अवसरवाद

आप सोचेंगे

कवियों पर डेडलाइन का बोझ नहीं

पर उन्हें भी

शुष्क शहर में हुई

एक कमज़ोर, टपकती बारिश को

निचोड़ लेना पड़ता है

अकालग्रस्त आश्वस्त नहीं हो सकता

दोबारा सरकारी हेलिकौप्टर वहीं से गुज़रेगा

वो और कवि

दोनों आश्वस्त नहीं हो सकते

उनके आसमान में फिर बादल मँडराएँगे

और वे उस पक्षाघाती दुख के न होंगे

जिसमें न पकड़ी जाएगी कलम,

न उठा ही सकेंगे

राहत सामग्री

First published in Jankipul, 12 Mar 2019.

Don’t make a mountain out of menstruation

Using theatre to talk of taboo subjects in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, and the lessons learnt

A few years ago, our theatre troupe, Aatish, had gone to the Central Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, in the Almora region, with our plays on resisting menstrual taboos and pre- and post-natal care for women. Before we booked our tickets, there was a big debate in our team on whether the men in our troupe should go along with us. Would it make it awkward for the women in the audience to interact with us if there were men on the stage too? Would they even come to watch?

We finally decided that patriarchal rules were set up by men and at times implemented by women. So both men and women needed to be part of the discussion. If a man wondered about why his menstruating daughter is not sleeping in a hut outside, he needed to know that it was her right to be as safe and comfortable as the rest of her family. If medicines or nutritious food had to be bought for pregnant or lactating mothers, men needed to know why it was crucial to budget for it.

With some of our apprehensions and nervousness still remaining, we got on the stage on performance day. With our usual enthusiasm, glitches and improvisation, we concluded our plays and waited with bated breath for the audience’s response. The turnout had been promising. But we still bit our nails fretting: would the audience find it worthwhile to come for our upcoming performances in the area or would they reject our choice of subject and actors for discussing what many consider “womanly” issues, or, “ladies problems”!?

After a kind applause, an old woman got up to say, “All right, we need to maintain hygiene during menstruation. But living here in the mountains we face water scarcity. Can something be done about that?” Another man her age shared how his pregnant daughter-in-law was forced to carry water as her spouse worked in the city and the father-in-law was too old to do it himself. We encountered more openness in talking about women’s health than we sometimes find in urban settings.

A local activist spoke of how women need to be healthy in order to function well in society, drawing the analogy of a sewing machine that needs regular oiling. We interjected to say that women need to be healthy because everyone deserves to be, and not just because good health ensures women’s productivity, something that ends up serving others’ interests more than their own. Two girls came to talk to us in private. One tried to explain a menstrual problem but was not very clear. Her friend, standing a few steps behind, came forward and revealed that her friend had been speaking on her behalf, because the girl had been hesitant. She then spoke about the issue herself and asked us if she should see a doctor.

Others in the audience said that the hospital in front of which we performed hardly had doctors or medicines. Someone from the hospital said that is because people do not come to the health centre but prefer to go to ojhas instead. There was a dialogue. We ended up doing a workshop for the NGO that wanted to create a play on basic health issues to show how people could take care of minor ailments (many children in the region had been lost to diarrhoea) through simple measures at home rather than going to quacks and risking their health. There was also demand for a dance performance after all the serious stuff we had put them through! Slightly embarrassed at our lack of skill in the area, we had to excuse ourselves. In the evening, we performed our play on menstruation again on a stage that had been set for a Ramleela performance by the locals. As we tried to break a taboo in our own small way, little heads of Ramayana characters peeped from behind the wings.

