The Bhil Adivasi Mobilisation for Climate Action

 Introduction

Tribal Development in India has been problematical from the time of independence. This has been due to a conflicting situation arising from the opposition between the traditional community based subsistence economy of the Adivasis and the modern market based growth oriented thrust of the mainstream economy. The challenge for the State has been to integrate the Adivasis into the modern economy in a manner that was beneficial to them. This has generally not been possible because the Adivasis have lacked the requisite skills for this and the government system for equipping them with these skills has malfunctioned. Moreover, in order to save on the costs associated with modern development the Adivasis have often not been recompensed and rehabilitated properly for the displacement that they have had to face as resources have been extracted from their traditional habitats.

Not surprisingly this has led to dissatisfaction on the part of the Adivasis. This in turn has given rise to outright political revolt, rights based New Social Movements of Adivasis and also an emergence of Non-Governmental Organisations for bringing about better tribal development. Decentralised and local community controlled development has been acknowledged as a major desideratum for tackling tribal deprivation by scholars. With the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Elinor Ostrom in 2009, even mainstream economics has come to acknowledge the importance of collective action for the management of common pool resources. This has also gained in importance currently because of the benefits in terms of mitigation of climate change that such communitarian natural resource management can achieve. The collective action undertaken by the Bhil and Bhilala Adivasis in West-Central India to secure their rights and entitlements and in the process mitigate climage change are detailed here.

2. Traditional Bhil Society

The Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India have traditionally had a communitarian culture based on a subsistence livelihood pattern that ensured sustainable use of their natural resource bases. The important characteristics of traditional Bhil society are as follows -

1.      Habitations of small communities linked together by strong kinship ties

2.      Customs of labour pooling in all social and economic activities

3.      System of interest free loans in cash and kind

4.      Minimal interaction with the external centralised trade based economy

5.      High dependence on forests for daily as well as agricultural needs

6.      Social customs that ensured the redistribution of the surplus of individual families among the community

There was thus a minimal role in this society for accumulation, trade and monetary profits and so it continued for ages at a low level resource use equilibrium. However, Bhil society is patriarchal like others and so women have to bear the double burden of poverty and patriarchal oppression.

3. Colonial Dispossession

The Maratha invasion of the region in the late eighteenth century and later the advent of the British colonialists in the early eighteenth century the situation changed drastically. The penetration of the modern market economy and the settling of non-tribal peasant farmers began in the Bhil areas. This put the Bhils in a precarious situation with the beginning of a process of alienation from their natural resource bases and their integration as ill paid debt ridden labourers in the centralised market economy.

The British enacted the Indian Forest Act in 1865 and took vast areas of community forests out of the control of forest dweller communities and handed over their management to the Forest Department created by it and this was the single most debilitating development for the Adivasis in India. Even though this act was implemented only in the provinces directly controlled by the British it nevertheless provided the new direction of commercial exploitation of forests to forest management in the Princely States that largely ruled over the Bhil areas and so they too were adversely affected.

4. Post Colonial Situation

Ironically, the coming of independence aggravated the livelihood situation of the Bhils instead of  improving it. Most of the Bhil areas that were under the governance of Princely States prior to independence were assimilated into the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and the Indian Forest Act (1927) (IFA) was implemented. Vast areas of forests which were earlier still being managed by the Bhils with the Princely States only nominally in control, were converted into Reserved Forests.

The Bhils mostly were illiterate and so did not understand the legal procedures for conversion of their habitats into Reserved Forests and so lost most of their lands.  Under the IFA, the government “can constitute any forest land or waste land which is the property of Government or over which the Government has proprietary rights, a reserved forest, by issuing a notification of this effect”. Settlement of rights was not carried out and large areas remain unsurveyed even today. The history of forest management thereafter has been one of continuous deprivation of the Adivasis and is briefly described below followed by a description of the failure of economic and social development schemes in Tribal areas.

4.1 Disempowerment and Maldevelopment of Bhil Adivasis

The situation of the Bhils was made worse by the fact that government services like education, development extension and health have not functioned properly and so the Adivasis have been deprived of the welfare benefits that they were entitled to under various schemes. Finally the patriarchal nature of Bhil society led to the burden of increasing poverty due to wrong development policies falling disproportionately on the women. The necessity of bearing more children to get male progeny has also led to a population explosion, increasing pressure on the natural resource base.

