Scorched Earths

The statistics are stark enough, but they don’t prepare you for the shock of what you see and hear in Lalitpur, one of India’s 10 most backward districts. Sixty-year-old Ganpat and his family in Piparai village have been going hungry every night for months now. At the local public distribution outlets, there has been no foodgrains for the past seven months. In February, Ganpat’s two sons left the village in search of work—and food. It’s what 70 per cent of the district’s smallholders are forced to do in the harvesting season. For a while, people in the village fed Ganpat and his wife with the little they could spare, but even that stopped after a few days. In May, Ganpat quietly died in his sleep. It was Piparai’s first starvation death, but probably won’t be the last. Villagers can’t remember when they last had two square meals a day. The one meal they do have is nothing more than a coarse chapati or a few spoonfuls of rice sprinkled with salt. Most of Piparai’s 1,300 inhabitants are unemployed, though they have job cards under NREGs, which promises 100 days of work. The job cards remain blank, despite Lalitpur being one of the first districts to come under theUPA’s flagship programme for poverty alleviation.

Rampur, also known as the village of widows, lies in one of Lalitpur’s farthest corners. There are 38 widows in the village’s 75 families—all of whom have lost their husbands to tuberculosis. Some of the widows make do with whatever they can scrounge, the others beg.

Devgarh, literally Abode of the Gods, is another remote village. But the gods have looked on impassively as 13 people died of starvation here this year. We meet a blind villager, Ramkali, being led by her deaf husband Parasuram, as they go about collecting a local herb, Ghaura, used for making kajal. They hope to sell it at a nearby market town for Rs 20—it might help them stave off hunger for a few days.

At Muria village we meet Savitri, whose debt-ridden husband committed suicide a few weeks ago. He had no work; rainless for long, his crops had withered away on his small plot of arid land and he had run up a debt of Rs 40,000. He was consumed by despair.

Savitri’s four children huddle around her; she wonders how long the one quintal of wheat left would feed them all. She asks us why we are in Muria. "We’re writing about how 60 years of freedom have changed the lives of Indians." "Sixty years!" she exclaims. "Who can think of 60 years? I’m thinking of the next two weeks, till I can hold out. After that, how will I feed my children?"