Some of the questions that had been raised by the villagers were simpler to answer than the others. The people there probably already knew that. But they wanted someone to listen, which we did. And we learnt and unlearnt. We learnt a bit more about the lives of people in the mountains, and unlearnt some of our own stereotypes. We realised that for all of our efforts to spread “awareness”, we too had not used words like “menstruation”, or “maahvaari”, its Hindi equivalent, as many times in our lives as we did that day on stage. We witnessed that once we had normalised the use of those words, a girl in the audience could also use it to discuss her problem with us. We lived the experience of every effort of liberation being a collective one, not something that gets passed down from one to the other. We saw that the restraint that an urban sense of privacy imposes on middle class or upper middle class conversations is often absent from many rural conversations where privacy and segregated familial and individual spaces are often a luxury. We noted that working at the local level required an understanding of the local context, and not stand-alone, externally imposed “solutions”. We were humbled to see that where fundamental rights could not be availed of, people at times withered, and at others made do with proud resilience. We observed that when representatives in a democracy failed to serve their people, those people sometimes got attached to dangerous peddlers of faith, for the desperate want of something to hold on to in the face of adversity. And we learnt that if we wanted more people to join our revolution, we needed to add some dance to it!

Walking back to our accommodation after the performances, workshops and discussions, we saw a grey-haired lady beat us to the top as we huffed and puffed up the treacherous hilly path. We knew that she and her tribe could leave us behind each time, and we thought of the “development” that had been too slow in reaching them, and yet was ironically leaving them behind.

First published in  thREAD, The Hindu, 4 Apr 2019.

Not seen, not heard: In slum evictions, children are some of the worst hit

“The first time a bulldozer came to our place, I was scared and kept sitting near our belongings that had been thrown out,” says Roshni, a ten year old whose family migrated from Bihar to Delhi looking for employment. Roshni and her family have been living in a slum in Yamuna Khadar’s Belagaon in the capital’s eastern region. The settlement is right behind Rajghat, the memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi. Between 2011 and 2018, the houses and the small farms of the dwellers had to face frequent eviction drives by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA).

Children in these fragile communities are amongst the worst hit by slum demolitions. They miss out on education, dropping out of school due to homelessness, uncertainty, and the stigma they face in schools as “slum children”. Caught in a cycle of poverty and growing up with the violence of forced displacement, their future is one of unemployment or poorly paid jobs, not to mention underage labour.

Lakshya Aakriti Foundation (LAF), a not-for-profit, runs informal schools for them in Belagaon because often having to shift from one place to another severely hampers schooling. Diptesh Singh of LAF explains, “We have been associated with this place since 2012. The area faces around four demolitions per year. One demolition takes place in a staggered manner over several days. So for the entire period the families, including the children, stay around their homes in case the bulldozers return. And it is not as if children’s school calendar is taken into consideration when homes are demolished. Children end up missing many days of school at a stretch or dropping out altogether.”

Children of Belagaon attending a school run by LAF

This year Roshni saw DDA officials in her area again. But this time she was quick to act: “I carefully dismantled our makeshift home, carried the lighter things outside the house with my younger brother, called up my older brother, and waited for him to come and take the heavy stuff out.”

Despite the trauma associated with demolitions, some children feel it is better to stay on and claim their rights to the land their ancestors have lived on since before Independence. Being close to the Yamuna river, the area is different from most urban slums in its greenery and fertility, and many residents depend on farming for their livelihood. Abdul and Rohit, both about 13 years old, are friends reluctant to shift to another locality. Abdul explains: “There is open space for us to play cricket. Neighbours share fresh vegetables they grow.” But he rues the fact that it takes months for families to get back to farming after bulldozers have run over their crops.

When the JCB machines come to raze the houses to the ground, Abbas, 14, feels like “hitting those people till they run away”. “It would be so good if we can retain this land. Anywhere else we will have to pay rent, and buy cooking gas, while here we can use the wood available around.”

Abbas’s father, Shafiq, has an elder son who works in another city as a shop assistant. With the family facing either homelessness or the threat of it, the son had given up on education years ago. Being illiterate himself, Shafiq wants that at least Abbas should study well. In answer to a question about the line of work he wants to pursue later in life, Abbas replies with a blank eyed stare, “I’ll become whatever is written in my destiny.” Constant displacement has made him lose faith in the surety of anything and he believes that fate would decide his future.

