The Hound and the Hare

My nine year old son's teacher told him to see the film "Three Idiots" and so I had also to go along with him despite not being keen on wasting time on it initially. Since cinematically the film is in the trash category and has scenes that a nine year old definitely should not see, possibly it was the film's message against competition and regimentation in education that led to my son's teacher recommending the film. However, a fundamental flaw creeps into this narrative of anti-competition at the end of the film. The offbeat knowledge searching hero of the film in the end turns out to have become the holder of hundreds of patents one of which is one that can be converted into billions of dollars in earnings. The problem is that once one enters the market to sell one's knowledge, then one is willy nilly entering the world of competition and regimentation on its terms and one cant fight against it. The great thing about tribal culture is that it does not put much of a value on private property in knowledge also along with its undervaluation of private property in other things. Possibly the greatest discovery by human beings has been the use of fire as a source of energy for production of various kinds. Now if the use of fire had been patented at that time millions of years ago one wonders what would have been the course of human history.
The unethical nature of the stealing of resources to create knowledge that has then been patented and sold has recently been brought to light with the story of Henrietta Lacks on whom a book has just been written. Henrietta was a poor black woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s and cells from her infected cervix were taken for study and later multiplied by researchers in cultures. These cells have later been multiplied into billions all over the world and have been used to produce the polio vaccine and many other medical marvels from which billions of dollars have been earned by various people and corporations and have become famous as HeLa cells. However, Henrietta's heirs have never been given anything and as one of her sons says - " She's the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?"
The world today is run by a few hounds who are always chasing and killing the much more numerous hares. And with time the hunting of knowledge has become the most important activity of the hounds. A particular kind of knowledge has become power and acquiring it requires money and so the hares ultimately have neither. The film Three Idiots has turned out to be the biggest grosser of all time among Hindi films which seems to signify that the viewing public, who are mostly young, disapprove of the cut throat culture of competition and regimentation that vitiates society today. However, the solution to the problem offered in the film is a fantasy one and fundamentally flawed and this is something that the audience has not discerned.
Towards the end the film also features two innovations by simple people - a flour milling machine run by a scooter and a wool shearing machine run by a cycle. These are some of the innovations that have been discovered by the National Innovation Foundation of India which promotes appropriate technology development by people who do not have professional technical qualifications. But this kind of token acknowledgement of this in an overall message full of myth and fantasy is not going to bring about a change in the present centralised system dominated by hounds.

A Republic in Jeopardy

January 26th was the sixtieth republic day meaning that the Indian Constitution has now entered its sixtieth year. From the point of view of the tribals of central India the Indian Constitution is a great document because it has in its Fifth Schedule made provisions that tribals will if they so desire be able to live and work in accordance with their own customs and if required the other provisions of the Constitution and other laws may be put in abeyance for this. However, in most cases the Indian state is wilfully violating these provisions of the Constitution and subjecting the tribals to unjust displacement and death. The most glaring being the situation in the districts of Dantewara and Bijapur in South Bastar. On the pretext of eliminating the Maoist revolutionaries, who disown the Constitution and have launched an armed struggle to overthrow the state, the government has launched a massive security operation.
This would not have been a problem for the local tribals if it had been just a war between the government forces and the Maoists. However, for quite some time now both sides in this war have been killing the tribals claiming that the latter support the adversary. One of the most horrendous of such incidents is one in which in the month of October 2009 the security forces entered the village of Gompad on the border with Andhra Pradesh and indiscriminately shot and killed a number of tribals including a woman and also shot another woman in the leg smashing her bone. The shooters were not the regular security personnel but tribals who have been recruited by the government as Special Police Officers (SPO). These tribal youths are paid around Rs 2000 a month to kill their own tribesmen who are suspected to be supporters of the Maoists. Thus in a diabolical plan the government has pitted tribals against tribals. Later human rights activists succeeded in getting the wounded woman Sodi Shambo to Delhi for treatment and she is seen below after the operation with steel supports on her leg.

Even more horrendous is the fact that the tribal SPOs also chopped off three fingers of a two year child whose mother they had shot dead. The child Mukesh Madvi is seen in the picture below clicked by journalist Javed Iqbal and published with a heart rending accompanying story in http://www.otherindia.org.

