Jaideep Hardikar

Priti David

Editor

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A
sweet, nutty, intoxicating fragrance wafts across the narrow alleys of Arattondi
village. 

In
the front yard of every house, a magnificent hue of yellow, green and brown mahua flowers are drying on bamboo mats,
soft rugs and mud floors. Brown flowers are the hardened, sun-dried version of
freshly plucked yellow and green flowers. 

Elections
are round the corner, and mahua is in
season in Gondia, Maharashtra.

“Mahua in April, tendu leaves in May,” Sarthika Kailash Aade quips. “This is what
we have here.” Every morning, the 35-year-old and other villagers belonging to
the Mana and Gond tribe spend 4-5 hours in the surrounding forests, collecting
the soft flowers that fall from the tall mahua
trees, their leaves now in shades of red. By noon, the mercury is at 41 degrees Celsius, and the heat is enervating.

Each mahua tree yields an average 4-6 kilograms of flowers.
People from Arattondi village (also called Araktondi by locals) collect it in bamboo cans or plastic sacks and bring it
home to dry in the sun. A kilo of dried mahua earns them Rs. 35-40 a kilogram and each person can collect an
average 5-7 kilos every day.

The mahua (Madhuca longifolia) tree holds an unparalleled cultural, divine and
economic significance in the lives of tribal populations across central and
eastern India. In the Adivasi hinterland of Gondia district in eastern Vidarbha
– including the strife-torn Gadchiroli district – mahua is a major source of livelihood. According to the 2011 census, Scheduled Castes make up for 13.3 per cent, and Scheduled Tribes, 16.2 per cent of the population. The other option for people here is the
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA) programme.

In
the dry-land, small-scale farming villages, as farm-work perishes and off-farm
is hard to find, millions spend hours every day in April collecting the
flowers, on their own farms or in the surrounding forested areas of
Arjuni-Morgaon tehsil. Forests
occupy 51 per cent of the land in Gondia, nearly half of it is protected area,
according to the <a href="https://cdn.s3waas.gov.in/s346922a0880a8f11f8f69cbb52b1396be/uploads/2022/10/2022101353.pdf">2022 district
social and economic review</a>. 

A
2019 study on the status of mahua
production and tribal livelihood – an initiative of the Mumbai School of
Economics and Public Policy (MSE&amp;PP), found that the eastern Vidarbha
region collects approximately 1.15 lakh metric tons (MT) of mahua. Gondia
district’s share is a little over 4,000 MT and Gadchiroli accounted for a
whopping 95 per cent of the total state production, says Dr. Neeraj Hatekar, well-known economist and MSE&amp;PP’s former director.

A kilo of mahua
means one man-hour of labour, the study found. Thousands of families spend 5-6
hours a day in April collecting mahua
flowers.

The
neighbouring state of Chhattisgarh is the big collection hub for the aggregated
mahua flowers, mainly used in liquor
production, food products, and as cattle feed.

“The flowers aggregated are much less than the
actual production,” Dr. Hatekar says. “The reasons are manifold, but mainly
this activity is laborious and very time-consuming.” He has suggested radical
reforms to mahua policy in
Maharashtra where liquor made from the flowers is illegal. He also adds that
measures to stabilise the prices, streamline the value chain, and organise the
markets will benefit the largely Gond tribal population who depend on it.

There’s
no possibility of Sarthika ever reading Arvind Panagariya’s <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/dont-lose-sleep-over-inequality/">‘</a><a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/dont-lose-sleep-over-inequality/">Don’t lose
sleep over inequality.’</a> The article was published on April 2, 2024, in the Times of India, one of the leading
English dailies. Panagariya is unlikely to ever meet Sarthika either.

Their
worlds don’t intersect at any point.

Panagariya
is probably in the top one per cent of India’s income bracket, not in the elite
dollar billionaire league, but the influential policy maker’s league.

Sarthika
and her village folks are among the country’s poorest and most powerless – the
bottom 10 per cent. Their households are devoid of amenities – the family’s
income does not exceed Rs. 10,000 a month, she says, from all sources. 

The mother-of-two says – and others around her nod in a
resounding affirmation – that their living is only getting harder by day. And
she is losing sleep over spiralling inflation and stagnating avenues for
earning an income.

“Everything
is becoming expensive,” Araktondi’s women say. “Edible oil, sugar, vegetables,
fuel, electricity, transport, stationary, garments.” The list goes on.

Sarthika’s
family has less than an acre of rain-dependent land on which they grow paddy.
It gives them about 10 quintals of harvest, with hardly any marketable surplus
for year-long returns. 

What
do tribals like Sarthika do then?

“Three
things are the backbone of our livelihood March through May”, says Alka Madavi,
a community resource person in the village for Umed – the state rural
livelihood mission.  

She
lists them out: minor forest produce – mahua
in April, tendu leaves in May;
MGNREGA work, and cheap foodgrains given by the state. “If you remove the three,
we will either permanently migrate for work to cities, or die of hunger
here,” says Madavi who steers the self-help groups here. 

Sarthika
and her community of Gonds spend five hours in the mornings collecting mahua from surrounding forests, five to
six hours constructing a road under MGNREGA, and the evenings doing their
household chores – cooking, washing, rearing the livestock, tending to
children, and cleaning. At the worksite, Sarthika fills up the plastic pans
with the lumps of hard soil, and her friends lift them on their heads and dump
them on the roads. The men level it later. Each one of them makes several trips
up and down from the farm pits to the road site.