With their right to housing taken away, children lose out on the right to education too

Sunayna Wadhwan has been an activist with organisations like Hazards Centre and Mobile Creches. In her experience of working with communities in slum clusters, she noticed many families don’t send children to schools so the kids can call and inform the parents if a demolition drive seems imminent: “When we conducted meetings, children would join and try to learn about what the future of their homes would be. Those who go to schools are often discriminated against. The school authorities feel these children won’t be able to stay in one area consistently and are reluctant to take them in. Once admitted, they have to face social stigma, like being made to sit on the last seats of the bus, because of living in slums. The proportion of students in higher education from such localities is low. A common trend for those who do study is to get enrolled for open or correspondence courses once they reach the college level. They realise that a college degree can be helpful in getting them jobs, especially through NGOs active in their area.”

Working with the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), Mukta Naik is an urban planner and architect. Remembering an incident of relocation of a community, she says, “The shifting took place close to children's board exams [considered a crucial test in an Indian child's school life]. Some children ended up losing the documents needed to appear for the examination.”

Resettlement also affects livelihood. Women working as domestic workers within the city are not able to find opportunities in the far flung areas where they are resettled. This affects the amount of spending on children's education, whether it’s about admission to a new school or traveling to attend the old one. The minute it becomes a question of a long commute, girls are made to drop out even quicker because of safety concerns. Sometimes they stay back to take care of the house or siblings, without being safe themselves in the cut-off areas they have been moved to.

Evictions also lead to absenteeism because there is so much damage to property that every member pitches in to put the household together. Children lose uniforms, bags and books. At a time when they have been rendered homeless, parents find it difficult to buy these things.

Rights groups say slum evictions make children vulnerable to violence, trauma and neglect

For the teacher in the school run by LAF in Belagaon, absenteeism is a regular concern. Once evictions/demolitions start occurring at regular intervals, children start dropping out. He says, “These children have to live in the constant fear of getting uprooted.” Shivani Chaudhry of Housing and Land Rights' Network, an NGO, recalls meeting a boy who broke down and started crying each time he saw a bulldozer. Demolition drives in Delhi’s slums have led to some children getting injured and others getting killed.

“The city sees adolescents in slums as potential abusers. But what about the tacit violence these children live with?” asks Enakshi Ganguly of HAQ Centre for Child Rights. “They grow up seeing their parents getting beaten up for fighting for their rights. The threat of children getting abused increases when resettlement takes place in remote areas and the jobs parents get closer to the city keep them out all day. Children are left to fend for themselves.”

Nazdeek is an NGO fighting for the rights of communities in slums. Jayshree Satpute, Nazdeek’s co-founder and lawyer, talks about litigation’s role in helping eviction affected people, “When the court comes up with a favourable order, like ordering authorities to make anganwadis (day care centres) for children, it happens after a year or so but also with results like two centres being close to each other, rather than in different localities.” 

The staff of these anganwadis are also not motivated. They have been fighting for better wages and recognition as government employees, and not volunteers. Working in slums is not lucrative because they get incentives if children have regular attendance. “In an area facing forced migration, this regularity takes a toll,” Jayshree adds.

Bipin Rai is a member of the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), a government body in charge of looking after slum clusters and their resettlement. He says, “Evictions are not legal. That is why we resettle and rehabilitate. But DDA and the Central Public Works Department do not cooperate or partner with us when it comes to land under them.”

However, like Rai admits, DUSIB too is not directly engaged with looking after the social aspects but is involved more in the infrastructure of resettlement colonies. Sudeshna Chhatterjee is the CEO of a trust called Action for Children’s Environments. In her paper ‘Children’s Role in Humanizing Forced Evictions and Resettlements in Delhi’, she describes the active participation of children in resisting the Gautampuri evictions in the year 2000. It had brought to attention children’s problems and gained them greater participatory space. But to look after the complete social, educational and psychological well being of children facing displacement, special focus on children in city planning for changes to be made at the policy level is something urban planners, researchers and activists continue to advocate for.

India has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. But in the current Draft National Child Protection Policy framed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the mention of children in vulnerable circumstances, like those exposed to evictions or forced migration, remains missing. This gap reaffirms lawyer-activist Jayshree Satpute’s statement, “The elite classes want every opportunity for their children. But they don’t extend the same principles to other classes.” CPR’s Mukta Naik has something similar to say, “The Delhi Development Authority's perception of the city is elitist . . . and slum children have no place in this vision.”