4.1.1 Decline of Local Self Governance - The most debilitating phenomenon immediately after independence was the marginalisation of the customary community based local self governance systems of the Bhils. The third tier of Panchayati Raj was not set up and instead the power in rural areas was transferred to the bureaucracy and especially the Forest Department and Police. The Forest Department staff took undue advantage of the restrictive provisions of the Indian Forest Act to demand bribes from the Bhils to allow them access to the forests without which they could not survive but which had become legally proscribed. The Police interfered with the traditional communitarian dispute resolution mechanisms of the Bhils and instead forced them to report their problems to the Police leading to unnecessary arrests and litigation.  Even though the Bhils elected their own representatives to the state and national legislatures due to the policy of reservation this did not translate into power for the Bhils at large as the elected representatives went along with the overall policy of marginalisation of the Adivasis.

As a result, the general Bhil population was completely disempowered and left at the mercy of the bureaucracy. This disempowerment is the root cause of the mal-development of the Bhil areas. The specific micro level needs and aspirations of the Bhils have not been articulated and so macro level development policies that have been pursued have been inimical to them.

Thus, the actual state policy that evolved for Bhil tribal areas was as follows - “ top priority has been given to a programme of rapid industrialisation and extension of means of communication to the most interior regions. Our firm view is that the development of land and agriculture alone will not be adequate for the rehabilitation of the tribal communities. Agricultural land is insufficient and cannot serve the needs of even half the tribal population. The tribal areas are rich in industrial and power potential. There is no reason why in the wider interest of the nation and in the long-term interest of the Adivasis themselves, industries should not be developed and localised in tribal areas”. 

4.1.2 Industrial Development versus Tribal Development - The assumption that industrial development in tribal areas is in the long-term beneficial to them has been proved to be totally fallacious. Invariably Adivasis are not rehabilitated and compensated properly for the loss of their traditional livelihoods and neither they are trained to gain employment in the new industries that are set up. The industrial areas set up on tribal lands in West-Central India are an example of this. The government provided cheap land and other subsidised infrastructure to the industrialists along with tax-holidays but the displaced Adivasis were given only pittances as compensation. Not being educated or skilled they did not get any of the permanent jobs that were created and are even today working as casual labourers. Pithampur, Indore, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Surat and Kota, which are the main industrial centres in West-Central India in fact draw in Bhils from the whole region as casual labourers.

The other fallacious assumption is that agricultural land was insufficient to provide suitable livelihoods to the Adivasis. Inadequate attention was paid to developing the productivity of dryland agriculture on sub-optimal soils in upper watersheds on which the Bhils are dependent. Instead stress was put on developing green revolution agriculture on the plain lands with irrigation and chemical inputs. This was totally unsuitable to the hilly dry land farms of the Bhils. Today the green revolution technologies are proving to be unsuitable for the areas where they were started off with in the 1960s in Punjab and Haryana primarily due to soil quality degradation and lesser and costlier avialability of water and chemical inputs.

A resource conservation policy for land, water and forests, a research and development policy for the traditional organic agriculture of the Adivasis and appropriate technology for processing agricultural and forest produce combined with a vibrant local government system with a clear gender focus to counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society would have worked wonders if it had been implemented. Appropriate education and health systems incorporating tribal knowledge would have been a bonus that would have produced a new generation of Adivasis able and ready to take on the development challenges faced by their community. This was not done and so the human development indices in the Bhil tribal areas have remained the poorest in the country.

5. Mobilisation of Bhil Adivasis

The Bhil Adivasis of West-Central India began mobilising from 1970s onwards primarily for their basic constitutional rights. Later this movement spread to include the integration of the Bhils into the modern market system without exploitation by moneylenders, traders and corrupt government officials. Currently the umbrella organisation of Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India is the Adivasi Ekta Parishad.

The introduction of the special Panchayat Raj for Scheduled Tribal areas under the provisions of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996 (PESA) gave a boost to the work of mobilisation. The provision in PESA Act that the tribal Gram Sabha is to be the final arbiter on all issues of local development and that this Gram Sabha could be as small as a hamlet of a village made it easier to implement development programmes. Often it is not possible to carry the whole village together on some development programme because the tribal hamlets of a village are situated at a distance from each other. Another law that promises to have far reaching consequences is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forestdwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act 2006 (FRA) which gives rights to the land that the Adivasis have been cultivating and also community rights to the forests in which they have been residing. Finally there is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which if properly implemented can in addition to providing employment to the Adivasis also improve the natural resource base of their habitats.

The specific mobilisational strategies adopted that have got the people to act collectively for getting their entitlements and the conservation of natural resources for climate change mitigation are –

1. Problem analysis workshops in which the people have participated in open discussions to pinpoint the problems they were facing.
2. Legal and rights training workshops in which the people were taught the basics of the liberal democratic framework.
3. Collective Action for assertive rights through public demonstrations and sitins.
4. Revival of traditional labour and resource pooling customs.
5. Special women's meetings to get them involved in resource conservation work and also public demonstrations and also counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society.
6. Legal and policy advocacy to change the laws and rules in favour of the Adivasis.

