Terror may be striking Naxal-hit villages in Chhattisgarh every now and then. But even in non-Naxal villages in the state, to be poor is like being on a marooned island waiting for relief packets to be thrown from the sky.
Both the state and Central government schemes are providing relief in the state. The relief mostly comes in packets which may or may not reach you or have contents you may not need.
In any village here, one would find eight or nine bicycles, distributed recently by the government to construction workers. It would be in pieces if it runs into a pothole, says a villager in Kampa panchayat in Mahasamund district, as he shows the cycle given to the villagers registered as construction workers.
The cycles are not exactly freebies. These have come from the construction workers' welfare cess that has accumulated in the state. These are made locally and hence not fancied by the villagers who regard it as junk. Eight others in the village, who are above the age of 27, have got sewing machines.
The government, in its previous term, had distributed tendu leaf bonus in the form of shoes to poor tribals, annoying the beneficiaries.
Relief also comes through Central government schemes. But there is no effort to ensure that it benefits people.
In Baldidih village in Pithora block of Mahasamund, a pond is being widened under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and almost the entire village is at work. There are young and old, even men and women in their 70s, who are busy digging.
None of them has ever asked for work themselves. They come when asked to do so. And they are helpless as they have not been paid for the past several months. Though the scheme provides 100 days of work for every household, in Baldidih, it has been giving 100 days of work for every village.
The other packet of relief that has been falling into the hands of the villagers is the health insurance card given under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana. The card is a big source of hope and pride unlike other benefits. But here, the card can also misfire.
It holds hope for Nindra, a middle-aged woman who has breast cancer.
But for Bhagirathi, 35, the card he got in 2011 brought disaster. He took his mother, who was seriously ill, to a government hospital in Raipur in February. But his mother was asked to leave saying the card did not have money. He returned home only to cremate his mother two days later.
He says the hospital took the card inside but there is no way to know if they did swipe it and took the money. In fact, that is the doubt that has been gnawing at most villagers who use the card. There were three other people in the hospital who were returned after the hospital said the card had no money. Bhagirathi says the card had been revived with Rs 30 and there was no way it had no money in it.
Bhagirathi did not complain as he did not know where to go. As for the state, it has not bothered to get a doctor in Pithora, which has a population of 200,000 people, forcing Bhagirathi to go all the way to Raipur, which is 60 km away.
In the case of education, the effort is to open a school in every village resulting in a shortage of teachers. An ad hoc English teacher in a school in Rajasevaiya village in Mahasamund says, there were two high schools in the area and neither had enough teachers. Teachers do not fall from the sky. It requires thought to have fewer, but better schools, as the teacher says. And thought is something that is missing in the way the state approaches development here.
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