Kavitha Iyer

Priti David

Editor

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The residents of Ambapani would greatly relish the opportunity to
host an aspiring Member of Parliament or two, to feed them corn bhakris with fresh flour from a home grist-stone, or sweet charoli fruit plucked by children who scamper up the tree
for fun. 



No political representative of note has
ever visited them, though — not one in the five decades that have passed since
people first built their homes of bamboo, mud and dung. Scattered across a
series of slopes of the stony, rugged Satpuras, the hamlet lies 13 kilometres
uphill from the nearest motorable road. 



Ambapani, with a population of 818
(Census 2011), has no road access, no electricity line, no running water, no
mobile phone network, no fair price shop, no primary health centre and no anganwadi centre. The residents are all
Pawaras, listed as
a Scheduled Tribe in the state. Most of the 120 households trace their lineage
to four or five large clans with roots in Madhya Pradesh, barely 30 kms north as
the crow flies.   



Located in a network shadow zone, there
are neither television sets nor smartphones. From Prime Minister Narendra
Modi’s warnings about women’s mangalsutras
to the Congress’s exhortations on protecting the Constitution, not even the
shrillest episodes of the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign have reached Ambapani’s
voters.



“A road, maybe,” says Ungya Gurja Pawara,
voicing what would be an attractive poll promise. The 56-year-old is a
descendant of one of the original settlers of the hamlet. About a decade ago,
when he’d saved up money for a steel almirah for his home, four men carried the
75 kg cupboard uphill, “like a stretcher”. 



Farm produce headed for the Mohrale market 13 kms downhill is ferried on two-wheelers, about a quintal at a time on a treacherous
dirt track along steep inclines, past a series of drops and rises, sharp turns
and switchbacks, loose gravel, mountain streams and the occasional sloth bear. 



“On the other hand, however,” Ungya muses, “one
would have to think about whether a road would escalate illegal lumbering.”

His wife Badhibai has been hobbling around for the better
part of the month, after a hatchet fell on her toe while she was chopping
firewood. The gash is deep, but she did not so much as bandage it. “Mohrala kinwa Haripuraparyant jaave lagte [I’d have to go to
Mohrale or Haripura],”
she says about why she ignored the injury. “Will any party give us a good dawakhana [clinic] here?” she laughs.     



At least one infant in Ambapani was
diagnosed as malnourished, though the family does not know how acutely
malnourished the little girl is. There is no anganwadi, though approvals were received nearly a decade ago, say
people in the village. 



Instead, an anganwadi worker from Mohrale has additional charge of Ambapani,
and makes the difficult journey once every few weeks to supply packages of
take-home ration for the beneficiary children and pregnant women as well as
iron and folic acid tablets for the latter. “If we had an anganwadi here, at least small children could go there and learn
something,” says Badhibai. Ungya says there are more than 50 children in the
village up to the age of six years, the age-group meant to benefit from the <a href="https://icds.gov.in">Integrated Child Development Services Scheme</a> (ICDS), through which the
anganwadi centres are run.    



Babies are traditionally delivered at
home, though some younger women have in recent years made the journey to
clinics in Mohrale or Haripura, a distance of 13 kms.      



Ungya and Badhibai have five sons and two
daughters, and a large brood of grandchildren. The unlettered couple tried to
put their sons through school, but it was never a realistic goal without a
road. 



A school ‘building’ emerged about two
decades ago, a bamboo and thatch room that might be the village’s most
ramshackle structure. 



“There is in fact a teacher appointed, but do
you expect somebody from elsewhere in the tehsil
to ride up here every day?” asks Roopsingh Pawara, a resident of Ambapani, and son of Bajrya Kandlya Pawara,
another original settler of Ambapani. Locals claim he had 15 children from his
two wives. Only expert bikers and locals venture to undertake this 40-minute
ride. The ride is not for the fainthearted, he says, and even forest department
guards have found themselves lost en route.

One of Badhibai’s grandsons, Barkya, is back for the
summer holiday from the ashram shala
(residential schools, run by the state government especially for children
belonging to Scheduled Tribes and Nomadic Tribes) in Dhanora, in neighbouring Chopda tehsil. Another grandson attends a different
ashram shala. 



