Apekshita Varshney

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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Her hair is
worked hard upon – neatly oiled and plaited. Abundant wrinkles crisscross her
face. She is wearing hawai chappals
and a khadi saree that
falls slightly above her ankles. She looks ready for a day of work, but is here
to take us across the Pinnath
range to the Rudradhari
waterfall – the source of the Kosi river in the Kumaon region. 

We are
participants at an annual March-April community festival in Kausani, a village of around
2,400 people on the border of Bageshwar
and Almora districts of Uttarakhand. Basanti Samant, 60, or Basanti behen, as she is widely
addressed, is a speaker at the event. She is not randomly picked to lead our
pack.

Some
years ago, she led a movement – forming 200 groups, each with 15-20 women – in
and around Kausani , to save the Kosi. By 2002, the river’s summer flow had <a href="https://d2cax41o7ahm5l.cloudfront.net/cs/speaker-pdfs/jiwan-rawat-professor.pdf">dwindled</a> to around 80
litres a second from 800 litres in 1992, and since then Samant and the women of
Kausani have worked hard for its conservation. 

Back
in 2002, Samant inspired women to stop cutting live wood and start planting
more native broadleaf trees such as the banj oak. The women pledged to use water
judiciously, and to put out and prevent forest fires. Samant ushered them into
a sisterhood that conserves the environment, but over the years, the women have
stayed together, deriving strength from each other for battles also fought
within their homes.

But,
at first, Samant had to fight her own battle.

“My
life was like the mountain – difficult and uphill,” she says. When she was
around 12 and had completed Class 5, Basanti was married. She moved to her
husband’s home in Tharkot village of Pithoragarh district. By the time she
turned 15, her husband, a school teacher, died. “My mother-in-law would tell me
that I ate him,” she says.

Basant Pandey

Soon,
she packed her few clothes and returned home to Digara, her village in
Pithoragarh, to help her mother and aunts cut grass and collect cow dung.
Samant’s father, who worked in the police department in Bihar, tried to get her
re-admitted in school. “He wanted me to become a primary school teacher,” she
says. But there was strong opposition at home. “If I ever read a book, my
mother would taunt me, ‘Will you start working in an office now?’ I didn’t have
the courage to oppose her.”

A
few years later, Basanti heard about Lakshmi Ashram, a training centre for
young women in Kasauni, started in 1946 by Catherine Heilman, a disciple of Mahatma
Gandhi. Basanti sent a letter to the ashram asking for admission. “Radha Bhatt,
the president, asked me to come,” she says. Her father dropped her to the
ashram for a year-long sewing programme in 1980.

Basanti
extended her stay to fulfil her father’s dream by teaching in Lakshmi Ashram’s balwadis.
She also filled out forms to resume schooling. “I graduated high school [Class
10, through a distance learning course] at the age of 31. My brother
distributed sweets all over the village,” she says, beaming at something that
happened 30 years ago as if it happened yesterday.

Over time, Basanti started working
full-time at the ashram,
where she still lives. Her work included helping to form balwadis  and women&#39;s self-help groups (SHGs) – to
teach  sewing, handicrafts and other
income-related skills – across Uttarakhand. But she longed to go back to
Kausani. “I wondered what I am doing in a big city [she was stationed in
Dehradun] when I should be with women in the villages,” she says.

She
returned to Kausani in 2002 – where the situation was dire. Villagers were
cutting trees, unaware of the consequences – each family thinking that their
limited use of wood for fuel and agriculture wasn’t amounting to much – and the
Kosi was drying up. In 2003, Samant read an article in Amar Ujala saying that the Kosi will die in 10 years if
deforestation and forest fires were not controlled – and she propelled into
action.

But
the problem was fiercer than she had anticipated.

The
village women would leave before sunrise to bring wood. They would eat a meagre
lunch of roti, salt and some rice, and go off to work in the farms. Samant says
that often, “previously collected wood would be lying idle, infested with
termites” but the women had to fetch more. If they sat at home, “they would get
an earful from their husband and in-laws.” The inadequate food and strenuous
work meant that the women were spending hard-earned money on medicines with
“little or no time to look after their children’s education.”

