Villages inside forest near Guwahati struggle for basic amenities

An early October morning in 2020, nine months pregnant Jitamoni (22) felt severe abdominal pain. When the pain kept increasing, her husband Naren Ingti (30) decided to take her to the nearest primary health centre (PHC) 23 kilometres (km) away.

Naren remembers this as one of the toughest journeys of his life.

The couple lives in Puran Garbhanga village, one of the 15 village settlements inside the Garbhanga Reserve Forest on the hilly terrains of Kamrup Metropolitan district, Assam. State capital Guwahati is just 25 km away but no road connects the village with it.

Thus, for Jitamoni and Naren, the 23 km to the PHC in Lokhra, Natun Garbanga, was the shortest distance for a safe birthing. For the rest of villagers too, it is often the difference between life and death in the absence of basic amenities.

At 7am that morning, Naren, gathered some village folks, booked a loader truck — the only four wheeler available — and set out for the PHC on the uncooperative, muddy roads.

An hour later they reached a junction, where they found mobile network and booked a government ambulance. “I called 108 (emergency services) and waited at the Garbhanga-Lokhra intersection. But no vehicle reached us,” said Naren.

An hour into waiting for the ambulance, Jitamoni delivered the baby on the side of the road in an unhygienic loading truck with the help of the women who had come along.

This sounds a twice-told tale in these 15 villages, mostly inhabited by tribal families, where delivering babies by the road is not uncommon. “It is a normal scene here,” a resident told this correspondent during his visit in January 2021.

These villages struggle for the most basic facilities: Health, roads, drinking water, electricity and primary education, despite being located so close to the capital.

One of the primary reasons for the absence of these facilities is the fact that the settlements are located inside a forest and India’s colonial forest policies don’t allow for most such facilites to be set up inside the forest. A landmark 2006 law, the Forest Rights Act (FRA), challenges these forest policies, but nothing has changed on the ground, so far.

“Forest administration in India has used colonial laws to set up reserve and protected forests over 23 per cent of the landmass. This process has created huge social conflicts in the forested landscapes inhabited by the most marginalised communities — the adivasis and other traditional forest dwellers,” said Tushar Das, an independent researcher on forest rights and governance issues.

These policies have led to communities being deprived of their rights and livelihoods. “The FRA has sought to undo this historic injustice but even after 15 years, its implementation has been blocked by the forest department,” Das added.

Paying for lack of access

The truck that Naren found to transport Jitamoni in was a ‘DI van’, used in good transport. The driver quoted Rs 3,000 for a trip to the junction, a hefty amount for a daily-wage labourer.

After Jitamoni delivered the baby at the junction, they rushed the newborn and the barely-conscious mother to Lokhra PHC in the same truck. But their struggle did not end there.

They reached the PHC only to find that there were no empty beds. The officials refused to admit the baby and the mother.

They travelled for another hour to reach a PHC located another 15 km away in Azara. “At 4pm, nine hours after we started from our village, a doctor finally checked them,” said Naren.

The group did not return to the village the same night because a stretch of the forest is a notified elephant corridor and the animals frequent the area in search of food and water, Naren said. They stayed the night and took the same truck back to their village in the morning.

The truck alone cost Naren Rs 8,000, more than his monthly income.

Perennial problem

In Jalukpaham, 28 km from Naren’s village, Tumung kabud (27) also delivered her baby on the way to the PHC three years ago.

“I felt extreme pain in the morning. My husband carried me in a stretcher made of sack and bamboo with the help of some villagers to Rani PHC, 20 km away from the village,” Tumung described. ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers of the village accompanied Tumung and her relatives and friends.

It usually takes three hours to reach the PHC from their village on foot through a steep, unmotorable hill road. Tumung was in the ninth month of pregnancy. She could not wait that long and delivered her baby on the road.

“We returned midway after the birth of the baby. The ASHA workers of the village helped us,” said Baliram Kabud, Tumung’s husband.