For a
day’s work, their wage: Rs. 150, according to the rate card. Along with earnings from mahua in season, they can make Rs. 250-300 working through the day.
Come May, and they enter forests to collect tendu
leaves.

Ironically,
MGNREGA remains the only livelihood for the poor in large parts of the country
despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeatedly deriding it as the Congress
party’s ‘living monument of failure’. Ten years of his rule, the demand for
MGNREGA has only gone up in 2024, say the women who spend six-seven hours under
MGNREGA, and this includes educated men and women.

It
will take hundreds of years for Sarthika and the other women to make the
equivalent of a day’s income of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. Unequal
incomes, wrote economist Panagriya, is something we should be losing our sleep
over.

“I
don’t have a farm or any other work,” says Samita Aade, 45, also a Mana while
sweating it out at the MGNREGA worksite. “Rozgar
hami [MGNREGA] is the only work we can get to fetch some income.” Sarthika and others are demanding “better wages and work round the year.”Contestation over forest offerings has intensified in the past few years,
Samita hints, as more and more people fall back on the forest-based livelihoods
in the absence of work round the year. Araktondi lies near the forested
landscape south of the Navegaon National Park, and has not yet got community
forest rights under the <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/the-scheduled-tribes-and-other-traditional-forest-dwellers-recognition-of-forest-rights-act-2006/">Forest Rights
Act</a>.

“But,” chips in Sarthika, “there’s a fourth
[livelihood] – seasonal migration.”

Every
year, October through February, nearly half the village leave their homes for
far-away places to work in others’ fields, industry or work sites.

“My
husband and I went to Yadgir in Karnataka this year to work in paddy fields,”
says Sarthika. “We were a group of 13 men and women who did all the farm work
in one village and returned late February.” That annual income is a major
support.

The
rice bowl and forest-rich districts of eastern Vidarbha – Bhandara, Gondia,
Gadchiroli, Chandrapur and Nagpur– are a total of five parliamentary
constituencies. They vote in the first phase of the 2024 General Elections on
April 19. 

There’s
stark disillusionment among the Araktondi villagers with the political classes
and the bureaucracy due to their complete apathy for the people. There is also
palpable anger among the poorest, over the Modi-government’s 10 years for
making their lives harder.

“Nothing has changed for us,” Sarthika
says.  “We got cooking gas, but it’s very
expensive; the wages are the same; and there’s no steady work round the year.”

There
is greater resentment for Sunil Mendhe, the Member of Parliament who’s been
fielded again by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from the Bhandara-Gondia
constituency. “He’s never come to our village,” is the common refrain in this
large constituency of mainly rural masses.

Mendhe
takes on Dr. Prashant Padole from the Congress in a direct contest.

The Araktondi villagers haven’t forgotten their treacherous and painful walk back home during
the first covid-19 lockdown in the summer of 2021.

On
April 19, when they go to cast their vote, they say, it would possibly be after
spending five hours in the morning collecting mahua. They would most certainly lose a day’s wage since the
MGNREGA worksite would be shut down, they say.

Who
would they vote for?

They don’t reveal the choice explicitly, but do
remark, “old times were better”.

Gondia's poor still bank on 3Ms: mahua, MNREGA and migration

گوندیا: مہوا، منریگا، مہاجرت پر منحصر غریبوں کی زندگی

கோந்தியாவின் ஏழைகள் நம்பியிருக்கும் 3 விஷயங்கள்: இலுப்பைப்பூ, 100 நாள் வேலை மற்றும் இடப்பெயர்வு

ਗੋਂਦੀਆ ਦੇ ਗਰੀਬ ਅਜੇ ਵੀ ਮਹੂਆ, ਮਨਰੇਗਾ ਤੇ ਪਰਵਾਸ ’ਤੇ ਅਟਕੇ

ଏବେ ବି ଗୋନ୍ଦିଆର ଦରିଦ୍ରଙ୍କ ସାହାଭରସା: ମହୁଲ, ମନରେଗା ଏବଂ ପ୍ରବାସନ

ഗോണ്ടിയയിലെ ദരിദ്രരുടെ മൂന്ന് ഉപജീവനമാർഗ്ഗങ്ങൾ: മഹുവ, എം.എൻ.ആർ.ഇ.ജി.എ, പിന്നെ, കുടിയേറ്റം

ಮಹುವಾ, ಮನರೇಗಾ, ವಲಸೆ: ಗೊಂಡಿಯಾದ ಬಡವರ ಜೀವನಾಧಾರ

गोंदिया: महुआ, मनरेगा व पलायन के बीच कटती आदिवासियों की ज़िंदगी

ગોંદિયાના ગરીબો માટે 'મ' મહુઆનો, 'મ' મનરેગાનો અને 'મ' માઇગ્રેશનનો 'મ'

गोंदिया: गरीब के तीन भरोसा मऊहा, मनरेगा अऊ पलायन

गोंदिया के गरीबन के सहारा: महुआ, मनरेगा आ प्रवास पर गुजारा

মহুয়া, মনরেগা, মরসুমি পরিযান: গোন্ডিয়ার আদিবাসীদের তিন সম্বল

মহুৱা, মনৰেগা আৰু প্ৰব্ৰজনৰ চক্ৰত আৱদ্ধ গন্দিয়াৰ দৰিদ্ৰৰ জীৱন

मोह, मनरेगा आणि स्थलांतरावर गोंदियाच्या गरिबांची मदार

Jhairpara, Arjuni Morgaon Taluka, Gondiya District, Maharashtra, 441701, India

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Gondia's poor still bank on 3Ms: mahua, MNREGA and migration

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