6. Gaining Access to Forests and then Conserving them

The mass mobilisation began with the problem of ensuring access to the encroached farms of the Adivasis in the reserved forest. As a solution to this problem it was decided to protect the remaining forest area and prevent it from degradation. This was done to counter the claim of the forest department that the Adivasis were destroying the forest. Consequently, social protection of the forests to ensure their regeneration was undertaken. Small groups patrolled the forests by turns through a labour pooling system. The fodder generated from such protection is cut and bought by the members at the end of the monsoon season and the money thus generated is kept in a fund for carrying out plantation work. This forest protection has considerably increased the availability of fodder, fireweood and non-timber forest produce in the study watershed and this has especially benefited the women and children who are the main collectors of forest products. It may be mentioned here that tribal children treat the collection of forest produce as a playful activity and it is not labour for them. This is how they come to know their natural environment. Greater fodder availability has facilitated goat and buffalo rearing and so increased the supplementary incomes from animal husbandry which provides an insurance against livelihood shocks to the tribal households. It is not possible to quantify the increase in forest product availability because of a lack of records but people say that they now enjoy much greater forest product availability and have bigger herds of goats and cattle than earlier.

7. Soil and Water Conservation

The villagers organised themselves into small groups of ten to twelve farmers each who then pooled their labour and cooperated with each other to perform their agricultural operations together and also undertake soil and water conservation activities. This was a revival of the traditional labour pooling custom of the Bhils called Dhas. In this system people used to work together to do agricultural operations on each others' fields, build each others' houses, and improve the quality of the farm fields through soil conservation work. However, this traditional labour pooling custom is dying out because of their integration into the mainstream money economy and the exploitation by the forest department staff.

A major feature of this cooperative soil and water conservation work is the participation of women in it. As is well known the ravages of natural devastation caused by bad development are mostly borne by women. Consequently it is not surprising, that when offered an opportunity to cooperate to reduce their drudgery, women come forward enthusiastically. This has not only ensured that women have participated in the community actions and improved their status in society but they have also as a result, changed the gender relations at home.

The intensive soil and water conservation work and the forest conservation have together ensured that both natural and artificial recharge in the watersheds have increased considerably and as a result the streams are flowing throughout the year. The farmers have used this enhanced water availability to cultivate dryland varieties of wheat which require less water. The greater availability of animal manure has resulted in the farmers using treated organic manure in larger quantities and improving the quality of the soil. The soil and water conservation work has also ensured the greater availability of soil moisture and so double cropping has become possible even without irrigation in some of the upper fields where a crop of gram is taken. In some cases the kharif jowar crop after being harvested, regenerates to give a small rabi yield from the soil moisture.

8. Implementation of the FRA

The FRA has been plagued with problems right from the beginning. Even though the Act was passed in 2006 it took another year for the Rules to be framed and passed by parliament. Even after that Governments have been very tardy in setting in motion the process for application and verification of the rights of the Adivasis. The people have had to organise many demonstrations to first get the process started and then for it to continue. The people have also pro-actively used the MGNREGS to carry out soil and water conservation works on the lands for which they have gained lease rights under the FRA.

An associated achievement of the people is their success in getting the proposal by the Government to set up a Wild Life Sanctuary in the Katthivada Forest Range of Alirajpur district in Madhya Pradesh cancelled. Under the provisions of the PESA Act and also the Wild Life Protection Act any displacement of people in a scheduled tribal area has to be sanctioned by the Gram Sabha. Hard mobilisation by the people forced the Government to implement this provision and the Gram Sabhas unanimously rejected the proposal because of its many infirmities and it had to be shelved. This is the first time that a proposal for a Wild Life Sanctuary in this country has had to be shelved due to strong legal and mass action by the Adivasis.

9. Conclusions

The most important achievement is that the Adivasi Ekta Parishad has been able to inspire the Adivasis to assert their identity and clearly demarcate their sovereignty over their habitats. The laws and rules for utilisation of the forests were that laid down by the government and administered by the Forest Department and were not matched to the local needs and conditions. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad succeeded in mobilising the people through regular meetings and trainings to stand up for their rights against the forest department staff and design their own rules for governing the use of the collective natural resources. A section of the people initially braved the opposition of the traditional Patels who were agents of the Forest Department and even went to jail fighting for their rights and established the organisation. Once the organisation was established and natural resource conservation work began, the benefits began to flow and this acted as a reinforcing factor in the continuation of the process and so later even the Patels, who were initially opposed to the process, later became a part of it.