(Names of children have been changed to protect identities.)

Firs published in Beyond Headlines, 31 Jan 2019.

बूझो तो जानें

बस्तर 

बद से बद्तर 

आदिवासी = नक्सलवादी 

गाँधीवादी = नक्सलवादी 

डॉक्टर = नक्सलवादी 

वकील = नक्सलवादी 

पत्रकार  = नक्सलवादी 

शोधकर्ता = नक्सलवादी 

फिल्म निर्माता = नक्सलवादी 

नक्सलों की इतनी आबादी?

या राज्य = अवसरवादी?

First published in Yuddhrat Aam Aadmi, 2018.

Mother’s illness led this man to organic, climate smart agriculture

When Ravdeep’s mother first heard that her son is going to take up farming, she was deeply disappointed. Standing in his farm in Punjab’s Pharwahi village in Barnala, Ravdeep remembers with a smile: “She said all the resources and efforts she had put into my education had been in vain.” But she also knew and took pride in the fact that her son could successfully meet the most difficult challenges. Ravdeep proved it was true when farming became his means of livelihood.

Ravdeep on his farm

Actually, it was because of his mother that Ravdeep had felt an urgent need to grow food organically. When his mother got cancer in 2009, Ravdeep started spending a lot of time at the hospital. The number of people he saw that had got diagnosed with the disease, and the fact that children were also patients, shook him up. He started questioning his entire way of living. “I always knew that chemicals are not good for us but my mother’s illness made me realise that we are poisoning everything . . . our air, water, food.”

Then a friend gave him agriculturist Subhash Palekar’s book on natural farming. Ravdeep also got in touch with Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), a non-profit working for farmers’ rights and food security that regularly conducts organic farming trainings.

The paddy problem

Ravdeep finally started farming through organic methods in the year 2012. “I first stopped growing paddy. In organic agriculture, it takes longer to harvest. The crop also has to be completely dry or the mandi, the market, does not accept it. By the time this happens, the sowing of the wheat gets delayed. I was also unhappy when I noticed the eventual hardening of the soil due to puddling [when the land is tilled while flooded to make the soil soft for rice plantation].”

Punjab ranks third in rice production in the country with 2.97 million hectares of the land under rice cultivation. 2.5 percent of human induced climate change in the world is estimated to have been contributed by flooded paddy fields.

Ravdeep says, “Earlier at least we used to retain trees around our farms. Now with the overabundance of paddy and the use of tractors and combines, there is no place for trees.” Not only environment but human health has been affected by the overzealous production of paddy. Ravdeep, along with his family, is conscious of his food choices: “Traditionally we grew and ate a variety of crops. Now it’s either rice or wheat and then we struggle with gluten allergy.”

He also blames paddy growing for being the original cause of stubble burning in Punjab, leading to polluting and warming of the atmosphere: “In fact the Punjab Agricultural University, based in Ludhiana, which is now advising farmers against burning, is the one that started doing it years ago.” Farmers say they cannot use machines or labour to remove the stubble because of the expenditure involved. But Ravdeep has a different take. He feels the cost one pays for illnesses like asthma or when injured in an accident caused due to decreased visibility because of smoke is much higher. Farmers need to see economics in its full picture, he insists, and not just have a short term vision.

However, he admits that a good number of farmers cannot afford happy seeders or tractors or other big machines. Some villages have a few of these machines that are to be shared by the community through cooperatives but it is often not practical. Ravdeep explains, “One seeder covers one acre of land per day. Farmers have ten days and 3000 acres to sow. So they need twenty seeders at the same time in the sowing season and cannot afford to take turns individually.”

After all these issues, Punjab has had to face rejection of export consignments because of pesticide residue in the rice. “The farmers who grow this rice do not eat it themselves. It is bought by the Food Corporation of India for distribution. People in south India like their own varieties. So why are we still growing it,” laments Ravdeep.

