Collective efforts can combat challenges faced by ultra-poor in Jharkhand

Jharkhand has been battling the multiple challenges of underdevelopment, malnutrition, low literacy levels, unemployment, distress migration and high incidence of poverty. The state’s weak institutional mechanisms and lack of good governance worsen the situation.

The latest edition of the Multidimensional Poverty Index, 2021, released by Niti Aayog, reaffirms the paradox of its citizens being deprived of basic amenities despite owning abundant natural resources. Around 42.16 per cent of the population of Jharkhand is multidimensionally poor, making it the second poorest state in India. 

Many Adivasi hamlets in Jharkhand bear the brunt of extreme poverty. Torpa block in the Khunti district of Jharkhand is one such pocket. Collective efforts by both the state and civil society is imperative to combat the challenges faced by such regions. Non-profits such as PRADAN have been working to improve the lives of the people in the poorest pockets of India. 

Two decades of PRADAN’s engagement in Adivasi regions have contributed to it, yet a significant part of the population, around 10 to 15 per cent remains deprived of the benefits of the program run either by PRADAN or the central and state governments.

Read more: India’s poverty reduction slowing down since a decade

Targeting a small section of the population can be challenging when the target group is subsumed within a broad category defined only with phrases like extreme poverty, as argued by Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Therefore, PRADAN designed a conceptual framework for strategic intervention to define and assist the ultra-poor in overcoming their vulnerabilities. 

The conceptual framework designed by PRADAN.

As part of PRADAN’s engagement with the ultra-poor, a study was conducted to comprehend the socioeconomic background of the ultra-poor and vulnerable in 10 villages of four Panchayats of Torpa block, Khunti district, Jharkhand.

A wealth ranking tool has been adopted to identify such families through a couple of checks and ownership of the ultra-poor by community-led institutions such as women collectives and self-governance forums like Tola Sabha. It involves orienting and sensitising village-level forums on the shared understanding of extreme poverty and deciding the indicators by tapping into humane and tribal values.

While the Indian Constitution recognises Gram Sabha, it is the Jharkhand Panchayati Raj Act (2001) which gives Gram Sabha the power to identify and select persons as beneficiaries under poverty alleviation and other programs. Gram Sabhas are facilitated to register the ultra-poor and prioritise them in government programs and schemes.

Identifying ultra-poor and vulnerable

Based on the indicators listed by the community, 59 families/ individuals were identified as ultra-poor from 10 villages with the help of local institutions. The indicators analysed are: Families/individuals who can’t manage beyond four-five months of ration annually, landless families, families ostracised by the community, woman-led families with dependents and/or single women, distressed migrant families, mentally or physically disabled and orphans.

As the pie chart above depicts, the ultra-poor are deprived of basic social welfare schemes. The majority of ultra-poor women are either widows (35 per cent) or sole providers of their families (2 per cent). Around 19 per cent of them are persons with disabilities, of which 5 per cent are intellectually disabled.

As Aadhaar is a necessary prerequisite to avail the benefits of any scheme, 27 per cent of the ultra-poor still don’t have one owing to information divide, inadequate enrolment facilities, update and retrieval and technical bio metric glitches.

Most ultra-poor families are engaged in multiple livelihood options to sustain themselves. This is due to various factors such as lack of assets, human and financial resources, poor physical health, caste discrimination and occupational structure, social norms, low land productivity and lack of irrigation resources.  The figures above highlight that casual wage labour work (38 per cent) is the most common option for the ultra-poor to supplement their household income, followed by sharecropping (24 per cent) and livestock rearing (16 per cent).

Diverse challenges

A myriad of vulnerabilities displayed by these ultra-poor makes it difficult to apply one straight-jacketed solution. S Topno (43), a single woman and resident of Marcha, has psychiatric disabilities. She lives in a kutcha house with a roof that needs repair. No one in the hamlet could share what led her to this situation. 

“She was the first woman from the hamlet to pass matriculation with first division and was very smart. We don’t know what happened to her that she started behaving like this,” said a villager. She murmurs to herself and stays alone in a separate house away from her brother and sister-in-law.