On an average, about 20 births happen per village in these 15 settlements and women have to go through a lot because there is no facility, Pritilata Das, Auxiliary Nursing Midwife (ANM) of the sub-health centre in Jalukpaham village, told this correspondent. Poor transportation and lack of cellular network makes matters worse.

The 15 villages share three sub-health centres located in Jalukpaham, Garbhanga and Puran Garbhanga. They only cater to general health issues and do not have the facilities to deliver a baby.

The three sub health centres, however, open only once a month. The electricity grid has not reached these settlements yet, so even on the days these sub-centers open, they remain functional only for a few hours because the officers lock-up to leave early in the daylight.

“We usually come to the health centre once a week. But in the rainy season, we come once a month,” said Hiran Chakrabarty, ANM of the Puran Garbhanga’s sub-health centre.

“For the last one year, we have only been doing first-aids and regular vaccination, because only the appointed community health officer is authorised to give medicines and the post was empty,” Chakrabarty said. An officer has recently been appointed in this sub-health centre, he added.

Lack of health infrastructure and medical personnel in inaccessible areas is a perennial problem in Assam, leading to adverse health outcomes for mothers and children.

Assam recorded India’s worst maternal mortality ratio, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — 229 — against the national average of 122, according to the special bulletin on Maternal Mortality in India, 2015-2017 of the sample registration system.

The state’s neonatal mortality rate (deaths of newborns in the first 28 days per 1,000 live births) was 22.5 against the national average of 12.3, showed the findings of the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey released in December 2020.

A cut-off world

For the people living in these 15 settlements the main occupation is agriculture and labour. Those who cultivate, mainly grow vegetables and paddy for their own consumption.

Some of them also walk long distances for four-five hours every week to sell their produce in the weekly markets of Lokhra and Beltola, 26 and 35 km away, for an earning as low as Rs 300-500.

For ration, village residents rely on subsidised grains from fair-price shops, under the government public distribution system, located 25 km away, a five-hour walk.

Several government schemes, including those for toilets, cooking gas and electricity connections, have not been able to reach here despite the proximity to the state capital.

Only a handful of families have below-poverty-line cards, which most families in all of these settlements should possess.

In these circumstances, even the smallest expenditure on health becomes a major burden for these families. And most of these health crises are caused by the absence of basic facilities such as water.

Darshana Tamuli, newly appointed community health officer in Jalukpaham sub-health centre, said:

The villagers mainly suffer from water-borne diseases as common as stomach pain. These diseases are mainly caused by lack of clean water.
Only three of these 15 settlements have a connection under the National Rural Drinking Water Mission, a national programme implemented in these villages by the Public Health and Engineering Department (PHED).

Rest of the families manage their water from waterfalls and streams located in the upper area of the hills. Some families instal temporary pipes to transfer water from these streams to their houses. It costs about Rs 10,000, not affordable by all.

Most people fall sick because the water that they collect from streams to use is not hygienic, said Tamuli.

Struggle for rights

Recently, PHED tried to build drinking water infrastructure in the villages. But the forest department, under whose purview the area is, obstructed and stayed the process — another example of colonial hangover in forest policies.

The British established ‘forest villages’: The residents could stay on free of cost provided they would work for forest department — felling trees, transporting them and protecting the forest from fires.

After independence, it became the duty of the forest department to ensure basic facilities in these settlements, while the village residents could not claim any right over the forest land.
One of the villages among these 15 is a recognised forest village. Facilities, however, are absent there as well.

The FRA tried to undo the injustice, saying those living in forests before December 2005 could claim land title with appropriate documents — something that didn’t go down well with the bureaucracy. FRA’s implementation, anyway, has lagged behind schedule.

Every family with appropriate documentation in these 15 villages inside Garbhanga reserve forest is eligible to claim their land title. But no one has tried. They are barely aware of their rights.
Bhaskar Deka, divisional forest officer, South Guwahati forest division, was approached for comments. He said he has recently joined and would not be able to speak on the matter of these villages in detail.

Bhabhesh Medhi is an independent journalist based in Guwahati, Assam. This story was reported under the National Federation of India Fellowship for independent journalists.

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