Beauty, and balance, in diversity

Following farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka’s book The One-Straw Revolution, on Ravdeep's six-acre farm, he is growing multiple crops, vegetables and fruit and flowering trees. They are not water intensive, and growing them organically has brought back the birds and insects that are killed or driven away by chemicals. In awe of this rich biodiversity through which his farm is making itself climate resilient, Ravdeep confesses that before this he had seen this feature only in the fields of his predecessors. Stubble is “food” for his crops and so he even collects the straw from his neighbours’ fields, which the farmers are only too happy about.

Long lost insects and birds have returned to Ravdeep's farm

The market

Ravdeep, like many other organic farmers, end up selling some of his produce in the common market. Wheat and pulses get the rates deserving of organic produce. He says 5-10 percent of the customers are ready to buy organic food at the correct price, though all agree that chemicals are bad. But in this small percentage there is a mix of “rich, lower middle and middle classes”, explains Ravdeep, depending on how serious they are about their family’s health or whether there has been an illness in the family.

KVM, which Ravdeep is connected with, has a shop in the area but it is open only once a week. Private buyers who get to know of organic farmers also buy from them directly. But Ravdeep says he could not have pulled it off without his family’s support. His wife, who is a teacher, and his daughter help with processing some of the produce at home before it can go to customers. “If I had to go out for processing, the cost and logistics of it would not have worked out.” Therefore Ravdeep recognises that a farmer cannot make a sudden shift to organic farming, and underlines the need for government to incentivise organic agriculture, and to provide markets for those who are already doing it.


First published in Beyond Headlines, 30 Nov.

How these farmers in Punjab are using the practice of mulching to fight climate change

Increasing soil fertility, avoiding stubble burning

Upon reaching Anirudh Vashisht’s farm in Sunam in Sangrur district in Punjab, a couple of other people with a camera could be seen. They had come to document the work of farmers like Vashisht who are setting an example, at a time when Punjab’s farmers have had to bear the brunt of criticism from the capital for stubble burning and adding to air pollution. Vashisht is part of the minority in Punjab that does not burn crop residue.

The documentarians talking to him had primarily come to film instances of stubble burning. To avoid doing it himself, something which leads to pollution, causes accidents by reducing visibility and harms the soil, Vashisht has been practising mulching. In the process, the stubble is cut and collected, and the small pieces are spread over the soil. While explaining the process, Vashisht took a few handfuls of chopped straw and covered the onion and garlic patches with them: “When we burn stubble, we lose microbes healthy for the soil; friendly insects die. Birds and animals also get injured. But with mulching the number of useful microorganisms grows. The soil is protected from the direct sun, its health is preserved and since it is able to retain moisture the ground needs less water. That’s why this process is climate smart.” Chasing away a parrot that had come for the fruit of a tree on the farm, Anirudh gave the example of a forest where grass and leaves cover the soil and it remains fertile despite anyone watering it.

Some farmers who can afford the machine use a rotavator for mechanically spreading the stubble on to the soil but most land owners believe that doing it manually has better results. But isn’t the manual process of mulching labour intensive? “It is,” Vashisht agrees, “but it is a long term investment.” Mulching increases soil fertility and yield and therefore ultimately it would be profitable.

Seema Jolly in Karodan village, Mohali, also prefers to put in human labour in the process of mulching because she does not find the use of big machines consistent with her organic farming practices and principles.

In Barnala’s Pharwahi village, Ravdeep, who is also into organic farming, recalled that even when he was a regular farmer using chemical fertilisers he did not feel comfortable with burning and still used mulching.

For his farm near Kapurthala, Rahul Sharma bought straw from his neighbours to mulch: “Once the soil is covered with the straw, it becomes dark and damp, encouraging the growth of earthworms, which are healthy for soil. If wheat needs to irrigated thrice, then with mulching only two rounds are enough.”

There have come to light other uses for the stubble that comes after a paddy harvest, instead of burning it and adding to climate change. It is being used for power generation, by the paper and packaging industry and, possibly, for furniture.

Why hasn’t mulching become popular in the state yet?

Shamser Singh is a farmer in Sunam. Asked about why he is unable to adopt practices like mulching, he shares: “Machines like happy seeders [machines that cut the straw, sow the next crop and puts the cut stubble over the sown area] and rotavators that should be priced at thousands cost lakhs. How are we supposed to buy them? The 50 percent subsidy is not enough.”

