Author: Sabyasachi Bandopadhyay
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: June 13, 2004
URL: http://indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=48885
What prompts Chief Minister to admit
'situation of starvation' in West Bengal village? 5 dead, no roads no schools,
no hospitals, no jobs - and a votebank
Comrades in New Delhi may hop around
TV studios lecturing the government on what it should do, should never
do or shouldn't dare to do but they should listen to Sanatan Shabbar. His
father died five days ago, with nothing to eat. His was one of the five
deaths in this village in West Bengal which has kept voting CPI(M) for
the Lok Sabha since 1977.
Shabbar breaks down while telling
his story.
''For the last one month,'' he says,
''we had almost nothing to eat except for some jungle fruits and wild vegetables.
That day my father told me, 'Give me some rice to eat.' I went to the jungle,
cut some fuel, sold it for Rs 12 and bought rice. But when I came back
home, my father, Shatrughan, was already dead.''
Top CPM officials, Ministers and
bureaucrats have rushed to this village-a well was dug here overnight-after
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee himself admitted yesterday that
''a situation of starvation was very much there.''
That rare admission is also a self-indictment
of sorts. For, this village, 280 km from Kolkata, with a population of
only about 300, shows the state of the state administration:
* There is no road worth its name
leading to or from the village
* None of the residents has any
Below Poverty Line card that could help them use the public distribution
system for rations z The nearest hospital is 40 km away, the nearest high
school is 50 km away. z There is no provision for irrigation.
* There is no public transport linking
this village to the district town of Jhargram, 80 km away. z One of the
primary sources of livelihood here is selling kendu leaves used to make
beedis. The government banned individual sale and formed various co-operative
organisations of tribals whose job was to collect kendu leaves and sell
them in the market-the money then earmarked for ''welfare and development''
of tribals.
''I don't know how that money is
spent. The money supposed to be spent on the welfare of people like Shabbar
goes somewhere else,'' says Amal Shabar. And he is an active member of
the CPM and of the Lodha-Shabbar Unnayan Samity, one of these registered
organisations.
* One of those hit by the ban is
Budhu Shabbar who lost his father Samaj and sister Mangli within a month
of each other. ''Before the government banned the sale,'' he says, ''we
would get two meals a day. Now when we don't get work as labourers, we
eat wild potatoes and mohua fruits."
* Getting work as labourers in the
nearby towns isn't so easy. More so because the People's War has fixed
daily labour rates at Rs 40 which nobody is willing to pay. ''If we go
to work on a lesser pay they threaten us and then the police harass us
demanding information on the Naxalites,'' says 19-year-old Sukhi Shabbar,
one of the several unemployed men here.
The absence of irrigation facilities
has ensured that at best, there is nothing beyond subsistence farming.
At worst, starvation. ''Even the small amount of crop that we got was destroyed
by elephants,'' says Chameli Mahato, who says she lost her 2-year-old grand-daughter
last month because she didn't have enough to eat.
Local CPM leaders blame the deaths
to remoteness of the area and the PWG. ''This is far from district headquarters,''
says Amiya Sengupta, secretary of the party's Belpahari Zonal Committee.
Not that the government isn't aware
of it. In fact, its state Human Development Report, prepared with the Planning
Commission and the UNDP and released last month, admits that the drought-prone
western part of the state, where Amlasol falls, is ''most backward in terms
of infrastructure and material development with the lowest per capita income.''
