April 27, 1998

Starvation drives poverty-ridden villagers in this barren region to take their own lives while the administration maintains a stony silence.

By Subash Misra

If tomorrow he cannot say, but today Raghunath has decided to stay alive. In his palm he clutches his salvation, a handful of mahua, a dry fruit. "There is nothing else to eat," he whispers. He is one of the lucky ones. Weeks ago, his brother's hand lay empty, no food, not a grain on his palm. Outside his home on land as stony as a pavement nothing could grow but frustration; beyond, in the towns, every door to employment was hammered shut. So he killed himself. It was not unusual. Starvation is stalking Bundelkhand, poverty on a permanent visit, and an entire people have found there is just one escape from hunger. Suicide.

Some survive, some don't, but what began as a final rebellion against hunger has now become a desperate ritual. Nowhere is life so easily exchanged for death and a trickle of suicides of a few years ago has turned into an epidemic. In the past three years there have been 462 suicides, most of them attributed to starvation. Yet it is a phenomenon that has gone ignored and unreported. As if a nation burdened by the guilt of one Kalahandi is not ready to digest the tragedy of Bundelkhand. Perhaps because it argues against a comforting vision of steady progress into the next millennium.

Every village in Bundelkhand has a story, every month lists a calamity.

December 1997. Their stomachs empty, Sharda, wife of a part-time tractor driver, throws herself and her four children into a nearby well. She survives, the crabs ensure there is nothing left of her children.

March 1998. Kamal Singh Chaurasia, 40, a landless labourer finds his hearth has run cold, nothing to cook. So he writes a note that tells of simple things he can't control, like poverty and hunger. Then he takes his wife, four children, and leaps into the river.

April 1998. Achchelal Dhanuk, 42, sends his wife Vidhya to borrow a kg of wheat from a relative, his four children have not eaten in three days. When she does not return by evening he feeds salphas -- the local name for Quickphos, an insecticide -- to his family. Only two children survive.

At the Jhansi Medical College, the medical officer at casualty says dryly, "If you want to help these people, don't give them medicine, remove salphas from the market." What else can he say -- every month 15-20 people arrive at the hospital having attempted suicide by swallowing these tablets. If once there was hope in Bundelkhand, it has long since fled. Here on the Uttar Pradesh-Madhya Pradesh border, so similar are the tales that neglect is no longer calculated in names but in statistics. In Jhansi, 168 people committed suicide in 1997 of which 73 were due to starvation; in adjoining Lalitpur 191 took their own lives, 82 to escape empty stomachs. Says social scientist Suresh Chandra Shastri: "Frustration has led to depression; they have lost the willpower to fight against poverty."

There is no age barrier to despair, if anything it is not the old who choke in frustration but the young. In Jhansi 120 of the 168 suicides and in Lalitpur 133 of the 191 were of young men between 15 and 38. In most cases poverty was the weight at the other end of the noose. There is more. Manish Mehra, a physician in Jhansi, wonders about the huge numbers never reported: "Villagers often burn the bodies to avoid police action." In a sense it is a baseless fear, for the police in return offer a compelling reply. "Since committing suicide is not an offence, we don't compile figures," remarks Devraj Nagar, dig, Jhansi Range.

Once a land where courage bloomed -- it was here that the British faced organised rebellion in 1857 -- today, it is a landscape that beckons adjectives like barren, infertile, rocky, a place where few have the strength to stay alive. The whole region comprises nine districts but it is in Lalitpur, Jhansi, Shivpuri and Tikamgarh that the effect is most stark. Every indicator is an advertisement for crisis. Water is scarce. Land unproductive. Industrial growth absent. Jobs an illusion. To the point where the rural migration rate is as high as 39.04 per cent against an average migration rate of 11 per cent. It is a land that is aching in despair.

Poverty embraces everyone, only in different ways. From the Birdha block in Lalitpur, a villager brings a story. There are no roads, he says. Then he explains what that means. "When the old get sick, we carry them on our back for 5 km to reach a hospital." He is not alone in his grief. Kamlesh has a tale too. She is middle-aged and unwell, her husband is without a job, their fields an obstacle course of boulders. There is no money for medicines and perhaps she will be May's statistic. "There are people who have even five to 10 acres of land but cannot manage two meals," says Sudanshu Tripathi, a local Congress leader.