Farmers complained that labour is scarce, especially since many have been absorbed by NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) works, and turn out to be expensive for the farmers if employed in huge numbers.

Another farmer, Parpoor Singh, adds, “We also suffer from the effects if stubble burning, from breathing difficulties to burning in the eyes. But what are the options? Let the government subsidise the growing diesel prices so we can use machines to clear the fields of the stubble.”

Time is also a factor. To reduce water use, the government has shifted the rice sowing time further ahead. This means that as soon as farmers harvest paddy, they have to clear the field and sow wheat. In such a scenario, mulching seems time-taking compared to burning the straw. Some farmers also believe that mulching makes the soil uneven and prone to attacks by rodents. But the farmers implementing this practice, including Vashist, saw it more as a prejudice. Buying the straw for commercial use by private parties is not widespread yet.

A few of the residents living around farms said that the pollution around has decreased since the government started imposing a penalty on burning. But this measure could not stop the practice at a larger scale. It led to resentment in the agricultural community against what they see as government’s apathy to their problems.

Farmers across different districts reiterated that they would prefer not to burn the residual straw if the government helps them fight the factors above through cash incentives. Agriculture expert Devinder Sharma agreed, “You cannot remedy this through punitive action. Cash is what the farmers want in the form of an incentive and that is what should be given to them.”

Most farmers using mulching consistently are also those who are doing organic farming and therefore have an overall, larger vision of how agricultural practices should not adversely affect plant, human, animal or environmental health in general. But both organic farmers and experts admit that for the farmers relying heavily on chemicals and under the pressure to get high yields quickly for financial returns, the shift to organic farming, of which mulching is already a part, will also have to be incentivised by the government, especially in the transitional phase.

This article is being published as part of the GIZ-CMS fellowship. First published in DailyO, 30 Nov 2018.

The indigenous doctors and healers of Chhattisgarh

Mane Singh holding a leaf that is supposed to aid digestion

The indigenous tribes of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India have had their share of natural challenges when they lived largely self-sufficient lives, relying on forests for most of their needs. But they look at that period as one of peace and prosperity compared to the current set of manmade difficulties. These troubles first sprung up when the State and private companies were charmed by the rich mineral reserve in the area and started development projects like roads, railways and mines on a war footing. These interested parties then started having violent confrontations with Maoists, the rebel guerrillas in the forests whose stated aim is to fight the violent exploitation and forced displacement of tribals done by the government and the corporations. In all these, the tribes often get slotted as victims who need saving or Palaeolithic forest dwellers in need of civilizing. This piece recalls the knowledge, the respect for ecology and the learning from ancestors that has enabled the Indigenous Peoples of Chhattisgarh to practice medicine since the time when there were no health centres to the present day, when people still place immense faith in these homegrown systems.

The bone doctor

Sundar Singh

In Khamdongdi village situated in Kanker district, a well known spot is the house of the vaidyaraj, venerable for his patients as the bone-setting doctor. His clientele includes not just villagers but officials and city dwellers from the state capital Raipur and beyond. Sundays are the busiest at his clinic-house, I am informed, full of patients from morning till midnight. But even on a weekday, when I am visiting, there is news that a patient from Raipur is on his way.

Eighty-five-year old Sundar Singh Kavde, the village’s own orthopaedic, had stopped his practice after his son died, and patients had slowly started moving to other doctors. The son is spoken of as a legend. Bone surgeons from hospitals were said to visit him when he was alive, and to ask their own patients to come here if the case was complicated. I am shown a chart hung on the wall, naming the various bones in the human body. “The doctor would use this chart to explain to the doctors. The only difficulty came in fixing an injury to the spine, because you cannot bandage it properly, and the ointment doesn’t seep into the wound as well.” So how many people ended up getting cured? “The people who complained of not having recovered did not have restraint, and would have alcohol though they had been asked to abstain.” Within the campus of the house and the clinic, there is a half-constructed structure. The current doctor’s son had started building it so the patients and their relatives could stay there.

