Hunger continues to haunt communities in eastern Uttar-Pradesh. Every year people die from starvation and from diseases like malaria, and Japanese encephalitis.

Government and aid agencies have launched campaigns to tackle these problems. Many of these districts are under the National Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) yet reports suggest that the scheme is another way of 'helping' those who already hold power in rural areas. Help has rarely reached the masses. Although the Government was attempting to provide food aid to the dying people, little attention was paid to the underlying cause of the suffering: the continuous reluctance of Government towards land redistribution. Instead of redistribution, more land had been given over to development without provision for satisfactory rehabilitation. The victims of this unsustainable development had been the communities like the Dalits, tribals and the Most Backward Castes (MBCs).

The number of landless communities in Poorvanchal is substantial and they face a severe challenge to their livelihood. With more mechanized agri-farming, these agrarian workers are now jobless. Forests are already out of bound for them as the Forest Department considers poor forest dwellers as encroachers, and exploits them. The Kumhars (clay potters) have lost their work to plastics and the fishermen have no idea how to increase their income when most of their lakes are under threat of sale. Migration to cities has increased in the past few years but now even that escape seems to be blocked for the rural poor. Theocratic, fundamentalist parties are against them and, in addition, some self-styled protectors of secular ideas see immigration to the cities as a threat.

Even when people were dying of starvation, 'nationalistic' forces were working in the villages, not to help the rural poor get out of the poverty trap but to push them back into the Dark Ages. The people have been led into superstition, so that they do not question the injustice done to them and blame it on their own misfortune and God’s wish.

In view of this, Uttar-Pradesh Land Alliance and Social Development Foundation, Delhi organized a Padyatra (march) throughout most of June, 2007. The Padyatra covered four districts of Poorvanchal: Maharajganj, Gorakhpur, Deoria and Kushinagar. In 22 days the march covered nearly 375-400 kilometres, visiting more than 75 large and small villages and towns of these four districts.

The Padyatra held public meetings, social audits and even training programmes related to land and livelihood. It spoke unambiguously against caste oppression, rituals and exploitation in the name of religion, rituals and superstitions.
The aim to was to strengthen the community organizations in the region to strengthen community-based development. Communities needed to be targeted in rural planning. There was also a focus on women's rights over land and forest resources. In simple term the Padyatra was an attempt to inculcate humanist ideas on the issue of livelihood, hunger and starvation.

Many friends warned against holding the Padyatra at a time of scorching heat, but it was felt to be the best time to understand how the communities worked under such conditions. In the latter part of the march, the marchers were drenched by the monsoon rains, but the march continued.

The Padyatra highlighted the plight of many rural communities. For example, in the village of Pandey Majhal, a village populated predominantly by a fishing community, there is no proper road to the village since the entire area surrounding the village is owned by the Yadav community who are locked in a struggle with the fishermen and who are encroaching on their land. Access to and from the village is at the pleasure of the Yadavs who can therefore limit the contact the fishermen have with the outside world. The judicial system provides little assistance to the fishermen in their struggles either, as even when they have won cases in court that gives them the final title deeds to plots of land they are unable to take possession of the land in person being physically prevented from doing so by the Yadavs. The often callous attitude of the state can be revealed by the amounts allotted for drought relief in 2005, with one cheque issued by the state government amounting to 31 rupees (less than 50 US cents) a sum so paltry that most members of the community have not even bothered to cash them, keeping them instead as a form of souvenir of the state's relative indifference to their plight.

Another village provides an additional example of the way in which state mechanisms designed to work in favour of the poor and the rural disadvantaged so often come to grief in India. As the river Gora is prone to periodic overflowing of its banks, fishing communities living on the riverside lose everything, including their homes, as in the floods of 2004. The Padyatra encountered an example of some of the rehabilitation efforts made by the state who had set aside new land for seven such families whose houses had been destroyed. The designated site, however, turned out to be a 20-foot-plus depression filled with water. The sum allotted for the construction of the new houses was not even sufficient to cover the cost of draining the water and filling the depression to level it with the surrounding landscape. As a result, the fishermen live in a state of limbo, having built makeshift huts by the roadside.

Most disheartening are the indications that the next generation of rural poor will see little if any improvement in their condition. The plight of children in the Balmiki basti of Dom Derwa, one-and-a-half kilometres outside Rudrapur in Deoria district illustrates this all too well. One, girl, Aarti was found industriously working away grinding red chillies into masala paste (see illustration). Her parents proudly informed us that she could also cook and did so regularly for the family. They proceeded to demonstrate this by calling her and instructing her to cook sliced mutton: a task at which she was depressingly deft. Aarti is only seven years old; when asked whether she would rather be in school than cooking at home, she initially didn't reply but with some coaxing said she would rather be at school. The future seems very bleak for children like Aarti; many of whom could be seen in the basti.

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Vidya Bhushan Rawat is Director of the Social Development Foundation, Delhi. http://www.thesdf.org/index.html