JOIN USWomen leaders of the panchayati raj in Odisha have gone beyond measures to ensure food security for their hamlets, finds out Sarada Lahangir.
During the monsoon season – from July to September – and sometimes even in the post-monsoon months, all the cultivable lands of the hamlets of Odisha get flooded, destroying the crops and leaving the already severely disadvantaged population famished.
It is under these challenging circumstances that women leaders of Nakkamamudi panchayat have made an impact.
Taking up cudgels
The Nari Mukti Samaj (society for women’s liberation) ‘of the tribal women, by the tribal women, for the tribal people’ has ensured that several local women sarpanches and panchayat members work for the local community. All of them, incidentally, have gone through a three-phase training programme designed by Thread, an NGO. In fact, all the women selected to contest panchayat election are put through this rigorous, year-long orientation. This helps them to gain a better understanding of the functioning of the panchayati raj system to enable them to do their job effectively, once elected.
Malathi Gudia, who also emerged through this process, has proved her mettle and gained a lot of respect from the villagers. Two years ago, the family of Chanda Sisa, 40, a resident of Nakkamamudi, was waging what looked like a losing battle for survival. Even scraping two square meals a day was proving difficult. She had a BPL card but it was useless. Sisa never got the foodgrains at subsidised rate.
“While the PDS price for rice was Rs 2, we were being forced to buy from the open market at an exorbitant rate of Rs 10 to 15 per kilo. Whenever I went to get ration the PDS dealer would say that the supply hadn’t come in. Sometimes he would tell me to come back the next day. When I did go back I was told that our entitlement had already been taken. This happened quite often but there was no way to find out who was doing the pilfering,” she recalls.
Once, of course, Gudia became sarpanch things changed for the better. “Now every month I am getting my PDS ration on time which is a big boon for my family,” Sisa adds.
A ray of sunshine
Today, hundreds of families in Kudumulugumma block are benefiting from the PDS, which is currently the country’s largest food security scheme. And the credit for this goes to the women leaders, who, as part of the Nari Mukti Samaj, have taken on the responsibility of ensuring a properly-functioning PDS. Gudia and her colleague Maha Devee Sisa, 35, have succeeded in bringing the PDS under the control of the Nari Mukti Samaj-run women sanghas (groups), which has benefited over 27 villages in the area. Every Thursday the PDS supply is brought to the five key villages and from Friday onwards the foodgrains are duly distributed across all villages under the supervision of the respective ‘sanghas’ of the villages.
Dayanidhi Majhi from Godiguda village is ever grateful for the activism of these elected women. A landless wage labourer, he has an Antodaya card though it is only from last year that he has been able to derive any real benefit from it. The card entitles him to 30 kilos of rice at a reduced price of Rs 2 per kilo.
He explains, “Earlier, the PDS delivery was very erratic. The ration shop owner used to give us grain once every three to four months and he would tell us to buy our entire quota at one time. It was trick, because he knew that we could not afford it all at once. He used to sell it in the black market forcing us to buy at full rate when the need arose. Thankfully. it is no longer like this.”
Better food security
NMS members across the district have initiated many other activities to ensure food security.
At present, six community cowsheds have been constructed by the local people that are benefiting 67 families. Collective cultivation – under which villagers work together on a common land and then the harvest is stored in community grain banks - has also been taken on in a big way. The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of rice cultivation is practised to maximise the yield.
From shortage to self sufficiency, these days, community grain banks set up in different villages are stocked up on eight quintals of rice and five quintals of ragi. In addition, there are seed banks where indigenously produced seeds like kanthulo (97 kilos), tho (92 kilos) and biri (145 kilos) have been stored.
Leaders like Gudia and Sisa know that “women suffer the most during a food crisis as they are anyway at the bottom of the family's pecking order”.
As Karmi Besra, another progressive local woman puts it, “Women and food security are closely linked. So all our efforts are trained at ensuring that tribal villages can become food surplus in the next five years.” Amen to that.