THE MORE THINGS CHANGE... Plans are made and revised but food remains scarce in the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region; (below) the bridge on the Bhaskel remains incomplete 10 years after it was proposed

Instead of the Rs 843 crore allocated in the revised plan, KBK has received only Rs 253.75 crore.

Deep in Orissa's interior, in the Kalahandi district notorious for periodic starvation deaths, all Chaituram Majhi has for company is despair. First, he lost a daughter to malaria. Then his wife died due to a mysterious fever. Emotionally pauperised, Majhi started drinking. After he went broke, he began to borrow from moneylenders till he had mortgaged his land and virtually everything else he owned. This harvest season, he stood by helplessly as the moneylender carted off the crop he had sown.

It's a tale made sadder by the fact that it is not unique. Kalahandi's harsh terrain has, with unfailing regularity, generated tragic tales-from starvation deaths to the selling of children. Now add one that's a different, but perhaps even sadder: successive teams of flighty bureaucrats and politicians spend years trying to concoct the perfect relief package on paper but the people in the village still remain hungry.

"Though low on hope, the region is high on hoaxes," quips Abhash Panda, a development consultant hailing from the region. Changes, if any, have been superficial. Like the splitting up of the three erstwhile districts of Kalahandi, Bolangir and Koraput-kbk, in short-into eight smaller districts. The bridge over the Bhaskel river in Kosagumuda is, therefore, symbolic: it remains incomplete ten years after it was proposed, like the numerous assistance plans chalked out for the region.

It all began with the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s. Following reports on starvation, he visited the area and announced a special package for 15 KBK blocks to fight starvation. The plan was in operation for about a year till Rajiv was voted out of power. The following government starved the plan to death.

Then in 1993, after another bout of deaths caused by lack of food, the Orissa government drew up a drought mitigation and development situation action plan for KBK. With a total outlay of Rs 379 crore, it sought Rs 270 crore as assistance from the Centre. But before the plan reached Delhi, the then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao arrived in Orissa with a Central team to suggest a five-year long-term action plan (LTAP) for KBK's sustainable development. The plan envisaged an outlay of Rs 1,369 crore, with the Centre providing Rs 699 crore.

It didn't stop there. Another Central team arrived, saying that the plan would have to be redesigned to provide assistance at the grassroots level. What emerged this time was a detailed district-specific plan that increased the outlay to Rs 1,456 crore. While the likes of Chaituram Majhi slipped deeper into penury, yet another team visited and suggested that the LTAP be stretched to eight years and expanded to include such sectors as health, institutional finance and the Public Distribution System. So a new long-term plan surfaced, its outlay jumping to Rs 6,656.44 crore, with the Centre expected to foot Rs 4,537 crore.

Like a game of Chinese Whispers, the plan was passed on, each player changing something of the character of the original. Sent to a new set of experts at the Union Ministry of Rural Development, the plan was found unviable. Contrary to expert opinions that it should encompass every important aspect of life, experts now insisted that it ought to be drastically pruned and focused on watershed management and employment generation. That was when B.N. Yugandhar, secretary to Rao, led a team to the districts. They made their suggestions and finally in 1995, a long-term plan for KBK took shape with an outlay of Rs 4,859 crore.

If the plan had been implemented fully, living conditions in KBK might well have improved. But it was not to be. In 1998, the plan that took two years to design and was revised four times was abandoned. The planners felt the project was not functioning as well as it should, so state officials were told to go to the work table all over again.

"The move was aimed at making the LTAP more effective," says Anadi Sahu, BJP MP and secretary of the party's special cell on KBK. But what it did was derail the plan. After state officials revised the LTAP in 1998, the Centre took three years to accept it in principle. This despite the fact that Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee had pledged in his Independence Day address to the nation from the Red Fort in 1998 that poverty would be banished from KBK. The two-line acceptance sent in October 2001 did not even make any financial commitment.

"Money is not only scarce for KBK, it comes, if at all, erratically," complains K.J.S. Chatrath, chief administrator of the KBK project. Words borne out by fact-the Planning Commission sanctioned Rs 100 crore for the region in October 2001, but not a rupee has arrived so far.

Another issue is that only 30 per cent of Central assistance for the LTAP since 1995 has come as outright grants. The bulk of it-70 per cent-is in the form of loans with an interest of 12 per cent. There's even a penalty of 14.75 per cent interest payable for delayed repayment.

The LTAP's prime objective was to pump in additional resources into the region so that development could get a fillip, even though long-term solutions lay in land reforms and better availability of institutional credit. But the funds are reaching the impoverished areas in meagre amounts. "Had money been made available, there would surely have been a trickle-down effect," says Radha Mohan Mallick of the Bhubaneswar-based Naba Krushna Chowdhury Centre for Development Studies.

But that has remained wishful thinking. Between 1995 and 1998, the state got no more than Rs 20 crore from the Centre, about 7 per cent of the sum originally promised under the ltap for those years. Post 1998, all the Central Government has done is make some ad hoc payments from time to time. As a result, the region received only Rs 253.75 crore, compared to the Rs 843 crore that it should have under the revised LTAP.

As if that is not enough, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has magnanimously promised to include the districts of Kandhmal and Gajapati in the LTAP. That means that the Rs 1.5 crore that each of the eight districts gets each year will shrink further.

LTAP has yielded limited results. Over 48,000 tube wells were sunk and 400 hostels for tribal girls have sprung up in KBK in the past few years. But poverty has not yet slackened its grip. "The challenges facing KBK are huge," says Arabinda Kumar Padhi, the young collector of Nowrangpur, one of the impoverished districts in the region. An immediate challenge is to secure funds to run the girls hostels. With only enough money to provide for the upkeep of its inmates for the next six months, the future looks grim. That has remained a constant right through the revisions of the elusive relief package.