The dirt track which doubles as the path for jungle streams in monsoon becomes treacherously slippery when the rains often don't let up for 4-5 days at a stretch.
Nagappa Bhoyi walks over 12 km through the thick tropical forests from his village Shirgani to the Vanalli crossing to board a bus which will take him to the areca nut plantation where he works as a labourer. The dirt track which doubles as the path for jungle streams in monsoon becomes treacherously slippery when the rains often don't let up for 4-5 days at a stretch.
Yet the 35-year-old braved it all with three other villagers when they carried his wife on a blanket held like an improvised stretcher last year. "My wife Tunga had gone into labour but the local midwife said the baby was transverse and she could do nothing. We carried her through the forest for four km till a sharp descent point. Here all the jungle streams had merged into a roaring swollen muddy river. There was no way we could cross it so we waited for the rain to subside. Neither Tunga nor the baby made it."
Bhoyi's village is not the only one. There are over 50 such villages in the Sirsi assembly constituency of the North Karnataka district which remain cut off from the outside world for most of the monsoon due to heavy rains. The inaccessible villages whose voice has fallen on deaf ears of those contesting from here for several decades are being wooed for votes once again with assurances and promises in the ensuing assembly elections.
"They come and ask for the votes and say 'we will surely ensure year-long access this time', but nothing happens. Now I don't think many labourers are really interested in voting," he says. "It means losing a day's salary and gets us nothing."
This does not seem to worry the sitting MLA Vishweshwar Hegde Kageri (BJP). "I can't force anyone to vote or not vote. My victory in the last few elections (four) has not depended on a few disgruntled. I wouldn't be repeatedly voted back if I was not delivering," he said.
Yet in a tightly contested election where every vote will count, his representatives later came to the village to tell Bhoyi not to talk to media. "You have to live here. Why unnecessarily make enemies," he was told.
Therein lies the rub. This constituency is huge with sparsely populated villages spread far and wide. Bhoyi's village has only 120 votes while the neighbouring Muski has 400 votes.
Here the upper caste Brahmins with deep pockets own massive areca nut plantations while the lower castes work on them as labour. While men make Rs 300 a day the women labourers get only Rs 200.
"The arecanut plantation owners have lived reclusively surrounded by thick forests where their writ is law. With the arrival of the roads the labourers want to go to the tehsil town where they get paid more as labourers on construction sites," pointed out one such landlord Ganesh Hegde who added, "We want roads for taking our produce out but this is making labour more and more expensive and hard to come by."
He points out the labour availability is the worst in the areas surrounding the 30 hanging bridges across the rivers in the region, most of each were built just before an assembly or parliamentary election to woo voters.
The Congress challenger to Hegde, Bhimanna Naik says, "If four terms were not enough to bring inclusive vikas for the region, I don't think they can or want to in the future too. People should see through and vote for change."
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 "Nagappa Bhoyi")
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