The mobilisation process resulted in a fairly strong people's organisation spread over the whole of the Bhil Adivasi homeland and the people were able to ensure that the Forest Department was forced to allow them to manage their common resources according to their own rules. The monitoring of the forests as well as the soil and water conservation work is done by the people themselves and that is why the system has worked very well for over three decades. The people have developed a system of sanctions beginning with fines for small infringements of the rules and going upto ostracism for more serious violations and this is administered by the people themselves. The traditional community conflict resolution mechanisms of the Bhil Adivasis have also been revived and these are also working very well.

However, unless the government ensures a participatory framework of rule making and monitoring at several levels it is difficult for a people's organisation to build up a larger movement of conservation. Since the government through the forest department and police has actively opposed the people's mobilisation it has taken place only in isolated patches in the Bhil homeland. The laws and policies that favour Adivasis are not implemented primarily because most people are not aware of these provisions and the Government is not serious about them. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad by raising the awareness of the Adivasis in this regard has brought about a positive transformation in West-Central India. Thus, despite its limitations, the mobilisation process described above has ensured justice for the Bhil Adivasis and provided them with a better livelihood situation while simultaneously making a significant contribution towards climate change mitigation.

 

WHITHER ADIVASI GIRLS' EDUCATION

I set out four decades ago to try and improve the situation of Adivasis but unfortunately have mostly met with failure. However, nothing hurts more than the most recent in this series of failures because it is related to Girls' Education.
My wife Subhadra is a Dalit whose family had less than two hectares of unirrigated land from which they could hardly make ends meet. She had to study in a government school and also work at home on meagre food and almost no money. She somehow passed her higher secondary school examinations and then to escape her poverty joined an NGO as an Anganwadi (creche) worker and later by dint of persistence became a land rights and gender activist. Later she decided to pursue higher education and is currently enrolled for a Phd.
This personal experience made her think about the education of girl children from poor families. She felt that if girls from poor families are to study then they must be provided hostel facilities because if they stay at home then their parents tend to make them work and so they are not able to study. Moreover, the government school system in Madhya Pradesh has now become moribund with close to zero teaching and learning. Therefore, without extra tuition it is not possible to educate girls just by sending them to a government school.
However, running hostels and schools for girls is not an easy matter. The Right to Education Act has now made it mandatory for all schools to be registered and a considerable amount of paper work has to be done continuously regardless of the quality of the actual education being imparted. Secondly due to the grievous malpractices by NGOs running girls' hostels there is also a considerable amount of monitoring of such hostels. Moreover, running a full fledged school and hostel requires good quality staff which is almost impossible to get in rural areas these days. Those few from rural areas who have somehow learnt something from the dysfunctional government school system and have attained some quality have invariably migrated to cities for better livelihoods. Therefore, those that remain in rural areas know next to nothing despite having become graduates.