For Samant, therefore, the objective of
forming a self-help group became more than environment conservation. But the
women wouldn’t talk to her – largely because the men in their families were opposed
to them being involved in any ‘activism’.One day, Samant saw a group of women near the bus stand in Kausani. Nervously, she approached them. The district magistrate had announced that the Kosi’s water should only be used for drinking, but the women needed it for farming too. The government had not yet constructed canals or check dams in the village. The only approach then was to ensure that the Kosi continued to thrive. Samant showed them the newspaper cutting and explained the need to plant and save the broadleaf oak trees as opposed to the inhospitable pine planted by the British. She gave them the example of the landmark Chipko movement of the 1970s to conserve forests in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. She pleaded and cajoled with them to think about how they would water their fields 10 years later. She invoked the visual of a lifeless, waterless Kosi.

The conversation struck a chord. Around 2003, the women formed a committee, appointed a president, and the cutting of trees gradually stopped in the village. The men  in Kausani too began to support the movement. The women still left their house early but this time, to gather drywood. The villagers entered into an agreement with the forest department – the department would recognise they had the first right over wood, but neither the officials nor the villagers would cut trees. It set a strong precedent and committees of women were formed in several nearby villages. Even
after this victory, challenges gushed out rapidly. For example, despite the
government orders, around 2005, a local restaurant’s owner was siphoning off
Kosi’s water. The women phoned Basanti behen. She told them to not let the tanker
pass. By then, the movement had become strong and visible, and so when the
women sat down in protest, the owner relented and agreed to pay a fine of Rs.
1,000, which went into the SHG’s funds. 



















But it wasn’t just
the villagers or the tourism industry at fault. A forest official was
stealthily running a wood business and would often arrive with his workers to
cut trees. One day, Samant and the women confronted him. She told him, “You’ve
never planted a single sapling and you come here and steal our wood.” The women
were united. They were numerous. They persisted for months. They demanded a
written apology – he refused. They threatened to complain against him. The fear
of losing his job finally made him stop. Since then, the local groups have not just been forest watchguards, they’ve also tried to address many instances of alcoholism and abuse within the home by intervening or counselling  the woman on how to handle the situation. While problems persist, 30-year-old Mamta Thapa, of one of the Kausani SHGs, says, “I’ve found a platform for discussion and possible remedies.”In 2016, Samant was awarded the Nari Shakti Puraskar by the Ministry of Women and Child Development – she proudly received it from former President Pranab Mukherjee. She continues to fight to save the Kosi and is now also working on waste segregation and talking to hoteliers in and around Kausani about recycling their dry waste. But her biggest contribution, she says, is &quot;ensuring that women are not silent –  neither in their local committees or the gram sabha, nor inside their homes.&quot;The author would like to thank Threesh Kapoor and Prasanna Kapoor, the organisers of the Buransh Mahotsav, for arranging the interview.

Ashutosh Kalla

Behind a successful woman are more women

വിജയിച്ച ഒരു സ്ത്രീയുടെ പിന്നിൽ കൂടുതൽ സ്ത്രീകളുണ്ടായിരിക്കും

ஒரு பெண்ணின் வெற்றிக்கு பின்புலமாக பல பெண்கள்

एका यशस्वी स्त्रीमागे आहेत आणखी स्त्रिया

এগৰাকী সফল মহিলাৰ আঁৰত আছে আৰু বহু মহিলা

এক সফল মহিলার পিছনে থাকেন আরও অনেক মহিলা

ପ୍ରତ୍ୟେକ ସଫଳ ମହିଳାଙ୍କ ପଛରେ ଅନେକ ମହିଳା

Kausani

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Behind a successful woman are more women

Widowed as a teenager and without steady schooling, Basanti Samant rose to become a resilient leader in Kumaon's Kausani village – bringing together women to save the Kosi, conserve forests and counter abuse

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