Also read: India has pushed back poverty, still home to most poor people in world: UNDP index

P Hemrom, 48, a resident of Manmani, stays with her husband and four children. Hemrom and her husband are mentally unsound and own an acre of land. Since they are not in a position to work, they have given their land to relatives for sharecropping. Both of them don’t have a pension due to the unavailability of required documents. 

M Dhanwar, 48,  a resident of Jagu village, stays with her nine-year-old daughter. She is mentally unsound and has often been exploited by men for their bodily pleasures. It is shared that her daughter has been born out of one of these forced physical relationships. She neither has an Aadhaar card nor a disability certificate. 

These are the few profiles of some of the ultra-poor and vulnerable families in Khunti district. Their deplorable conditions of everyday survival are based on the intersection of different identities. They are at the receiving end of structural violence. Therefore, each family requires abundant attention from various stakeholders as well as customised pathways to assist them.

Some insights

There are different faces of vulnerability layered with multiple disadvantages. Prominent among these are social and economic disadvantages, geographical limitations, political scenarios and limited coping capacity coupled with insecurities.

For instance, R Devi, 69, a widow, stays with her son, who is physically disabled, her daughter-in-law and three grandsons. They belong to the service caste named Turi, known for basket weaving and have no land. Neither Devi nor her physically challenged son gets any sort of pension.

Some indicators in isolation have contributed to understanding the condition of the ultra-poor, while in other cases, a couple of factors together account for extreme poverty.

N Topno, 68, lives in a hamlet of Marcha village with her 72-year-old husband and 12-year-old granddaughter. Their daughter had to send the granddaughter as a helping hand to the ageing couple. It led to the discontinuation of her studies. They own 1.5 acres of land, but due to physical inability, they have given their 1 acre of fertile land to neighbours from whom they get a portion of the produce. Only N Topno has access to an old-age pension but not the husband.

Social capital is another factor that plays a crucial role in the lives of the poor. Those with social capital tend to fare better than those lacking contacts or are not part of women’s collectives or Tola and Gram Sabha. 

For instance, R Devi, 33, a resident of Dao Toli, lives with her family of four members. The family moulds iron on an occasional basis and works on the host community’s land as agricultural labours. The couple sustains their family by rearing livestock and has access to welfare schemes like ration, livestock schemes and credit facilities. She says that her family benefits from her being a part of SHG and her neighbours ask them first if they have to hire labourers for work.

While the ultra-poor are majorly women, a significant degree of vulnerability can result from the intersectionality of caste dynamics, social standing and occupation.

For instance, K Lohra, 80, a resident of Jagu village, is an individual of the Lohra with the Oraon community for ages. He doesn’t own any house and lives in a dilapidated one-room. He has neither a ration card nor a pension to sustain himself. He is not physically capable enough to do any work but moulds iron as part of his traditional occupation. He has a daughter who went with someone to work in the tea gardens in another state and never came back.

Sensitising every local forum about its most vulnerable and poor section of society is critical. Often, the community’s direct and indirect actions significantly impact those living on the periphery. Therefore, to help them access their rights and entitlements, one needs to sensitise the community towards their vulnerable and ultra-poor, build capacity of the ultra-poor, customise context suitable livelihood options and create awareness around their rights. 

Focusing only on the ultra-poor rather than the community as a whole will not effectively contribute to addressing extreme poverty, as push and pull factors of a market economy will expose a section of society to shocks and uncertainty at one point or another.

In due course of collectively identifying these families/individuals, possible forms of assistance should be loosely bracketed into some categories to organise support from different stakeholders. Some of these are: Consumption support, access to welfare schemes, counselling of people with psychiatric disabilities, sensitisation workshops for community members, admission of children in government boarding schools, waiver of school fees, capacity building of members on alternative livelihood options and access to interest-free loans.

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth. Iqra Khan is a development practitioner, working with PRADAN. Currently, she works to strengthen local institutions of governance such as Gram Sabhas and Panchayats, focusing on social security schemes for economically weaker sections, women-led institutions.

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