So Subhadra decided two years back to informally run a hostel with about five or six girls of class six at the Pandutalab centre of Mahila Jagat Lihaaz Samiti. The girls would be enrolled in the Government Middle School in the village and would reside at the centre and get coaching from Subhadra and I in addition to whatever they were taught at school. Once the hostel stabilised other people also could come and spend a few days and teach them whatever they were good at. The idea was that the girls would get a holistic education as they would also work on sustainable farming at the centre and understand the forest, soil, water and energy conservation work being done there.
Initially, it was difficult to get these girls as both the girls and their parents were not ready. So in the first year we started a weekend coaching class at the centre for girls of all classes from Pandutalab and a few nearby villages so that they and their parents would get an idea of the huge difference in education quality that we were planning to provide. There were quite a few girls who came to these coaching classes in the beginning where we taught them English and Mathematics the two main bug bears of school children in rural areas. However, after some time the interest of the students flagged despite their learning immensely in the classes. Investigations revealed that the problem was that they were being taught next to nothing in the schools and they were also not being given any time to study at home by their parents. Thus, while they would learn a lot in the coaching class on one weekend, they would forget everything by the next weekend and be back to square one. Also the girls did not see why they should work hard to understand a subject in the coaching class when nothing was being taught in the school.
This reinforced the logic that the girls would have to be kept in the hostel and taught intensively. But that is easier said than done given the fact that girls are made to do a lot of work at home even when they are studying in school and so keeping them in hostels is not generally favoured by parents. Anyway, this year Subhadra began canvassing for girls to join the hostel from the month of April itself when the last year's session came to an end. She went around nearby villages convincing parents and talking to the girls who could be enrolled for the hostel. Once the girls were identified, she went and met the teachers of their schools to facilitate their transfer to the Government Middle School in Pandutalab.
The interaction with the teachers brought to light the sorry state of public primary education in Mahdya Pradesh in tribal areas. The primary schools are mostly single or double teacher schools teaching five grades all seated together. All the children of school going age are enrolled in these schools regardless of whether they are attending regularly or not. This is because there is a strict order from the higher ups that there should not be any child out of school. Since there is a no detention policy so not only are these children marked present they are also declared passed in the examinations. Moreover, since the funds and materials for the midday meal to be given to the children are according to the attendance in the school so also all are marked present regardless of whether they are taking the meals or not. The Unified District Information System for Education, which is the online data base for the primary education system thus paints a very rosy picture of the status of primary education. There is of course an unofficial tally of the actual attendance and the number of dropout children with the teachers but try as she might Subhadra could not get this from them.
After much effort parents of about eight girls agreed to put their girls in the hostel at Pandutalab. They were told to get the transfer certificates from the old school so that they could be admitted to the school in Pandutalab. Two girls were even put in the hostel by their parents pending the formal transfer and we began teaching them. These girls despite being in the sixth class did not know the Hindi alphabet or the numbers let alone write in Hindi and do sums.
When the girls' parents went to try and get the transfer certificates they came up against a barrage of questions from the teachers as to why they wanted to shift their girls to a private hostel and the government school in Pandutalab and that such hostels are wholly unreliable and that they would be jeopardising the future of their girls. One parent did manage to get the transfer certificate but the Head Master of the Pandutalab Middle School refused to admit the girl giving him the same kind of warning that putting the girl in the private hostel would jeopardise her future. Basically no teacher wants to lose a student even if he himself is not teaching anything because it reduces the number of students for the midday meal. Also instead of trying to improve pedagogy and learning achievements in his school he is wary of private schools and hostels which reflect on his incomepetence and the shoddy state of the Government School System.
This then created a difficult situation for us. The only two girls who had come to the hostel began crying given the lack of company. The increased pressure of proper studying also made them feel more home sick. The fact that the girls would not be enrolled in the school in Pandutalab also resulted in a situation wherein Subhadra and I would have to take on the full responsibility of teaching them. Since these girls would in any case remain enrolled in their village schools formally this was not much of a problem in formal terms. As they could go and give the examinations there. There was also the possibility of getting these girls to give the tenth class examinations from the National Institute of Open Schooling a few years down the line as this is the first formal educational certification these days after the RTE Act's no detention provision. However, convincing the parents to follow this kind of informal arrangement became difficult as they felt that their girls might get penalised in future. Also there is a general reluctance to send girls to study away from home because there are now a spate of cases where the girls elope with other boys often of a different sub tribe of the Bhils from the one to which they belong even while studying in school. So there is a malevolent and dysfunctional public education system on the one hand and patriarchy on the other which are seriously putting girls education in jeopardy.
Consequently, we have had to send the two girls who had joined the hostel back and put this project in abeyance for the time being. We will try again next year with greater preparation as we now know what we are up against.

Inequality of Access to Justice

Getting justice in this country is costly. Whether it is initially from the police or later from the courts. That is why poor people are in most cases unable to access it unless there is an organisation supporting them. The Int Bhatta Majdoor Union based in Ahmedabad is one such organisation that has been fighting for the rights of the brick kiln workers in Gujarat in particular and also in the rest of the country for over five years now. Here is a report from them about the gang rape of an Adivasi minor girl brick kiln worker and the extortion from her co workers by their employers and the action that the union has taken to bring the culprits to justice.

Rape and extortion at a brick kiln in Baroda district, Gujarat

Geeta (name changed), a 16 year old tribal girl, is a resident of Limkheda village in Dhanpur taluka of Dahod district of Gujarat. She has three brothers and three sisters. She has studied till class VIII.  For the first time in her life, she went to work in brick kilns at Navik Bricks, a brick kiln in Sankheda block of old Baroda district in the month of February 2014. Her brothers and cousins were already working there. The group had started work in the month of November and had spent almost four months by the time Geeta arrived to join them. Some members would come back to their home village some 150 kms away and then join back after a couple of days’ rest. The group of six persons was recruited to work in the brick kilns by Avani bai, a female labor contractor from a nearby village. The family group was advanced an amount of Rs. 90,000/- against six persons to work in brick kilns. Geeta’s family took Rs. 60,000/- for four workers while her uncle took Rs. 30,000/ for two workers. The group was engaged to transport fired bricks from the kiln for loading in trucks.

Dahod district is part of the tribal belt in Western India that stretches across a number of states. Tribal community is universally recognized as the poorest community in India. Dahod district is the main catchment for cheap wage labor in construction and agriculture sector in plains of Gujarat. The family owns a small amount of land that is not enough to provide sustenance. As local labor is not available, the family members migrate for wage labor work. The normal migration route is for agriculture work in Saurashtra, a far off region of Gujarat, an overnight journey away. This was the first time when the group went to work in brick kilns.