The human rights activists also helped Sodi to file a petition in the Supreme Court against these atrocities committed by the security forces and the latter has issued notices to the central and state governments asking them to reply. This has made the state government abduct Sodi while she was being brought back to Delhi from Dantewara for further surgery. The other witnesses of the Gompad killings who had also come to Dantewara to take part in a public hearing to air their grievances have also been abducted by the police in Chhattisgarh. When this is the situation despite the Supreme Court of India taking cognisance of the matter then it would not be wrong to say that the Republic of India is in jeopardy from its own government.

There is Still Hope

The most heartening aspect of the workshop held earlier this month in Raipur in Chhattisgarh on the implementation of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996 and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act 2006 was the participation of a new generation of young, educated and committed tribal activists both men and women. The most notable among them being Mamta Kujur from Jashpur district seen in the picture below.

Mamta's parents were both government servants and stationed in Bhopal. So after her early childhood she spent most of her time in that city and did her education up to the post graduate level there. When she returned to her village in Jashpur after that she was shocked to find it in socio-economic decay. Not only had the forests and the agriculture become less productive but the people too were malnourished. The men were mostly alcoholics drinking the bottled liquor from distilleries which was available in plenty instead of the traditional home-brewn liquour from fermented Mahua flowers or rice. An even bigger threat of displacement was looming large. After devastating the nearby districts of Sarguja and Raigarh through indiscriminate mining and setting up of factories and plants of all kinds the government and the capitalists had now begun to eye the rich mineral resources of Jashpur.
Mamta chose the path of activism instead of taking up a job to fight the injustice being meted out to her fellow tribals. She first got other women together to set up an organisation for women's rights and later joined with other organisations to launch a campaign against indiscriminate industrialisation. Over the past two years these have borne fruit and not only is bootlegging and alcoholism being tackled but also the problem of displacement. There have been militant mobilisations first in Jashpur and then a massive joint one in the capital Raipur. Mamta spent a lot of time holding meetings with tribals who are in government jobs to convince them to support this mobilisation so that their less fortunate community members could fight against injustice. This led to these government servant tribals footing the cost of the food given to the thousands of tribals who came for the rally in Raipur.
Another positive development in the workshop was the presence of Mohan Kothekar a veteran trade union activist from Nagpur in Maharashtra. He is part of a network of politically independent trade unions called the New Trade Union Initiative. The NTUI has grown out of the experience of the struggle of many independent trade unions both in the organised and unorganised sectors the most famous being that of the Kamani Tubes workers union in Mumbai and the Kanoria Jute Mills workers union in West Bengal where workers took over management of the company. The main hurdle that independent trade unions face is their isolation in an increasingly hostile market friendly world in which the labour laws count for little. That is why it is necessary to form a wider forum. A trade union working as part of a forum like the NTUI is much more stable and has greater longevity than a social movement which tends to peter out after some time due to the lack of formal structures and member contribution. The oppressed and marginalised can still hope to overcome their misery one day was the feeling with which the participants in the workshop went back to continue with their struggles.

The Dance of the Tribals

The Bhil tribals have a form of entertainment and prayer in which a gayan (bard) sings a gayana (song) which is based on a story that has no end. the gayan can go on improvising and singing. There is a burwa or shaman who dances to this song. and the song continues as long as the burwa goes on dancing under the spell of the great spirit, revealing the hidden truths of the world. Thus, this song ends only when the burwa finally stops dancing having become free of the spell of the great spirit. Without any pre-planning the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights)Act 2006 (FRA) has turned out to be like that song. Since there is no mention in the Act itself and the Rules about when the process of claims for rights is to begin and when it is to end it can go on for ever as long as the tribals under the spell of the great organisation spirit can go on dancing and filing claims and challenging the wrong dismissal of their claims in the courts. Since there are still a few spirited organisations of tribals around the country, and their number is increasing by the day, one can bet that this song at least is never going to end!
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the tragic accidental death of the great french philosopher and litterateur Albert Camus at the relatively young age of 46 on January 4th 1960. Like all great literature Camus's works have the quality that every time you re read him you find some new nuggets of wisdom. Similarly even though I was initially very sceptical of the FRA when it was passed in 2006, trying to ensure that it is implemented in Alirajpur district has made me re read it again and again and every time I find some new points in it on which to well and truly stymie the state.
Possibly Camus's greatest philosophical essay is the "Myth of Sisyphus". the way I have understood it is that the free human being must go on rolling the rock of protest up the hill of injustices meted out by the state and that fight itself is freedom. It is possible to combine the FRA, Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 and Right To Information Act 2005 to mount a significant challenge to state power in tribal areas and this is happening in pockets. It looks as if it will be possible to ensure that the FRA remains stuck eternally in the throat of the state as a fit reply to the centuries of oppression that has been heaped on the tribals in this country because this dance of the tribals is not going to stop in a hurry.

