Phanas Punji’s next generations have the same level of poverty in what is called inter-generational chronic poverty
That afternoon conversation she had on July 27, 1985 is all that Phanas Punji lives with. The more years she adds to her life, the wider is the resonance of that conversation.
After 37 years and at 70 now, that conversation is her only memory. As if she never had any other; or she could not chronicle her life without that conversation. When she remembers that conversation, she closes her eyes and her face becomes stiff. She mechanically utters the conversation.
That day, she spoke about 100 words to a “stranger” with an entourage of more than 100 people. They did not understand each other’s language. A translator let out the conversation to the world where it made ripples as an elegy on India.
“I sold my 14-year-old sister-in-law for Rs 40 to buy some food. I would have died otherwise,” Phanas told the “stranger” in local dialect. The buyer of her sister-in-law also offered a new saree — the one she had on while speaking to the “stranger”.
This “stranger” had visited her home in Amalapali village in the Kalahandi district (now part of Nuapada district) of Orissa (now Odisha) to record the brief confession personally.
The stranger was Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, accompanied by his wife Sonia. While listening to Phanas, she asked Janaki Bhallava Patnaik, then chief minister of the state, to check the stale leafy vegetable cooked in an earthen pot.
Phanas pointed to a sack of rice local officials gave her the night before. She was looking at food grain after a long time. “We eat sirel (a wild weed people often consume in time of distress, and could be found in Phanas’s backyard) for days and rice water begged from others.”
A prime minister of India was recording the first starvation-driven selling of a family member.
In March that year, news broke out of Phanas selling the minor girl. A severe drought had ravaged the district in 1984-85. Thousands of people were on the verge of starvation as agriculture collapsed.
There was little employment. People across the district were out looking for food in exchange of whatever belongings they had (like utensils).
Many died; many never returned to their villages — people assumed they either lay dead somewhere or had ventured to unknown lands from where it was tough to return.
Phanas was scouting for work in exchange of food in neighbouring villages. Her son and daughter remained home without food for days.
Her husband had mysteriously vanished a decade ago — many thought he had went away to look for jobs. But Phanas knew he was not of sound mind — may be because of years of hunger and unemployment due to the droughts of 1971-74.
As news broke of the PM descending at Phanas’ doorsteps, a few policemen and officials picked her up to be presented before him.
“Why didn’t you sell your baby daughter?” Prime Minister Gandhi asked her, as many locals recount. “Who would have bought a baby?” she replied.
A partially blind man bought Phanas’s sister-in-law as a companion to whom he formally married long after.
“Feeding another mouth alone, taking care of my own children, and the man of the house nowhere to be seen. It was not possible.” That was her last few words to the PM.
While returning from his first-hand brush with India’s acute poverty, Rajiv Gandhi made that now infamous observation: “Even 15 paise of a rupee sent from Delhi is not reaching the people.”
In February this year, Phanas had to again narrate her story to me.
‘I remain all about that visit’
Phanas lives with her son, daughter-in-law and grand children in a one-room house constructed with support from the state government in 2015. Her next two generations have grown up hearing the conversation Phanas had with a prime minister of India.
She became a metaphor for India’s poverty. Kalahandi became the geographical marker for government to gauge progress of poverty eradication. If Phanas is not escaping poverty, the geography is not; if Kalahandi is reporting starvation and distress, the country is still stuck where it was.
“You are one of the thousands who hear me retelling this conversation. Rajiv has been killed. I remain all about that visit. I am where I was when he met me,” she said.
Like her, the undivided Kalahandi district is stuck with chronic poverty. It has featured as one of the poorest districts in all the government assessments since 1951.
Economist Asha Kapur Mehta who has done seminal research on why some areas remain poor forever — called chronic poor areas or poverty — ranks the district as “stuck in worst level of poverty” as in the past.
Nuapada, along with other districts carved out of the earlier Kalahandi, still rank among the country’s poorest districts. Every third person in the district is poor, according to the latest multidimensional poverty assessment by NITI Aayog, the central think-tank.
In 1996, a decade after the prime ministerial visit and many more starvation deaths, Government of India declared Kalahandi one of the 41 districts in India “prone to starvation”. It remains so.
Spreading desertification
The story of Kalahandi is a story of good resources and bad management. Official records and reports of British travelers point out 1898 as the first severe drought that struck Kalahandi. Its 125 years of history with rising frequency of drought is a chronicle of the destruction of a sustainable and participatory ecology.
Nineteenth century travelers often referred to Kalahandi region as the “mass of jungle and hills.” Kalahandi and its surrounding areas have become degraded barren land. In the late 19th century, snow and frost were as common as cactus and sands in the 21st century.
Deforestation and collapse of the traditional tank irrigation have caused desertification of this area. In the latest Desertification Atlas of India, Nuapada has been identified to be facing high land degradation due to unirrigated lands losing the top soil and moistures.
The decline was quick and its impact is already visible. In 1946, Kalahandi’s 5,497 traditional structures irrigated 38,684 ha of land. By 1970, it reduced to 8,007 ha — a drop of 80 per cent. Currently, such tanks hardly irrigate a few hundred hectares as large-scale irrigation projects have been promised. Kalahandi watches helplessly as all the water flows away, even though it receives more rainfall than Punjab — an average of 1,200 mm.
For most, forest and agriculture were the two main sources of livelihoods. And both are no more propositions of profits. Migrating out for sustenance is just another seasonal occupation for the people here. And this one gives that much sought after cash income as farming has become unreliable.
In 2020 when the national lockdown was declared to curb the COVID-19 spread, a whopping 70,000 informal workers returned to the district, officially recorded by the state government. “Every year some 80,000 to 1, 00,000 people migrate out for livelihood,” says Fanindam Deo, a retired principal of the Khariar College who have researched on the roots of the district’s chronic poverty.
