The Hindu Business Line : Where BPL is a proud label

, The Manager at our Visakhapatnam office had warned: "Better carry some food... the joke in this part of Orissa is that if you drop an idli on your toe, you'll get a swelling, if not a fracture." The Western Orissa belt is famous enough for its backward and Rayagada district was once a part of the undivided Koraput district.

FMCG majors such as HLL have their biggest sales of their LUPs (low unit price) products - such as shampoo sachets and small soaps - in the western Orissa belt.

At Hotel Sai International, a comfortable 40-room "luxury" hotel, the bread, cheese spread, biscuits and orange juice, picked up from Vizag appear as unnecessary baggage. The room service menu card has tempting pictures of exotic prawn and chicken preparations, but with the TV "breaking news" of bird flu in Jalgaon district, one decides to play safe and get sustenance from the cheese spread and orange juice!

Tough drive ahead

Badal Tah, a local activist and advisor to the Orissa Adivasi Manch, who is to act as guide and translator in the Kashipur villages which had seen starvation deaths in 2001, says: "Better pack up some lunch. We won't get any food there." Strange, Rabindranath Tagore, my local guide in 2001, had said the very same words. Had nothing changed in five years? Incongruous though it seemed... after all we were going for a follow up of hunger-related deaths... vegetable sandwiches and alu paratha were packed. Around 7.30 a.m. we set off for the 75-km journey to the Kashipur belt and surprisingly the roads are smooth and the journey speedy. There isn't a vehicle in sight for a few km at a stretch. "Don't think these roads have been laid for the villagers, they have no transport. They've been laid for the companies already here and those queuing up, eyeing the rich mineral and metal resources in this belt," is Badal's caustic comment.

As Ramanna steps up on the accelerator, he has to be cautioned that this is not NH4 and children will be darting across the roads. But instead of children we encounter inebriated and unruly holi holy revellers. Holi is celebrated in this region with a surprising passion and fanfare. A matching zeal is, of course, that of Pepsi marketers; every few km Preity Zinta entices the villagers with 300 ml Pepsi bottles "for only Rs 6." What a choice — a kg of rice at Rs 4.75 or Pepsi at Rs 6!

Organic produce

Down generations and over the years, the tribal villagers' landholding has dwindled, and families of 8 to 10 have to subsist with a collective holding of a couple of acres. With near-nil irrigation facilities, cultivation is dependent on the rain gods and natural streams for water. Apart from rice, they grow maize, ragi and other millets and vegetables. They don't believe in pesticides or chemical fertilisers — perhaps, because they cant afford them — so all their produce is organic, something that should fetch them fancy prices in urban markets... only if they had a marketing network. Instead, the sad part is that when a crisis situation crops up such as illness or death, many growers sell the rights to the crop much before it is harvested to the contractor or saukar (moneylender) from Kashipur. When the crop is harvested, it is the property of somebody else.

Then & now

More depressing news is in store as I revisit Panasagoda village, about 72 km from Rayagada, where hunger deaths had taken place in 2001.

So has anything changed, one asks Pylo Majhi, who had contested unsuccessfully for the sarpanch's post. "You can come and search our homes. You won't find any foodgrain, particularly not a grain of rice. Once upon a time we had surplus rice, but today rice has become a luxury for us," he says.

This one street village has 95 families and "after the hunger deaths we were promised BPL cards for all families. But till date we have only 30 BPL cards." We also know that many among the 30 would have either pledged or sold their cards for a mere Rs 500. As others queue up to complain about not having BPL cards, something that entitles the family to 16 kg rice at Rs 4.75 a month, you wonder at the plight and future of people whose present dream is to get the coveted label... Below Poverty Line.

(To be continued)

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in