Whither Forest Rights

A two day workshop was held in Raipur in Chhattisgarh on January 9th and 10th under the auspices of the Jan Van Adhikar Manch and the National Centre for Advocacy Studies on the problems regarding the implementation of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996 (PESA) and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act 2006 (FRA). The first statute provides for the constitution of Gram Sabhas or village councils in the traditional tribal hamlets that may be part of a bigger village or Panchayat and then gives these Gram Sabhas wide powers to manage the natural resources and the affairs of the community in accordance with traditional tribal customs. The second law purports to set right the injustice done to tribals by not recognising the fact that they had been cultivating forest land for centuries prior to the settlement process under the provisions of the Indian Forest Act 1927 undertaken widely throughout India after independence and deeming them as encroachers.
In reality both these laws are not being implemented mainly because the state agencies and their staff see a threat to their power arising from their implementation. The workshop was organised to take stock of this lack of implementation and chart out a campaign strategy to counter the reluctance of state authorities. Tribals and activists from Jashpur, Sarguja, Bilaspur and Raipur districts of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra attended the workshop. It came to light that the provisions of PESA were not being applied and that in Jashpur where private companies have been given prospecting leases and proposals are under consideration for the setting up of steel, power and cement plants, the administration is putting pressure on the tribal people to go along with these plans instead of asserting their rights to manage their resources.
The situation was equally bad with regard to the implementation of the FRA. In most cases the applications for community rights to forests have not been accepted by the administration. In the case of individual rights applications also there have been many rejections but the applicants have not been informed of this or been given written notice of the grounds for the rejection. Even in cases where rights certificates have been given the amount of land mentioned is much less than that demanded. An attempt is on by the forest department to try and demarcate on the ground the lesser amount of land recorded in the certificates even though the process is still going on. There is also an attempt on the part of the administration to officially declare that the process of conferring of rights has been completed under the provisions of the law.
The situation in the Achanakmar Wildlife Sanctuary in Bilaspur district is particularly disturbing. Under the provisions of Chapter IVA of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972, if a protected area is declared as a tiger reserve then it is necessary to take the consent of the tribals residing in it regarding the management of this reserve. However, the forest department instead of consulting the tribals, which under the provisions of PESA entails that Gram Sabha meetings should be held and the whole process of tiger reserve management should be discussed in these meetings, has told them individually that they will have to vacate their villages and resettle elsewhere and for this they will be given Rs 10 lakhs. There is nothing about this in writing however. The tribals are all Baigas, who are a primitive tribe still very much unfamiliar with the processes of law. This is a clear violation of the law as the tribals cannot be displaced from the sanctuary without their consent.
Thus, the Indian State continues to violate its own laws to cheat the tribals as of old. Faced with this governmental mendacity it was decided at the workshop to use the provisions of law to file cases on behalf of the tribals in appropriate courts against the state's unjust ways. The Right to Information Act 2005 is also to be used to get information regarding the proceedings of the meetings of the Subdivisional Level and District Level Committees under the FRA for the acceptance or rejection of the applications for Rights. Since this is a legal procedure each and every one of the lakhs of applications needs to be assessed on merit and reasons should be recorded in writing for their acceptance or rejection. It was felt that the records of this process should be scrutinised to see whether the legal process had been followed. If it hadn't as is most likely then the whole process could be challenged in court and a demand could be made for it to be done properly all over again.
Finally citing the example of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath it was suggested that grassroots level organisation work should be strengthened and that the trade union mode of functioning should be tried out as it led to ownership by the people of the organisation and its actions. The main reason for the state to be able to act in this lawless manner is the lack of widespread mobilisation of the tribals for their rights. So the only way forward is to increase mobilisation to put pressure on the state.

