Late rains bring an early death

Press, 17 June 1986, Page 16

Late rains bring an early death

Once again the spectre of hunger looms in India. ERIC SILVER, of the “Guardian,” London, reports from Rajasthan on the mortal toll of malnutrition.

The women started keening soon after we arrived in Dhar, a dusty, stony village amid the low, grey hills of southern Rajasthan. It scraped the nerves, a highpitched ritual of grief and protest.

A tribeswoman aged about 30 had died of typhoid during the night, an unrecorded victim of the worst drought to have afflicted rural India in 40 years.

She had not died of hunger, a young man explained, she had died of fever. It comes to the same thing. The tribespeople, the aboriginal Indians living in the famine belt that stretches from Karnataka in the south-west through Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan almost to Delhi, are all too familiar with early death. India grows a surplus of food grains. The welfare and distribution systems are efficient enough to ward off a disaster of Ethiopian dimensions. Almost everyone in the stricken areas gets some food and some water. But the tribespeople suffer from chronic malnutrition, which has been aggravated by the drought. They are more vulnerable than ever to diseases of the underfed: acute diarrhoea, tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria, anaemia.

“These people have a regular deficiency in diet, a reduced capacity to survive,” said Mr Heera Lal Sharma, who runs a relief programme for a voluntary rural development organisation in Udaipur.

“The famine has reduced their resistance. There is not enough water, and what there is is not good water.”

The Government acknowledges the problem, but claims that it is coping. “I have spent 10 years in the public service,” a senior official told me. “I have spent all 10 years in Rajasthan. I have never come across a famine this severe.”

The trouble, this official explained, was not just that last year’s monsoon was 15 per cent down, but it came very late in the summer.

“The main crop in this district is maize,” he said. “Maize is highly rain-sensitive. If rain is delayed by 15 or 20 days, production can fall as much as 40

per cent. This year the loss was around 80 per cent. “Nearly 75 per cent of families in this district own five acres or less. Normal production lasts them about nine months in the best of years. This time they had only enough for a couple of months.”

In the Udaipur district the State Government runs a “food-for-work” scheme under which the tribespeople are paid in wheat for road-building, terracing and tree-planting. Elsewhere water is supplied by tankers and emergency fodder is distributed for livestock. - Officials contend that they are holding the line. In Dhar, a scattered village inhabited by about 800 people of the Bhil tribe, the struggle is elemental. Kaisu, a man of about 20 (he did not know his exact age), was earning some money building a stone house for the priest of a neighbouring Hindu temple. This year, he said, the rains had been so poor that they could grow neither maize nor wheat. Because of the fodder shortage, the cattle were yielding no milk. Two had died, leaving the family with two bulls and three cows.

His extended family comprises father, mother, son and three daughters (all married young). Kaisu’s eldest sister had borne two children. One had died.

As we talked, two girls with water pots on their heads stopped on their way to a well a mile from the village, whose own hand pump has run dry. “It is hard work for a woman,” ome of the girls, 13-year-old Laiki, said, “but we have to do it. The water is very low. About 5 metres down, so it is very tiring to draw it up.” The young man, Kaisu, told me his family made do with about 27 litres of water per person a day for drinking, bathing and washing their clothes, all this in a daytime temperature of about 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). In town you would use as much as that for a single shower. As well as flat wheaten chapatis, Kaisu said, they scrape together a diet of potatoes, onions, pulses and very rarely green vegetables. “Since we don’t have any milk, we drink black tea.” On the dirt road back toUdaipur, about 20 women in

vivid magenta saris were carrying buckets of stones to the site of a new bridge, their faces set in sullen resignation. The state pays them 5 kilograms of wheatfor a day’s work, but will employ only one member of a family at a time for 15 days per month. The wheat has to be shared between half a dozen people. Sometimes, as officials admit, delivery is up to two months late (payment is made monthly not day by day). We pass other women bearing headloads of firewood, which they carry 24 kilometres to sell for about 10 rupees (little more than $1.80) in town. The wood,

they tell you, is dead. They picked it off the ground. Some of it looks suspiciously green. The firewood women are helping to solve the Immediate problem of staying alive, but are contributing unwittingly to the long-term problems, the transformation of huge tracts of India from forest to desert. In Udaipur, the tourists’ and film-makers’ city of lakes and palaces, old timers tell you the Maharaja used to go into the surrounding forest to shoot tigers and leopards.

Today a dog is lucky to find a tree. Commercial lumbermen and village scavengers have denuded the entire Aravali ridge.

“We have lost 40 per cent of our tree cover in the last decade,” a Government official acknowledged. “If we don’t do something fast there will be nothing left.” The lack of trees is estimated to have reduced average rainfall by half, from 760 millimetres to 1015 mm a year a decade ago to 380 mm to 500 mm. Last year It was down to about 305 mm. “We are trying to plant as much as we can,” the official said. “We are.trying to involve the people. The main are trained personnel and funds. I keep howling for more.” ‘

His masters, it seems, have other priorities. •