Sundar Singh applies medicine on the patient's injury

But one day Sundar Singh, the father, had a dream in which his ancestors advised him to resume his practice, and he did. In the hut that is his clinic, there are some roots and leaves brought from the jungle. He grinds the roots using a mortar and a pestle. With the advent of a mixer, he started putting the ground medicines into it so it could turn out as fine paste. A makeshift switchboard for the electric grinder is tied to one of the wooden poles that holds the thatched roof in place. A partition creates another room, which has an earthen choolha, so if a patient or their family needs to stay overnight they can cook their food.

After he has bandaged the patient’s leg, Sundar Singh comes to this other room and sits on a plastic chair, “My father, grandfather, everyone did this work. It is in our DNA. Earlier we were treating animals more frequently. Now with motors on the road, it’s people.” He gets herbs and roots from the mountains. I had heard that at some places, despite Forest Rights Act protecting the rights of indigenous people over forest produce, forest officials had been preventing villagers from accessing them. Singh hasn’t faced that problem so far: “People in the government come here to get treated. If they stop me, who will cure them?” Precious medicines do get lost, Singh adds, when there are forest fires due to people’s recklessness. Local reporter Tameshwar Sinha speaks with awe of a deputy forest ranger, quite an exception compared to corrupt government officials, according to Sinha, who had got burnt himself while trying to quell a forest fire.

After applying the ointment, the injured area is bandaged

Doctor Sundar Singh also reads books on Ayurveda to aid his learning. “At times our gods enter our dreams and guide us when we are not treating a problem in the required way.” He also gets some medicinal leaves, etc., from the market. “First we used to quickly get what we were looking for in the forests. Now we have to find them.” Since construction and militarisation on a big scale started in the state, it has lost a lot of its forest cover.

What about the fee? “We never ask for money. What people are required to get are some gauze (earlier leaves and bark were used) and some oil that we recommend. Besides that sometimes people come with an offering, say, a coconut. Even if they don’t have anything it’s fine.”

The vaidya nods when I ask if he ever has to visit a doctor. “Yes, we also get fever, typhoid . . . Then we have to go. But because they know me, often they come here and see me. But this one time I did not feel better even after injections. So I just went into the forest and got the medicinal plants I needed and they worked.”

When local doctors like Singh go to the forest, they take what they need for the time being and leave the rest, saving the rest for others and for the generations to come. They agree that people, including some of their own, have now been lured to sell for greed, which depletes the resources without replenishing them.

I ask Brijesh Sahu, the patient, why he came to the village all the way from the city of Raipur. He says, “Hospitals are expensive and there are no guarantees. Here one is almost completely sure of results if they also eat, drink and abstain as prescribed by the doctor.”

The vaidyaraj shrugs, “Sure, if someone has extra money, like thirty-forty thousand rupees, they can go for an operation. Here we have had some people come here even after they had surgeries but still could not recover completely.”

A farmer and a healer

Doctor-farmer Mane Singh looking up at the garud tree, whose leaves are an antidote to snakebites

The second visit I make is to Mane Singh Kavde’s farm in Kanker’s Bewarti village, another herbal doctor. Before we meet him, we are asked to wait outside a closed poultry shop. A while later we head to his farm, which has vegetables, fruits and trees growing. We find Kavde in the greenhouse and start talking to him but the heat pushes us out where we spread a gunny sack on the ground and begin the conversation.

Unravelling the story of how he became the accidental doctor, Kavde says that while DNA is definitely responsible for the transfer of medicinal knowledge within the family, it usually skips a generation. But in any case, he says, this way each village ends up having its own surgeon. “Apart from that knowledge and what is communicated by my ancestors in dreams, I started doing my own research. Our body is a part of nature and therefore when we take in something natural the body readily accepts it. Illness is nothing but a lack of natural elements.”

He talks of disease caused by eating what we like, not what we need. “We realize the extent of the damage only after it is done. Our resistance is going down and the size of the capsules we swallow is growing. Our ancestors ate naturally grown greens. But our government is interested in metals, not food.” He is referring to the growing number of mining sites in the state. He calls vikas, or development, a synonym of materialism, condemning the sort of food “development” sells to its buyers, “The kind of food we are putting into our body these days is like putting iron into a grinder that is made to crush pulses.”