Timelessness of Childhood

The current obsession with earning money has robbed most of us of the leisure of biding our time. Even the Bhils of Alirajpur who were traditionally a very laid back set of people, these days have their calendars all tied up. They are either working on their own small farms or migrating to Gujarat to work on the farms of other big land holders or on construction sites. So much so that even their happy go lucky festivals these days have become short affairs to which they come in droves from work to relax rather than to extend their leisure as in the past. The biggest sufferers of course are the children. Children love to play and even when they are working they convert the work into play as in the picture below. These Bhil children have collected a weed that grows wild on the banks of streams in the monsoons to feed to their buffaloes which produce more milk as a result. But obviously they have enjoyed the work by converting into play.

The girls are in the school uniform of white shirts and blue skirts which means they study also. Unfortunately the education that they get in the government school which they attend is not at all as entertaining as their work. Whereas the work is not only entertaining but it also ensures that their household runs. Consequently their education is more holistic and they will grow up to be people who will still have some inclination for savouring time rather than measuring it.
In fact not only time but also all the resources are being measured today. There was a time when there was enough green fodder for there to be no need for collecting fodder from the stream. But now the fodder from the fields has become scarce and is a commodity that is sold on the market. So these poor children have to go searching for free fodder as their families cannot afford the expensive cotton oil cake fodder that is available in the market.
This is important because in the present brouhaha over restriction of greenhouse gas emissions it is being forgotten that it is not just pollution that is a threat but also consumption. Many feel that if clean energy can be produced then all our problems will end. However, the clean energy will still require immense amounts of resources to work on and that is leading to shortages of all kinds of resources and also shortage of time and human feelings. Anybody who idles his time or spends time in activities that do not produce monetary wealth is looked upon as a fool. This is in fact something that has struck at the very roots of the tribal world view by dubbing them as fools who are not fit to be part of human society.
Common property resources like common lands, forests and water courses and bodies are best protected and conserved through communitarian cooperation. Even agriculture is most productive when practised in a communitarian manner. Because agriculture is their lifeline the Bhils had developed a system of labour pooling that helped them to undertake the labour intensive work of weeding very easily. By turns the whole hamlet would weed in each other's farms and reduce the burden of work and ensure productivity. One of the major achievements of the KMCS has been to revive this system as seen in the picture below where such a line of communitarian weeders are at work.

In fact the Bhils had labour pooling customs for natural resource management and other activities like house building also. However, such cooperation is extremely difficult if there is a culture which measures time in monetary terms. Because communitarian cooperation requires that people give time to building up trust. That is why we have to become like children again if we are to save nature and prevent climate change. The tribal worldview was traditionally a childish one. Even after becoming adults they always saw themselves as being children of nature and they kept playing games throughout their lives. But now the situation is such that in urban areas children have to start preparing for a life of earning money right from the time they begin to walk and talk and this is the culture that is penetrating through to the whole of society through television where small children are having to perform like adult artistes in so called reality shows.
Climate Change is a peripheral symptom of a deeper malaise of valuing time in monetary terms. Unless this hankering after money and wealth which tries to put a price on time ceases, even if we manage to avert climate change through some technological invention there will be other virulent symptoms that will manifest themselves.

KMCS as Santa Claus

The greatest tragedy that the Bhils of Alirajpur, Jhabua and Dhar districts of Madhya Pradesh have witnessed is the terrible deaths from silicosis of labourers who went to work on daily wages in the stone crushing factories of Godhra and Balasinor in Gujarat. These poor people living on small pieces of unfertile land were forced to migrate seasonally for work to these factories which did not have any protective gear for them and neither were anti-pollution screens installed on the crusher machines which were pummelling the stone to powder and releasing stone dust in the process. This dust was breathed in continuously by the labourers and very soon they were afflicted by fatal silicosis which has no cure once the deposition in the lungs crosses a critical limit. Hundreds of labourers have died a painful death wasting away from the disease. The Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath in association with many other organisations in Madhya Pradesh and in the rest of the country has waged a continuous battle to get justice for these martyrs of modern industrial development. However, despite orders from the Supreme Court of India and the National Human Rights Commission till date neither the Gujarat nor the Madhya Pradesh governments have provided any relief to the families of these silicosis victims. In many cases both the parents have died leaving the children as orphans to make do as best they can. Since their relatives are also very poor this in effect means that these children are living in dire straits as can be seen from the decrepit nature of one of their houses shown below which has only palm fronds for walls.