In February, Avani bai put pressure on the family to send one more workers for work as the advance was against six workers, but only five were working. So Geeta also went to the kiln as there was no other person left at home. After she started work, she was stared at and followed by three young men whom she did not know by name. One of the group members would repeatedly smile at her. Six days after she had arrived, when Geeta was loading bricks in the truck, this person climbed on the truck to receive bricks from Geeta. He pressed her hand. Geeta then moved away. That night Geeta was sleeping outside her hut with a group of young girls. Late in the night the three young men covered her mouth with a cloth and lifted her to nearby fields. They took her to a nearby hut where she was raped by the young man targeting her while the other two kept guard. By this time, the other girls realized that Geeta was missing. They raised an alarm. The workers gathered and rescued Geeta from the hut. One of the group members pursuing Geeta was the son of the owner of the kiln while another one was supervisor at the kiln.

After the incident the group decided that they will not work anymore at the brick kiln. The labor contractor and the kiln owner did not agree to let the group go back. They instead said that the family should reach a settlement about the incident, but continue working. The settlement offer was to marry the rapist and get some money. The workers did not agree to this. They informed their family members back at home who sent a vehicle to pick up the family. The vehicle arrived at the brick kiln two days after the incident. The female members of the group sat in the vehicle to go back. At this point the brick kiln owner collected a group that attacked the workers. They beat up the jeep driver badly who ran away. The kiln owner removed the tires of the jeep and kept it in his compound. The female workers were asked to go back to their huts. They were asked to pay back a sum of Rs. 1.5 lakhs (Rs. 150,000/-) if they wanted to go back.

It took the family members a week to collect this amount. A group came from the workers’ village along with the village headman to pay the ransom money and bring the group back. Even this did not happen easily. The workers report that the owner collected a group to kidnap Geeta but somehow they were able to sit in their jeep and go back to the village.

After the group reached the village, Geeta’s father approached the village headman to help in filing a police case. The headman approached the head constable who was on the local beat. Rs. five thousand was paid. A food and drink party was organized. However nothing came of it.

Dhanpur block is a major source area of brick kiln workers for brick kilns in Central Gujarat. Ahmedabad based Int Bhatta Majdoor Union has been active in this area. It has helped workers get their back wages in a number of cases. Bharat bhai is the Union cadre from this area. Almost six months after the incident, he came to know about the incident. He immediately contacted the Union. The whole group came to the Ahmedabad office on 18^th September. After a debriefing session, the Union team went to the Sankheda police station on 20^th September to file a report. Geeta’s brothers who had migrated were called back to give evidence. A police report has been filed under sections 370 A, 376, 342, 323,114 and POCSO Act section 3,4. For the first time, Section 370 of IPC that deals with human trafficking has been invoked after much argument with the police. 

The case is remarkable for its extreme brutality, but is in many ways symptomatic of the vulnerabilities faced by the brick kiln workers across the state and the country. It shows almost complete absence of regulation of any kind at the brick kilns. The system of advances leading to debt bondage, non-payment of wages, extortion if the workers want to leave early, violence including sexual violence – all these features are common to brick kilns all over the country to some extent. The incident has taken place in a state that has been touted as the model for the whole country. The brick kiln falls in old Baroda district, the constituency of the current Indian Prime Minister till he resigned his seat to keep the other seat won by him. The case illustrates that the law and order machinery of the state is outside the bounds of the poor unless mediated by civil society groups of which there are not many. The Prayas Centre for Labour Research and Action is one such group that has been actively working for the informal workers and is providing support to the Int Bhatta Majdoor Union in this case.

The Right to Education and The Reality

The Right to Education assuring eight years of schooling to all children is there on paper in this country but the reality is quite different. The poor people, who find it difficult to make ends meet as it is, are rarely able to spare the money for the education of their children. Therefore, it devolves on the Government to provide free schooling to the poor children under the Right to Education Act. Unfortunately in remote Adivasi areas like the ones in Alirajpur district in which the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath operates, the Government does not provide for the education of children adequately. What it does is appoint some guest teachers on an ad hoc basis. Each year at the start of the academic session in June advertisements are given asking for applications from prospective teachers. By the time the whole process of selection is over it is about October. So a single teacher per school is appointed in November without any training whatsoever and she is retained till March when the examinations are conducted and then the teacher is laid off resulting in only five months of teaching in an year. The teacher is paid only Rs 2400 per month for teaching children of various ages in multiple grades in one school housed in the hut of one of the villagers. It is easy to imagine what effect on the quality of pedagogy such working conditions will have. In most cases these teachers do not teach at all. Since all children are passed automatically in Madhya Pradesh till they reach class ten, all that the teachers have to do is maintain false records of attendance and then submit false evaluation reports. Thus, in government records there is hundred percent enrolment and passing of children in all the classes and everyone in the administration is clapping themselves on their back saying that the Right to Education has been guaranteed.