Industry came for a while then collapsed. In 1993, the industrial estates developed by the Uttar Pradesh State Industrial Development Corporation were declared "sick and unviable" by the government. The Bundelkhand Development Corporation, once set up in Jhansi for socio-economic uplift, was wound up in 1996 without achieving any target. The cotton mill of Uttar Pradesh State Textile Corporation was closed down in 1997, leaving more than 3,000 workers jobless. The resulting deprivation has not just meant suicides, but has had other extraordinary repercussions. "My four-year-old son Arvind Kumar died as I had no money for his treatment after a dog bit him," despairs Bindeshwari, wife of Akhilesh Pandey, one of the jobless workers in Jhansi.

Her lament finds an echo everywhere. Traditional makers of earthen pots and leaf baskets find their livelihood snatched by an invasion of polypacks. Tribes, surviving by collecting herbs and other medicinal plants in the regional forests, must now sell their wares at a nominal price to the touts of a drug factory in Jhansi and other cities. "After spending one month to collect a kg of safed musli (a medicinal plant) in the forests, we get Rs 30 for it. It is then sold in the main market for over Rs 400 a kg," claims Lalmani of Gudai village in Lalitpur. The cottage industry of (red) stone statues, wooden furniture and toys has also collapsed with the entry of multinational companies in the market.

The cycle of life has broken down over the past two-three years, the fight has gone out of these people. Even eastern Uttar Pradesh, backward itself, cannot rival the Bundelkhand definition of hardship. In the eastern region, there is fertile land, the largest number of sugar mills and thus some employment, careful nursing by the Gandhi family and abundant water. Bundelkhand can lay no such claim -- not one sugar mill, and it requires dynamite to dig a well. Everything here appears contrarian. People in penury often turn to crime as the final alternative, but here even that has not occurred. Mafia gangs flourish in eastern and western Uttar Pradesh, but there are hardly any here. In every way, their well of resilience has run dry. "They have no avenues or options left to earn wages," says G.P. Mishra, director, Giri Institute of Social and Development Studies in Lucknow. That being so, salphas provides an easy way out; and when one man swallows the tablets, says Shastri, "it provokes others to end their lives as well".

Help is hard to come by. B.P. Mishra, former district magistrate of Lalitpur, was one of the few who responded to a call of distress while the administration stood rooted in bewilderment by the suicide trend. The situation pleaded for action, like industrial or agricultural projects to generate employment; instead the administration colluded with influential politicians who captured the local economy, refusing to assist mine workers or farm labourers in ensuring payment of government wages. In December 1997, Mishra began a crusade against the area's unscrupulous politicians; last week he was handed his transfer order.

Elsewhere, from the politicians under whose jurisdiction this epidemic continues, there is silence. "Our MP Rajendra Agnihotri has been elected for the fourth time but has not voiced his concern in Parliament even once in the past 10 years," chides a professor of a degree college. He believes that Agnihotri, whose roots are in Kanpur, is a man with no empathy for people beyond those citylines. But he should not fret, every politician of the area faces similar criticism. Uma Bharati, say residents of Gujarra Khurd village in Tikamgarh district, "promised development" but it never came. In Jhansi, they say the same of MLA Ravindra Shukla, elected from their town but whose heart lies in Farukkabad from where he comes. As if concern has physical boundaries.

Removing frustration, generating self-employment, reviving cottage industries is part of B.P. Mishra's solution. Suggestions for rehabilitation that have gone as unseen and as unheard as the tears that still fall in Bundelkhand.

April 1998. Brijesh, just 13 years old, his father unemployed, swallows Quickphos. Rushed to hospital he survives. His father, holding his hand, does not know what to say. Or who to blame.

April 1998. Kamal Kishore Dubey, just 25 years old, unemployed for two years, finally abandons hope. He does not survive.

Nothing has changed. Every village in Bundelkhand has a story, every month lists a tragedy.

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