Often the families have nothing to eat as there are too many mouths to feed. It is a suicidal situation as figuratively depicted by the rope hanging like a noose in front of such a family in the picture below.

In some cases all the young members of the family have died leaving their old parents without any support as in the case of the forlorn and dejected old man shown in the picture below.

So in this festive season when most fortunate people would be celebrating KMCS decided to play Santa Claus for these devastated families of orphaned children and destitute old people. Some funds were sourced from a funding agency and thirty families were given a quintal of maize as a gift on the 27th of December in a simple ceremony chaired by Ashok Choudhury the veteran tribal leader of Gujarat. The smiles on the faces of the children below say how much they liked this gift.

The larger activist battle for getting justice continues and will be a long one that will eventually get these children much more from the government but in the interim a little bit of charity in the NGO mode has brought them some cheer to begin the new year with.

The Roots of Communitarianism

A friend sent me a quote from a recently published book (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Knopf, Sep 8, 2009.) which I found very intriguing -
"Frankly, we hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act. In one experiment, research subjects were divided into several groups, and each person was asked to donate $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. One group was told the money would go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl in Mali. Another group was told that the money would go to address malnutrition among 21 million Africans. The third group was told that the donations would go to Rokia, as in the first group, but this time her own hunger was presented as part of a background tapestry of global hunger, with some statistics thrown in. People were much more willing to donate to Rokia than to 21 million hungry people and even a mention of the larger problem made people less inclined to help her.
In another experiment, people were asked to donate to a $300,000 fund to fight cancer. One group was told that the money would be used to save the life of one child, while another group was told it would save the lives of eight children. People contributed almost twice as much to save one child as to save eight. Social psychologists argue that all this reflects the way our consciences and ethical systems are based on individual stories and are distinct from the part of our brains concerned with logic and rationality. Indeed, when subjects in experiments are first asked to solve math problems, thus putting in play the parts of the brain that govern logic, afterward they are less generous to the needy."
Even though the sample is too small for drawing any firm conclusions like the social psychologists have done in the quote but the thought that possibly the human heart and the mind are not in sync is an intriguing one. As a firm supporter of small communitarian societies I intuitively seem to feel that the social psychologists are right in their inference. Human beings have lived in small groups for millions of years and have been packed into centralised societies only for about the last six thousand years or so. In fact the really complex and highly centralised social formations have emerged over the past four centuries. Thus for a long long time there was really no need of mathematics and complex reasoning and relationships between people were based on simple human interaction. Thus the pull of the heart is still very strong in people even if they are forced to live in a mathematically and reason determined milieu. Unfortunately the compulsions of living in a centralised and market based society are such that most of the time people have to suppress their feelings and bow to the demands of this society. This is important in the context of the present stalled negotiations around both international trade and emission reductions. In their heart of hearts everybody knows that fairness has to be adopted in reaching a humanitarian consensus but only a miniscule minority want to risk giving up the centralised system. So unless more people are prepared to follow their hearts and turn back on mathematics for a while so that a more humane de-centralised society and can evolve there is no way out of the mess we are in.

Give Me REDD!