Consequently, given this sorry state of affairs, the KMCS has been running a residential school in village Kakrana since the 2001 to provide quality education to children. However, this is not enough and still huge numbers of children are without education in many villages. So the KMCS began running three schools in 2013 so as to improve the access to education for children in remote villages. Two of these villages had the government guest teacher schools while one had no school. Bada Amba and Chilakda, which have guest teacher schools are on the banks of the River Narmada, while Khatamri, which is without any school is up in the Vindhya Hills a little way inside from the Narmada. The people in these villages all belong to the Bhil Scheduled Tribe. The school in Bada Amba in progress is pictured below.

The school in Chilakda which is running since July 2013 along with the one in Bada Amba now has its own building constructed by the people of the village and is shown in the picture below. 

The school in Khatamri began in December 2013 and has a lady teacher and is shown below. 

Presented below is the evaluation report of the performance of the children studying in these schools. The official enrolment in the school in Bada Amba is as shown below in Table 1.

 Table 1: Total Enrolment in School in Bada Amba

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	Total
Boys	6	6	2	4	4	4	4	2	32
Girls	6	6	2	4	4	2	4	2	30
Total	12	12	4	8	8	6	8	4	62

However, all these children do not attend the school. The people are so poor and their single cropped farms so small and unproductive that they have to migrate to Gujarat seasonally to labour in the farms and urban construction sites there to augment their income once the Kharif crop has been harvested. They take their children along with them and this prevents the latter from attending school. Generally there is some scepticism also among the parents regarding the utility of education and so they prefer to have their children grazing livestock or labouring on the farms and in the houses rather than attending school. The number of children who are regularly attending school are given in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Children Regularly Attending School in Bada Amba

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	Total
Boys		2	3	2	1			1	9
Girls	2	6	5	2					15
Total	2	8	8	4	1			1	24

Thus, only 38.7 per cent of the total enrolled children are regularly attending school. Among boys the proportion is very low at 28.1 per cent while among girls it is much better at 50 per cent.  The reading, writing and arithmetic skills acquired by the regularly attending children in the past one year is given in Table 3 below.

Table 3: Proficiency Level of Children in Bada Amba School

Subject	Level of Proficiency	Boys	Girls	Total
Hindi	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	6	13	19
	Reading and Writing of Words	1	2	3
	Reading and Writing of Sentences	2		2
	Total	9	15	24
English	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	3	6	9
	Reading and Writing of Words	3	2	5
	Total	6	8	14
Arithmetic	Reading and Writing of Numbers	6	13	19
	Simple Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication	1	2	3
	Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication with Carryover	2
	Total	9	15	24

The two older boys have made considerable progress in Hindi, English and Arithmetic. Two of the slightly younger boys and two girls can do simple arithmetic and read and write words in Hindi and English. The rest of the children are at the rudimentary stage of reading and writing the alphabets and numbers and ten students cannot read or write the English alphabet. 

The total enrolment in the school in Chilakda is given in Table 4 below.

Table 4: Total Enrolment in School in Chilakda

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	Total
Boys	6	14	4	2	1	1	4	32
Girls	5	9	3	2	4	1	2	26
Total	11	23	7	4	5	2	6	58

Due to the same reasons as mentioned for Bada Amba earlier, in Chilakda too all the children enrolled in school do not attend regularly though the attendance is more than in the former. The number of children who are regularly attending school are given in Table 5 below.

Table 5: Children Regularly Attending School in Chilakda

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	Total
Boys	6	10	4	2	1		1	24
Girls	4	2		1				7
Total	10	12	4	3	1		1	31

In Chilakda 53.4 per cent of the children enrolled in school attend regularly. Among boys the proportion is higher at 75 per cent while for girls it is very much lower at 26.9 per cent. There is greater attrition among the older children and girls. Child marriage is a common custom among the Bhils and girls especially are married off very early once they attain puberty and that is the reason for the high attrition rate among the older girls. The reading, writing and arithmetic skills acquired by the regularly attending children in the past one year is given in Table 6 below.

