(VIDEO) Bundelkhand Poor is forced to eat Grass & Wild plants to survive
While her grandson Sultan nibbles on a roti, Shanti lies wrapped in a blanket, ignoring the hunger pangs. Her son and daughter-in-law have gone to work as daily wagers in Sehore near Bhopal, 300 kilometres away, leaving behind two of their four children with the grandparents.
There is no work in Shanti's village of Bhadauna in Lalitpur, the Uttar Pradesh district bordering Madhya Pradesh, part of the region of Bundelkhand. Unseasonal rain and hailstorms washed away the winter crop of wheat at the time of harvest in February and March. The monsoon crop of urad dal shrivelled up as the rains failed. If two successive crop failures weren't bad enough, the soil is now so arid that many farmers cannot plant the winter crop, and those who have, have stuck to sowing wheat in small parcels.
For Sahariya adivasis like Shanti, who have no land of their own and work on the fields of others, there is nothing to do, and little to eat.
“Ab khaani to hai apan ko chaar roti ya paach,” said Shanti, sitting up to talk. "I should be eating four-five rotis. But I’m not getting that many. Mil rahi hai do ya dedh. I’m getting only two rotis, or one and a half."
“After the children have eaten, whatever is left, we eat that,” she said.
A younger woman, Kundan Devi, Shanti’s neighbour, stood overhearing the conversation. “Let me show you what we are eating,” she said, and went inside her home and came back with this.
The rotis were made with a mix of wheat flour and leaves that grow wild, she said.
As Shanti’s small courtyard filled up with neighbours, in the chorus of voices, someone exclaimed, "Ghaas kha rahe hai, ghaas. We are eating grass." Just then, an old woman appeared in the lane, carrying a potli on her head. Her name was Biniya Bai.
The bundle contained an assorted collection: the dust of dal left behind by a farmer after threshing. A wild rice-like grain found on the edges of fields. The seeds of a weed called samai.
Biniya had spent the day painstakingly collecting the fallen seeds by pressing a cloth against the earth. The seeds would stick to the cloth, she would gather them, bring them home, pound them into flour and mix them with the dust of dal to make rotis.
This wasn’t the first year she had fallen back on eating samai, she said. But never before did she have to walk past two villages before she found them.
The rainfall had been so scarce this year that even the weeds had failed to sprout.
Abysmal rainfall
Lalitpur is no stranger to drought. Nearly 150 years ago, a near identical failure of two successive crops had led to a famine that William Wilson Hunter documented in the Imperial Gazetteer:
“Lalitpur is subject to loss of crops from blight, hailstorms, and the ravages of locusts; but its principal enemy is drought, to which the great famine of 1868-69 was mainly due. The kharif or autumn crop of 1868 failed almost entirely, through long-continued want of rain; and the rabi or spring harvest of 1869 produced only half its usual amount.”
More recently, since 2002, like other districts of Bundelkhand, Lalitpur has seen erratic rainfall, with several years of drought. The crisis turned severe enough for the Centre to announce a special package of Rs 7,266 crore for drought relief and development in Bundelkhand in 2009.
But this year, according to people, the rainfall has been abysmally low – worse than any other year in recent memory.
“It rained in the monsoon the way it rains in the winter,” said Lalita Devi of Bhaduana village. “Just a few showers that lasted a couple of hours.”
In Purakalan village, Babulal said, “The water did not leave the fields.”