adivasis, the Brahmins — have come together to cook and feed and even eat together. For an area where caste-based discrimination and politics is rampant, this is indeed noteworthy. Till a couple of years ago, the Sahariyas — the most downtrodden tribe in the region — were not allowed to use the same handpumps that the upper castes of the village used. Even today, at Kadesara Bansi we see that that the handpumps are separate though the Sahariyas tell us that they prefer it this way as the water queues are long and the wait to fill their buckets endless.
As we are about to leave the area, the sky turns cloudy and a few specks of raindrops fall. Looking up from the chulha, Lacchia, an old lady says she feel in her bones that this monsoon they may get some rains. The Paani panchayat has been busy building check dams and creating tanks for rain water harvesting. Hopefully their work won’t be in vain.
(An edited version of this story was published in http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/specials/india-interior/cooking-together-to-cope-in-waterless-bundelkhand/article8566395.ece )
Chitra Narayanan is a Delhi-based journalist who writes for the Hindu Business Line.