Table 6: Proficiency Level of Children in Chilakda School

Subject	Level of Proficiency	Boys	Girls	Total
Hindi	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	18	6	24
	Reading and Writing of Words	1		1
	Reading and Writing of Sentences	5	1	6
	Total	24	7	31
English	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	18	6	24
	Reading and Writing of Words	6	1	7
	Total	24	7	31
Arithmetic	Reading and Writing of Numbers	18	6	24
	Simple Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication	4	1	5
	Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication with Carryover	2		2
	Total	24	7	31

Once again the two older boys have made considerable progress in one year and can read and write sentences in Hindi, read words in English and do addition, subtraction and multiplication with carryover. Four slightly younger boys and one girl can do simple arithmetic and read and write sentences in Hindi and read and write words in English. The rest of the children are at a rudimentary stage of reading and writing the Hindi and English alphabets and numbers. The proficiency levels in Chilakda are better than in Bada Amba because the parents take a little more interest and the teacher is more skilled even though both teachers are formally eighth class pass.

Khatamri village does not have even the rudimentary guest teacher Government school. Some children of this village study in hostel schools elsewhere. There was a long standing demand for a school here but due to the lack of a suitable teacher it could not be started. Finally one of the youth of the village married an eighth class pass girl and this lady was appointed as teacher in December 2013. The parents in this village are very proactive and from the beginning have sent their children to the school. They have also imposed a rupee one per day fine if a child does not attend. Consequently the attendance is regular and in a short time the children have acquired considerable proficiency. The number of children attending school are shown in Table 7 below. In this village the age of the children is a little less than in the other two villages earlier. Khatamri in fact is the remotest and smallest hamlet of the large village Vakner. That is why there are less number of children as compared to the other villages.

Table 7: Children Regularly Attending School in Khatamri

Age in Years	4	5	6	7	8	9	Total
Boys	3	1		5			9
Girls	3	3		4	2	1	13
Total	6	4		9	2	1	22

 The lady teacher and the parents are very diligent and so the quality of teaching too is good. So much so that some parents have withdrawn their children studying in the Government hostel schools in other nearby villages and enrolled them in this school. The reading, writing and arithmetic skills acquired by the children in the past five months is given in Table 8 below.

Table 8: Proficiency Level of Children in Khatamri School

Subject	Level of Proficiency	Boys	Girls	Total
Hindi	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	4	6	10
	Reading and Writing of Words	5	1	6
	Reading and Writing of Sentences		6	6
	Total	9	13	22
English	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	9	10	19
	Reading and Writing of Words		3	3
	Total	9	13	22
Arithmetic	Reading and Writing of Numbers	9	10	19
	Simple Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication		3	3
	Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication with Carryover
	Total	9	13	22

Three of the older girls have picked up simple arithmetic skills and six of them can read and write sentences in Hindi. The rest are at a rudimentary stage.

Clearly more inputs are needed. The villagers of Chilakda first and then Bada Amba later have built separate schools contributing their labour and wooden materials. Some support has been provided to buy the roof tiles. The school in Chilakda is now functional while the one in Bada Amba is still under construction as shown in the picture below. 

The teachers have undergone training for a week in the Adharshila Learning Centre which is a residential school set up for Adivasi children by another Adivasi organisation, Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, in the adjacent Barwani district. The picture below shows the training in progress.

The teachers are all formally class eight pass. However, at the start of the training it became evident that some of them were at the class four level while others were even weaker. They have been taught how to teach better and this will improve the quality of pedagogy next year. The schools are currently closed for the summer holidays and will reopen for the next session in June 2014. There will be another short training of the teachers just before the schools start followed by follow up trainings once every quarter thereafter. The teachers will do three surveys during this holiday period in their respective villages. The first will be to document all the flora and fauna. The second will be to document all the crops that are planted. The third will be to document all the herbs that are used by their local medicine men to cure various diseases.

Education has a very close link with human development. All the countries with high levels of human development have high levels of public investment in education right from the primary to the tertiary levels. Unfortunately right from the time of independence, the education sector has been plagued with low public investment and even lesser accountability of the what little investment has been made. Government schools across the country are woefully understaffed and under provisioned and the local people, especially Adivasis eking out a precarious existence in remote regions have little control over their functioning. They have neither the wherewithal nor the belief to provide for the education of their children. The KMCS with the help of some external help sourced through crowd funding on the Internet is trying to do something to improve matters in this crucial sphere. A lot remains to be done and it is hoped that this initiative will become better with the passage of time. The total cost including the salaries and training of the three teachers comes to Rupees Two Lakhs annually. The bank account for transferring funds electronically is -
Dhas Gramin Vikas Kendra
Current Account Number - 024105500603
ICICI Bank, Ashok Nagar, Indore, Madhya Pradesh -452001
IFSC - ICIC00000241

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