At Ambapani, we were served river water
in steel tumblers and tiny ceramic cups of black tea. The four young girls who
handed it out said they had never been to school.          



The marital home of Badhibai’s daughter Rehendi is about a
kilometre or two away, along a winding dirt track built by the Pawara men
themselves, cutting downward through the side of one hill-slope and up the next.




Rehendi says some voters may think about
whether government processes to obtain a caste certificate could be made
simpler. Other men gathered around say about 20 to 25 per cent of the
village does not have ration cards.

The ration shop (public distribution
system) is in Korpawali
village, about 15 kms away, further south of Mohrale. Children as old as six
years are often not yet registered for a birth certificate, and without
institutional deliveries, this has meant that families struggle to get Aadhaar
cards made for younger members or include them as beneficiaries in the family’s
ration card.   



The women said access to water was the
most important thing to ask politicians for.



There are no wells or borewells in the village,
nor hand pumps or pipelines. Villagers depend on monsoon streams and
tributaries of the west-flowing Tapi for drinking water and for irrigation.
Acute water scarcity is rare, but the quality of water deteriorates as the
summer wears on. “Sometimes we send the men with cans to bring water on
motorbikes,” says Rehendi. Mostly, women and girls carry pots of water
home, several times a day, lithely stepping on to rutted pathways, often
barefoot.

Along the dirt track leading uphill
towards the school building, Kamal
Rahangya Pawara is squinting at the bark of a sal tree, scraping against
it a conical metal cup with sharp edges. Slung across his wiry torso is a worn
rexine bag carrying about three kilograms of fragrant resin from the sal tree (Shorea robusta). It is mid-morning, and the previous afternoon’s 44
degrees Celsius maximum looks set to be breached. 



Focusing intently on ensuring he collects
every bit of the available resin, Kamal says he expects a price of about Rs.
300 per kilo in the Haripura market. He has spent about five hours collecting
the resin, filling the bag over four days. Locals call the sticky resin ‘dink’, though it is not the edible gum
used in dink laddoos, a popular
winter-time delicacy in Maharashtra. This resin has a woody and slightly musky
fragrance, making it a sought-after raw material for incense sticks
manufacturers. 



Tapping the resin involves carefully
stripping away the outer cover of the tree bark in a few sections about a metre
from the ground, then waiting a few days for the resin to ooze out, before
repeating the process. 



According to government officials,
deforestation on account of resin-collection by scorching the base of the tree —
another method of inducing formation of the gum — is an emerging problem. Kamal
says that Ambapani’s dink-collectors
opt for the traditional bark-stripping method. “Our houses are in the same
area,” he reasons, “so nobody lights fire here.”



Collection of forest produce including
tree resin, leaves of the sal tree,
berries, tendu leaves and mahua flowers is neither a year-long occupation nor
lucrative. Men like Kamal earn approximately Rs. 15,000 – Rs. 20,000 a year
from resin, and similar sums from other forest produce. 



Twenty-four families in Ambapani received land
titles under the <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/the-scheduled-tribes-and-other-traditional-forest-dwellers-recognition-of-forest-rights-act-2006/">Scheduled Tribes and
Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act</a>, 2006. With no irrigation, the land remains
fallow during the dry season.

About a decade ago, as families grew and
living off the land was no longer sustainable, Ambapani’s Pawaras began to join
the annual migration seeking work as sugarcane harvest labourers. “Every year,
about 15 to 20 families now travel to Karnataka,” says Kelarsing Jamsing Pawara, a labour
sub-contractor who earns a commission of Rs. 1,000 for each ‘koyta’
he signs up for the harvest work. 



A ‘koyta’,
literally a scythe, is the name given to a unit of labour — a husband-wife
couple — in Maharashtra’s cane fields. As inexperienced cane workers, the
Pawaras are paid a lower lump-sum advance, about Rs. 50,000 per koyta, than most others in the sugarcane
plantations. 