The most popular modus operandi for mitigating climate change at the moment seems to be Cap and Trade - put a legally binding cap on the carbon equivalent emissions that a country will be allowed so as to ensure that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere globally is less than 350 parts per million and allow countries and corporations to trade carbon credits which are equivalent to one tonne of Carbon released into the environment. There are many problems with this arrangement primarily centred around the cap limit to be decided for each country because that will limit energy use and so development and growth and also involve huge investments in research and development of cleaner energy technologies. There is a clear developed and developing country divide here as the latter are saying that the former should bear the costs of having historically pushed up the concentration of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with less efficient technologies in the past. There are also concerns about the transparent working of the Carbon trading markets which even in their incipient forms have been exposed to speculative scamming of the kind that brought down the financial markets in the recent past.
Thus, there is another school of thought that questions the energy intensive path of development that the world is following at the moment. Energy and transport constitute the main contributors of green house gases and most of this is due to the way in which the world economy is organised - raw materials available in one place are transported to another place to be processed and then the finished products are again transported to another place to be sold. A lot of energy is thus wasted in transport. The production itself is done with more energy using machines because the price of energy does not include the cost of the pollution it is causing. Since such production and distribution is necessarily of a centralised nature it leads to huge disparities in the distribution of the wealth created leading to social and political strife and more wasteful expenditures on military hardware and wars. Consequently the argument is made that first an audit should be conducted to see which is the best way to organise production from the point of view of least use of energy, least creation of disparities in assets and income and so least possibilities for conflict while making a decent standard of living possible for all people on earth.
This of course is a very difficult matter as it will involve a radical change in the way business is being done today. In the interim, since some kind of a cap and trade mechanism is what is going to emerge from United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, it is best to explore the possibilities that this offers for putting a communitarian foot into the developmental door. One such opportunity is the United Nations Programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries known popularly by the acronym REDD. This envisages transfer of funds to developing countries for reducing deforestation and also in reforesting of already degraded forest lands. Since mostly indigenous people reside in forest areas around the world this then turns the focus on them. Consequently if the funds being transferred to developing countries were to be given directly to these communities then they would benefit greatly by being rewarded justly for their conservation efforts. At the moment however, no such arrangement exists and it is mostly the government agencies or private corporations in the developing countries that are appropriating the funds transferred under REDD.
For instance the men and women of many of the villages of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath have been protecting their forests for over two decades now with exemplary regeneration of forest, soil and water resources as shown in the picture below.

However,apart from the benefits of such conservation that they have gained directly there has not been any reward given to them for the service they have rendered to humanity by sequestering carbon. This is where REDD can be utilised in a big way. There are already laws in place that give the small tribal village community in India control over their natural resources. Thus if a big enough effort is made by tribal communities in this direction then the funds transferred under REDD can be easily be given to these communities for furthering the goal of natural resource conservation and climate change mitigation in the interim till a more just and environmentally sustainable global development system is put in place.

The Continuing Injustice

There is no end to the injustice that tribals face in this country. Here is a heart rending story about the travails of a tribal family residing deep inside rural India as related by Sujeet Kumar of India Abroad News Service -
Such is the state of medical care in Chhattisgarh that a woman had to walk 110 km for fifteen days to reach a government-run hospital to get her burnt hands treated.
In September, Phoolwati, 25, and her husband Roop Singh were burnt when the kerosene stove on which they cooked burst in their hut in Bakalo village within the jurisdiction of the Kapu police station in Raigarh district. Sans any medical treatment, Roop Singh battled his burn injuries for a week and then died. Phoolwati then found insects crawling inside her burnt hands and realised she had no option but to go to the district headquarters here and seek medical treatment. There was no government-run health facility nearby that could tackle her problem.
"I did not have a single paisa to get treatment from any private doctor or to get into a bus so that I could come here. So I had no option but to walk the 110 km to get admitted to Raigarh hospital. I had found several insects in my burn wounds and the problem was getting worse every day" Phoolwati said at the hospital at
Raigarh which is 240 km northeast of the Chhattisgarh state capital, Raipur. "During the entire 15-day journey I begged for food from local people alongside the road. Here a worker in a medicine shop brought me to the district government hospital. The doctor here removed all the insects. Now I feel my injuries have healed a little" the childless widow said in between sobs.
A. Tirki, the doctor who operated upon Phoolwati, said "Her wound was filled with dozens of insects when she came to me last week. I have cleaned up her wounds and hopefully within a fortnight she will recover. But she would surely have lost both her hands if she had reached the hospital even a week later."
The first anomaly here is that despite living in the forest Phoolwati and her husband were using a kerosene stove. This seems to indicate that they were unable to access firewood possibly due to the highhandedness of the forest department staff. The second anomaly is that there is no government health staff near her village who can provide first aid or probably even if there is that person demands money to do so. In fact the whole story requires even deeper probing to bring out the comprehensive nature of the failure of the Indian state with respect to tribals.