Kavde was a trader running a profitable business, until he fell sick and had to find and prepare his own medicines for his recovery. “In modern medicine, they give you fifty medicines for one disease. Nature is such that one thing here can treat fifty ills.” The medicines he gives are supposed to do a speedy job of killing the virus, while the discomfort caused by the malady takes a few days to end.

To introduce us to some of the medicinal properties of the vegetation growing around him, he first offers us some tendu (Diospyros melanoxylon Roxb.) fruits, saying having them once is supposed to boost immunity for the next six months. He plucks a few leaves off the garud tree, named after the mythological bird, supposed to be an antidote to snakebites. “But the patient has to be brought within an hour. It becomes a challenge if the heart shuts down.” Talking of the tree’s potency, he states that if a snake rests under the tree for too long, it would die. Around another tree is a creeper called giloy, or Tinospora cardifalia (Wild.), used for tying the bandage in case of a bone injury. Mane Singh distinguishes trees by their sex and uses their products accordingly. “If a tree has a thick bark, it is male. Women’s hearts are full of kindness, and so the bark of female trees would be soft, and can be chewed.”

Tendu fruits

With government subsidies and his own knowledge and hard work, Kavde’s farming practice has been flourishing. It did receive a slight setback though at a time when he was inundated with requests for appointments from patients. He recalls an obese, ill young man who was too sick to walk. “I prayed to my ancestral pen (god) powers and gave him twenty millilitres of a plant juice. By the time his family took out a stretcher to take him back after the treatment, he was fit enough to walk.” Others sitting around, my young guides in the village, discuss the case of the two-year-old who had holes in her heart, and was getting better with Kavde’s treatment. “But then,” Kavde recollects regretfully, “the family discovered that I knew about their same gotra (clan) marriage, and were embarrassed to visit me any more, as such marriages are against the rules of our community. It was a pity that feeling uncomfortable about it they stopped the child’s treatment.”

The biggest challenge for the “natural” doctor came when he had his first HIV patient. The nurse who came to see him about it had to get over her sense of shame, because of societal stigma around the affliction, before she could tell the vaidya that she had been diagnosed as HIV positive. It was Kavde’s first case and he did not know much about it. The woman kept asking him if she would get well. “I prayed for guidance and the medicines I was able to give her transformed her. Her pale face looked radiant on the next visit.”

Mane Singh's farm

With his popularity growing, Kavde has had to allot fixed dates and time for his practice, which he sees as knowledge sharing and not a commercial enterprise. Then he was able to have time once again to devote to his crops. But as a farmer some of his concerns continue. “Farmers are forced to sell some crops to traders at rates even lower than the minimum support price. Subsidies are not there for everything. It was better earlier when we could barter goods amongst ourselves. Now it is more difficult to afford because to buy something our neighbour is producing we have to approach the trader and pay him a higher rate. That’s why the development song rings hollow. Let the delegates visiting from other countries come to the villages, not the big cities, to see the ground realities. We were more developed earlier because there was more prosperity amongst people. Now the only thing actually getting developed is capitalism.”

Sundar Singh and Mane Singh, both the doctors adhere to the pledge which says a doctor’s first duty is to treat and heal the patients. Today hospitals in bigger cities and the fraudulent work done by quacks have also made sections of the population suspicious about indigenous medicines. Yet when this knowledge is appropriated, patented and packaged by pharmaceuticals and sold at high prices, the public puts its trust in the drugs. While the healers I met were concerned about this development as it limits access and corrupts the natural composition of the herbs, personally they have no urge to be competitive because healing is not a commercial enterprise for them. “Here,” Mane Singh says, “we share our knowledge with the community. It has been transferred to us from our elders to benefit people, not for profit making.” Perhaps this is why youth groups like KBKS, Koya Bhoomkal Kranti Sena, receive higher education as well as local trainings, and attend inter-state tribal meets, to educate themselves and fellow tribals about their rights, so that they both preserve their own traditions and resist vested interest groups from taking advantage of their knowledge and resources.

First published in Intercontinetal Cry, 23 Apr 2018, supported by the Centre for World Indigenous Studies.