“How many labourers a small piece of land can absorb? In distress, this leads to bonded labour. And the district has many of them, including Phanas and her son at some points of time,” says Ajit Panda, a veteran journalist who has monitored Phanas’s life very closely.
The Nuapada District Handbook, published in 2020, quotes data from the 2011 census that offers a glimpse into the district’s employment crisis. In 2011, the district had more agri-labourers than cultivators: out of 0.3 million total workers, 0.094 million were cultivators and 0.14 million were agri-workers. In the Khariar development block – Phanas’s village comes under this – the number of agri-workers are double that of the cultivators.
Deo was in a nearby village when Rajiv Gandhi visited Phanas. He has followed her life after and says the district has a similar trajectory. “Distress has come down as welfare programmes are reaching to some people. But that is not the real development. While migration earlier was a distress response, it has become an established livelihood source,” he says. “If Phanas was moving out to look for employment in face of a drought, now also she and family do that. Thousands in the district do that,” he adds.
‘Life has been a risk, but this was…’
Phanas slip into the poverty trap took that same path that of the Kalahandi region: ecological degradation leading to disaster like drought becoming more frequent leading to ultimate collapse of the traditional livelihood sources.
She has some three acres of land. But she doesn’t remember her husband ever did cultivation. Droughts didn’t make it possible. “I did bhuti (labour) in exchange of rice, for years as far as I remember,” she says. After a decade of the prime ministerial visit, in 1995, government gave her the contractual job of a cook in the nearby Anganwadi. She earns currently Rs 3,500 as a monthly honorarium.
By 1990, her son — Jagabandhu Punji, then 15 years old —started migrating out, first with her mother to nearby villages and then to Chhattisgarh. Her two daughters also worked as farm labourers to support her. For months, they were out of the village.
In neighbouring village Bhalumunda in Balangir district Jagabandhu earned Rs. 30/month for manual works in a household. Ajit Panda says he was under bondage. It was an endless chase: every day Phanas and family worked just to eat. In case of any emergency, they took some loan from private sources and that put them on a debt trap.
In three generations, Phanas has further slipped into the abyss of poverty. Her son and grand children are already in a debt trap that was laid years back when Jagabandhu had a brush with farming. They face a real threat of losing the only asset they possess, the piece of land on which they reside now.
Jagabandhu stopped migrating in 2004 when he decided to take up cultivation in the 3 acres land. “I gained experience of agriculture when I was bondage in a farm in Chhattisgarh,” he says remembering the overwhelming sense of being free from depending on others for survival. “My mother’s salary gave some sense of security. The cheap rice we get from government somehow ensured we get food for a few days. Anyway, it was just another risk that we have been enduring every day with hunger.”
To begin with he took up paddy for own consumption and vegetables for selling. The recurring drought and desertification made a profitable earning just impossible. Under a government scheme he got a dug well on his land but that dried up in just a few months. “The cost of inputs was also high for me to afford. I had to again migrate out locally for daily wage jobs to supplement,” he says.
READ: India stopped counting poor
Poverty traps the third generation
In another twist of time, Phanas’s husband Chabi Gaud reappeared in their life. “He was not keeping well. In 2007 he died here,” Jagabandhu remembers the event as one which pushed them into a debt trap from where they have not been able to come out for the last 15 years.
To pay for his treatment and the funeral rituals and the community feast, they loaned Rs. 10,000. To repay it they sold a part of the land. To get his daughter married, he took a loan mortgaging the land from the Utkal Gramya Bank at Khariar. The bank serves him multiple notices and the loan with penalties and interest come to around Rs. 40,000 currently. “Can’t pay back,” he says.
His earning from the vegetable crop has not been remunerative. “During the lockdown I had sell 50 kgs of brinjal for Rs. 100. It even didn’t cover my fuel cost. Last year he added to debt when his crop of green gram was completely wiped out due to unseasonal rains. He had a herd of 10-15 goats; every year he could sell two to three of them that paid for the food. But a strange disease killed all of them. “It was a huge capital loss”.
In February this year he couldn’t manage any daily wage jobs. In the last four months he worked for just 18 days. In his job card under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) recorded the last work 2017. “The Panchayat has not opened up any work in our area,” he says.
Jagabandhu is reliving the pangs of hunger as he looks at his children playing around. Including Phanas’s Rs 3,500 monthly salary and the wage earning, the family of five survives on Rs. 4,750 a month. Or, Rs. 31/day is each member’s capacity to spend. This is one rupee less than the country’s rural poverty line set based on 2011-2012 price, referred to as the “starvation line’ as well. The family together gets 50 kgs of subsidized rice a month through the Public Distribution System. “Buying the extra 25 kgs to meet our total consumption costs us Rs. 750 a month. The only way we survive is by cutting down on lentils and vegetables.” It is long they had any food except rice.
His two children are growing up unknowing that they have already inherited an unbearable burden of debt. “If the government withdraws the subsidized rice scheme, Phanas and her family will overnight starve. This is the story of Kalahandi; distress has been taken care of by relief measures. But relief from poverty is a distant goal,” says Deo.
This article is part of a series on stories from India’s poorest districts, particularly those that have featured in the country’s poverty ranking since 1951. The series examines the link between poverty and the local ecological degradation, whether the later making poverty chronic in these geographies.
We are a voice to you; you have been a support to us. Together we build journalism that is independent, credible and fearless. You can further help us by making a donation. This will mean a lot for our ability to bring you news, perspectives and analysis from the ground so that we can make change together.
.png)
Comments are moderated and will be published only after the site moderator’s approval. Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name. Selected comments may also be used in the ‘Letters’ section of the Down To Earth print edition.