The country has been shut down completely. As of now, the authorities have said that it is going to be a 21 days lockdown. It is just the 9th day and we are cramped like anything, despite having all our needs and wants fulfilled like food, mobile connectivity, Hospital, technology, and Netflix.
At this point, I feel like sharing my experience of a district in Odisha called Kalahandi where I stayed for 15 days just before the lockdown was announced.
My name is Vishwas, and I am a student at the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj; I am pursuing my PG Diploma in Rural Development Management. Under my organizational internship, I came to an organization called Gram Vikas which is an internationally reputed grassroots organization. The organization is well known for its outstanding work with the tribal people of Odisha. My project was to teach students under Gram Vikas schools about government, governance and how a good government can be brought at Gram Panchayat level.
The first incident I remember was when the Project Coordinator who came to pick me up from the district headquarters said, “You can call everyone you want to now, once we start travelling, the network shall go and you will not have any network throughout 70 km and at the location too” This, my friends, for a 21st-century youngster was a deadly statement.
The school was located in one of the detached blocks of Odisha called Thaumul Rampur block of Kalahandi district, which became popular after the news came in 2016 where a person named Dana majhi carried his wife’s dead body on his shoulders for 12 km.
The School I Saw In Kalahandi Was Unlike Any Other I Had Seen
Gram Vikas has been providing education to the children of tribal people over for many years now and is the example of how a school should be. What can be witnessed in this school is something I have not seen in any of the schools in my life. The school is a residential one. The students here grow crops like onions and vegetables to an extent where it is sufficient for them. The school does not have any additional helping staff except for one cook. Students wake up early in the morning, clean up their hostels, campus and go for watering the crops.
In the meanwhile, few students go help the cook in cutting vegetables and preparing breakfast. This happens on a rotational basis. After the classes are called off for the day, the students again go back to the fields to look after their crop, few go clean the class and few others go help in cooking the dinner. In this way, most of the work is done by the students which would save the cost of operation of the schools. The students come from such a background where they cannot even go home for holidays as it would be an extra burden for their family to provide food for them.
The children here are highly talented and are spectacular in extracurricular activities like painting, dancing, sports like cricket, kho-kho, etc. There are even good poets in them. Something which hit me hard was that the children over here do not get upset easily. They make their solutions to the problems they face, e.g.: the children do not have a sufficient number of bats, balls, and rackets but these people make their own bats with the wood from the nearby forest; they make balls by stitching all the torn clothes and trust me, they are happier than those kids in the urban population who have everything and yet they are not happy.
Despite Major Lacks, People Here Live Happy Lives
I have been fortunate enough to get in contact with the communities and observe the way these people live their lives closely. The villagers here do not have good roads and there are only two buses, one in the morning and another in the evening which connects to this block. The water available is not drinkable in many of the villages, the healthcare system is very poor and people here are highly dependent on herbs and leaves as medicine to many diseases.
A power cut is like a normal routine here where the average power cut for the day is around 12-15 hours, and the situation gets worse when it is rainy season where the power cuts last for days. Internet and phone connectivity itself is a big issue. If you have to make a phone call, you need to travel 15 km from the school to the top of a hill named ‘Hello Point’ where you can get access to a mobile network.
As the Patta books (documents for assigning lands to people) are not given to most of the tribal people for agriculture, the agricultural practices are poor here. People grow their vegetables in their backyards or buy them from the weekly haats (markets). Most of the families here depend on daily wages they get and a finite amount of ration they get for their survival.
What makes this experience amazing is that even after surviving these many difficulties, the people over here live a very happy and undisputed life with their families. They do not reflect any negative vibe or greed in any manner. Kalahandi has been an indelible experience and it has taught me things which shall constitute pillars of my way of living. People here face daily hassles to survive and yet live life blissfully with limited accessibility. They eat together, sleep together, work together and share their joys and sorrows with their families as well as communities. I never thought that villages like these exist until I saw them.
We, on the other side, staying in cities and urban concrete jungles, face nothing similar to what these people do. People are lost even if they are connected with everyone and everything. People are not thankful for what they have and are greedy always. The concept of family has been vanishing and a sense of togetherness is being buried for the sake of self-greed.
The 21 days of lockdown has been extremely difficult for most of us but we forget that people are living in the same nation with a “perennial lockdown” for centuries now, unsure of when their lockdown would come to an end.