Cover Story: View from the Village: Land's End

Villages are the core of the relief effort. But as Principal Correspondent Avirook Sen and Senior Photographer Bhaskar Paul found, little trickles down to the needy.

When the sea sounds like an approaching predator. When the still silence in the air gives way to a mocking whistle. When the birds clamour for space in that big banyan tree at the edge of the village. That's when the people of Birudipantal know that a storm is coming.

The sea sounds distant now. The wind isn't shrill any more. But that massive banyan tree -- older than the village itself -- whose branches children climbed, whose shade elders sat under, has fallen. Now children at play hang from its roots: life has turned upside down.

FACTFILE

Profile: Birudipantal in Puri district is the smallest in the Nagar village cluster. Most of its 132 residents belong to the Scheduled Castes.

It happened in the space of half an hour at 3 a.m. on October 29. Suddenly, the roofs seemed to have windows. The sea came in neck deep. Holding children above their heads, spitting salt water, the villagers looked for higher ground. The 132 people who inhabit Birudipantal knew that the storm had come. But, they also know that it hasn't quite gone.

Birudipantal in Puri district's Astaranga block is roughly 80 km from Bhubaneswar. It is the last of the villages on the estuary of the Devi river which drains into the Bay of Bengal, the smallest in the cluster under the Nagar village panchayat. No one, barring the poorest Harijans in the area, wants to live here. This is land's end.

It is just after daybreak on the 17th day after the cyclone at Birudipantal. Bijoy Bauri and his family are in the last house in the village -- the one closest to the water. The house is new. It is a 350 sq ft thatch and mud affair, built over the past two weeks, mostly from the debris of what used to be their home.

The neighbourhood cat is tied up outside the Bauris' house. Her duty begins at night: to protect the scarce relief rations from rodents. In the day, she might just wade into the supplies herself, hence the fetters. "We feed her once a day," says Bauri, "about the same as us." If there is a food chain in Orissa, Birudipantal is the last link.

On this Tuesday morning, 50-year-old Ananta Das and some others heard that some NGO was bringing in relief. The buzz around the village centred on how to claim the paltry 16 loaves of bread, three packets of biscuits and some kerosene oil, earmarked for each of the five villages in the area. But when Das reached Alasahi village after a half hour walk, there was no sign of the relief material. Some of the 2,000-odd villagers of Alasahi had apparently looted the consignment. "The relief worker told me that there was nothing he could do to prevent the locals from grabbing everything," says Das. This has become routine.

There are two ways to get to Birudipantal from the block headquarters at Astaranga. The direct route is to take what used to be the road to Nagar village from Alasahi, pass Dakhinpantal and arrive at that banyan tree that announces Birudipantal. Just 20 huts. One tubewell. No graduates. In an area where there is a surprising similarity between the number of tubewells and the number of those who have been to college (the ratio for each is about 1:100 people), the villages that have more of each have fared better after the storm.

The other route to this village of mostly illiterate daily-wage labourers, is via the larger villages of Balidiha (population 2,000) and Kaliakon (population 1,000). For those supplying relief, this is easier: there's a dirt road in place. But whichever way relief comes, very little drips down to Birudipantal. The sieve that throttles the flow is a fine knit of caste prejudice and population size.

Says Pramod Kandi, a Harijan youth: "Educated higher-caste people from other villages were able to garner some aid from NGOs, we just don't know how to go about it." The only time that there was any close contact with the relatively affluent general caste population in the area was during the cyclone. Anyone with a pucca structure took in whoever came.

Once the storm ended, though, things changed. With just about 60 men, Birudipantal can only send a few to fetch relief for the rest. They always have to go to larger villages, and are invariably outnumbered. Sanjay Das went to Alasahi on November 13 to get the village quota along with three others. "We were beaten up and told to go back," he says. It is being said that Orissa has been set a couple of decades back by the cyclone, but it looks much worse than that: it is now a place where the Darwinian theory of survival seems to prevail. It's a jungle.

After Das' failed attempt at getting relief from Alasahi, the villagers are now discussing what to do about the pilferage of government relief at Birudipantal. The 500 gm of rice per head per day is shrinking inexplicably. This is where the local government comes in. The village panchayat has a sarpanch and a nominee, the two people who control distribution.

On November 13 the nominee arranged to get eight quintals of rice picked up from Astaranga. The road link being cut off, this meant paying a boatman a quintal of rice to ferry the rest to the vicinity of Nagar village. It's a one-hour ride. But when the bags arrived, two more quintals were missing. The people of Birudipantal believe that the rice found its way to the nominee's village: nearby Balipantal. Now there is suspicion and bad blood between the two villages. The story repeats itself down the road. Each village accuses the one nearer the block headquarter of cornering most of the "loot".

And in the villages themselves, there's an atmosphere of constant conflict. At Balidiha village, brothers Chandramani and Hari Behera are fighting desperately even while building their houses: over which of them owns the three utensils that were found among the debris of their broken homes. Some distance away, there's a near riot where Laxman Behera is sitting with a bag of white powder. sixty-year-old Jhalu Behera thinks it is babyfood and wants some for her grandson. It turns out to be bleaching powder. "This clamour will go on if the Government doesn't provide some money for rehabilitation," says Nagar village panchayat sarpanch Kalash Chandra Behera.

There is no shortage of food in Orissa. Chief Minister Giridhar Gamang said that the state has enough to last five months. The trouble for people who have lost everything is that it has to be paid for. In fact there's a problem of plenty in the markets of Astaranga and Kakatpur. Says Astaranga Block Development Officer B. Mangaraj: "Supplies are available in the market, relief isn't required." But Birudipantal villagers can only window shop. There is no money because the labourers have lost work, the fishermen have lost their boats, and the landowners who traded fish for rice have lost their crop.

It is a cycle that the people of Birudipantal ponder over each night. As dusk falls, rice is carefully measured out in coconut shells for the evening meal at some of the homes. The sacks are then tied tight. Bijoy Bauri lets the cat loose. It leaps away to get near a fire. With hardly any trees left standing, this is going to be a bitter winter in Birudipantal. The sea has claimed all the blankets.

Post Script: "Will you have some tea?" asks one of the five government servants at the Astaranga block headquarters. A pile of relief material lies on the verandah. Other rooms have been vacated to stuff bags of food and clothing. Half a cup of tea arrives for everybody. "You were asking about Birudipantal?" says another. "Under Nagar village panchayat, five villages, population 7,299, mostly Scheduled Caste, 21 deaths. fifteen days' relief has been distributed there. That's enough." They elucidate in a chorus: "These people from the labour class and fishing community are so pampered they want relief to go on forever. Always making a noise. We're doing our best. BDO gets up at 5 a.m., yet they are dissatisfied."

Excerpts from the inventory at the block headquarters read thus: Materials received, as on November 14, 1999: 131 bags of clothes; 19,000 towels; 50 blankets; 3,070 bedsheets; six (yes, six) pairs of chappals (used).