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#DNAInUP: Between a drought and a hard place

The Dalits of Bundelkhand, its most oppressed section of society are leaving the region in droves due to a lack of employment opportunities. Meanwhile, their children are being deprived of education, too, either because of a loss of regular income or because of caste discrimination

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Families from the Valmiki community who are still engaged in their traditional occupation of manual scavenging
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On October 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a Parivartan rally in Mahoba in Uttar Pradesh where he highlighted the presence of large numbers of migrant labourers in Gujarat. “When I met people from Bundelkhand in Gujarat, I would ask, are you from MP or UP? Most of the people say we are from UP. Why do people from UP’s Bundelkhand region leave their home? Because of the lack of jobs,” Modi posed the question and gave the answer. 

Dalit activists, however, have a different answer. 

“Who are these people from Bundelkhand who are going to Gujarat, Delhi and Mumbai? They are mostly Dalits who are landless labourers and marginal farmers,” says Kuldeep Kumar Baudh, convener of the Bundelkhand Dalit Adhikar Manch (BDAM), which is active in nearly 500 vilages in and around Jalaun district in UP. 

In Navalpura village in Jalaun district, Munna, a landless labourer, is preparing to travel to Surat. He had come home for Diwali, and after spending 20 days is packing to leave again. “All my life I have been a refugee. I am originally from Dehalkhand village, not far from here. The upper castes snatched my father’s land and forced us to flee. We settled in Navalpura, but because of the drought, there is no work on farms. Now, I have to go to Gujarat, and I have to also take my children out of school because it is not safe here. This village has nearly 50 hectares as common property which belongs to the gram sabha. If I get one acre, I can do some farming,” says Munna.

But successive droughts in the Bundelkhand region have rendered small farms unviable and forced bigger farmers to cut back on hiring labourers. Despite agriculture proving unremunerative, there is a clamour for land. Delayed MGNREGA wage payments and a failure to generate works tied to the scheme have robbed the area of a vital safety net.

In rural Bundelkhand, even as migration is disrupting the education of many children, some Dalits are accessing secondary education and beyond. But the education offered in the local government school at Navalpura is dismal. Ashok Kumar Dohare, who owns four bighas of land and has a motorbike, is one of the better-off Dalits in the village. He describes the school, “There are five classes, three teachers and 58 students in the school.

Many of the upper castes who can afford to do so, send their children to private schools. The headmistress will not eat the mid-day meal here. We are certain that this is because the cook is a Dalit. If you want to find out about the learning, just quiz these children.” 

Rajni is in the fifth standard, but she cannot count over 50, does not know the multiplication tables or perform division, and cannot read her class book. However, the villagers are all praise for one teacher, Lakshmi, who does not take leave or let the students play truant. “All the children in the classes Lakshmi takes are doing very well. She teaches Hindi and Mathematics. She says that the government pays her salary and she will work hard to justify the salary,” Dohare says. Her students, Vikas and Kajal, both in the second grade, can read and do Mathematics better than Rajni. 

In Mangrol village, some distance away, Dalits complain about their names being eliminated from lists for PDS rations and non-allotment of land for pattas (a guarantee to allot land) dating back to 1976. According to them, local revenue and panchayat officers visit only the house of the village sarpanch and rarely venture across to Dalit bastis.

A mobile tower looms large over Mangrol but so does the archaic practice of manual scavenging. In this large village with a population of over 3,000, most of the residents have mobile phones, but five families from the Valmiki community remain engaged in their traditional occupation. Phoolan Devi, makes the round of 15 households in the village in the mornings to clear out their dry latrines. “I get two sookha rotis from each house. During festivals, I get some clothes,” says Phoolan. The 30 rotis that Phoolan earns daily feeds her unemployed husband, Girdhari, his aged mother, Ramkali, and their four children.

“Because we are in this profession, other parents do not let their children sit with mine in school. My children have to take plates from home for their mid-day meal unlike the others who are provided plates in school,” says Phoolan. Her four children—Vikas, Vasai, Kshetender and Vishwas—can fluently recite poems, read books and do arithmetic. They are the only bright spots in her existence and have found an able tutor in Rajesh Gautam.

Rajesh is an 18-year-old ITI student who has taken upon himself the task of tutoring Dalit children in the locality. He says, “The schools teach virtually nothing. Moreover, the Dalit students are often asked to sit at the back of the class.” In his living room, there are charts depicting numerals up to 100, the English alphabet, human anatomy, multiplication tables, fruits, birds and the political map of India. “I manage to find at least two hours every day to teach children. I don’t want any one of them to drop out from school,” he says. 

It is in spotting dedicated youngsters like Rajesh that Baudh, now 27 years old, has spent the better part of the past four years. Baudh’s first exposure to the caste system was in school over his name. “My grandfather had named me Kuldeep Singh. A teacher said that a Dalit cannot use Singh as a surname and insisted that I be called Kuldeep Kumar.” Despite this bitter experience, Baudh resolved to study further and completed his B.Sc.

While pursuing his Masters in Social Work, Baudh founded the BDAM in 2011. 

The Dalit activists of BDAM are firm supporters of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) but complain that the party has diluted its commitment to social justice while pursuing political acceptability. “We tell people from our community that they must stand up and raise their grievances and we will come and support you,” says Baudh. Slowly, but steadily, the green shoots of change are rising.

In Kutra in Jalaun, Munshi Lal has led a dogged struggle to take possession of the land for which a patta was granted to him in 2010. Along with 26 other Dalits, he was on the verge of being allotted the land, when complaints surfaced of undeserving beneficiaries. “The sarpanch and the lekhpal should be probed to find how those already having sizeable land parcels made their way to the list. This was done to sabotage the award of land to us,” alleges Lal. He has filed RTI applications and approached a civil court, and is awaiting a favourable order.

Interestingly, there is not a single landless Dalit household in Kutra. “All of us have one acre or one or two bighas. But that is not enough to sustain a household. We are then forced to lease land, but for that we have to take loans. Everyone here has agricultural loans or loans taken against the Kisan Credit Card,” says Babu Ram, Munshi Lal’s neighbour. Heavily in debt, Babu Ram decided to not to grow any crops this year and instead opt for work under MGNREGA. “I worked for 73 days this year. At Rs 172 per day, I am entitled to get Rs 12,556 but the sarpanch says the money is yet to be released from the government. I am frustrated. I may have to leave for Ahmedabad or Surat now.”

For Dalits, the ascendancy of the BSP in the 1990s was a big morale booster. Between 2007 and 2012, when the BSP was in power, many landless Dalits received pattas, but the incumbent Samajwadi Party has shown little interest in granting them title deeds. As another assembly election looms, Dalits in Bundelkhand are pinning their hopes on the BSP returning to power. 

“My only demand from Mayawati in 2017 is that she should release village common property to landless Dalits,” says Munshi Lal. 

Echoes of India’s unfinished land reforms agenda continue to ring from our villages.

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