“There is no other work available,”
Kelarsing reasons. For approximately Rs. 10,000 a month, a couple works 12-16-hour
days, slicing and cutting the cane stalks, bundling them up and heaving them to
tractors that drive off to the cane factory, sometimes in the wee hours of the
morning. 



Roopsingh says Ambapani has recorded two
deaths of labourers who went off on the cane harvest. “The advance payment gets
spent in days,” he says, “and there’s no medical assistance or insurance or
compensation for accidents or fatalities.” 



The men gathered at Rehendi’s house say
they wouldn’t work as cane harvesters if they found employment closer to home.
They cite language problems, the hardships for women and children during the
harvest period when they live in tents near the cane fields and the dangers of
trucks and tractors. “The conditions are terrible, but which other job will pay
a lump-sum advance?” asks Kelarsing. 



About 60 per cent of the menfolk in
Ambapani have worked as sugarcane harvest labourers, he says. 



A sizable advance payment is useful not only for
minor home repairs or purchase of a bike but also for the bride price that
Pawara grooms must pay the parents of prospective brides, a sum negotiated and
enforced by the Pawara panchayat.

Norms governing social and marital
relations among the Pawara tribe are unique. Roopsingh explains how the
panchayat rules on marriage disputes. The two sides sit a few dozen yards away
from each other during a negotiation, a process called jhagada.
Occasionally, a bride is returned to her parents a few days after a wedding, along
with a payment called izzat, but if she
elopes with another man then the bride’s family must pay a compensation equal
to twice the bride price collected.           



“Ambapani is truly a distinctive
village,” says Ayush
Prasad, Jalgaon’s District Collector. Locals say he was the first DC
ever to have trekked up 10 kms to meet them, in December 2023. “It [the village]
has unique challenges on account of its topography, but we have initiated the
process to provide better services.” A central legal challenge has been that
the village is not recognised by the revenue department, having originally been
a settlement on forest land. “Work on making Ambapani a gaothan
has begun, and many government schemes can follow,” said Prasad.           



For now, the school room, a broken toilet
block outside it, is where the 300-odd registered voters will cast their ballot
on May 13. Ambapani falls in Raver
parliamentary constituency in Jalgaon district. The EVM and all the other
voting paraphernalia will be carried uphill on foot and on motorbikes. 



The booth has witnessed an average 60 per cent
turnout during General Elections, and officials said everything required for
Ambapani to exercise its democratic right would be available. Only the rewards
of democracy will be slow to come.

The village no politician visits

ایک ایسا گاؤں جہاں کوئی سیاست داں نہیں آتا

రాజకీయ నాయకులెవ్వరూ సందర్శించని గ్రామం

எந்த அரசியல்வாதியும் வந்திராத கிராமம்

ਕਦੇ ਕਿਸੇ ਨੇਤਾ ਦੀ ਚਰਨਛੋਹ ਨਸੀਬ ਨਾ ਹੋਈ ਇਸ ਪਿੰਡ ਨੂੰ

ଜଣେ ହେଲେ ରାଜନେତା ଆସୁନଥିବା ଗାଁ

രാഷ്ട്രീയക്കാര്‍ സന്ദർശിക്കാത്ത ഒരു ഗ്രാമം

ಯಾವ ರಾಜಕಾರಣಿಯೂ ಭೇಟಿ ನೀಡದ ಊರು

इस गांव तक नहीं पहुंचे ‘अच्छे दिन’

વાત એક એવા ગામની જ્યાં એકેય રાજકારણી ફરકતો નથી

ये गाँव मं कऊनो नेता पाँव नइ रखय

गांव जहंवा कवनो नेता गोड़ ना धरेला

যে গাঁয়ে পায়ের ধুলো দেন না কোনও নেতা

কোনো নেতাই ভৰি নিদিয়া গাওঁখন

राजकारण्यांनी कधीच न पाहिलेल्या गावाची गोष्ट

Ambapani, Yawal, Jalgaon District, Maharashtra, India

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The village no politician visits

Nestled amidst the stony slopes of the Satpuras lies Ambapani, a hamlet where the essence of democracy remains elusive — residents can exercise their vote in the General Elections 2024, but they have neither roads, nor electricity or healthcare facilities

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