Come May 12, Lingappa, a farmer in his 60s, and his family members of Kyatanamakki in Chikkamagaluru district will have to trudge nearly 4 km to vote in the Assembly elections. There are just two families in the village and their polling station is at Horanadu Balige.
With no public transport, 30 to 40 villages of Mudigere, Koppa, Sringeri, Chikkamagaluru and N.R. Pura taluks in the remote, hilly but pristine Malnad region abutting the Western Ghats face such a predicament.
A hotbed of Naxal activity about a decade ago, these villages have more or less come out of its influence. Today, when they are not cultivating their small fields, the residents work as agricultural helps for others. And they are not averse to taking part in democratic exercises such as voting.
But the villages are far from each other and have 261 registered voters. Some have just one family each. Its members must walk about a kilometre to reach the nearest village. In fact, reaching out to them is daunting for the government machinery and the vote-seeking politician.
When a few senior officers of the district administration visited them recently to motivate them to go out and vote, the people raised their common problems — lack of basic amenities such as public transport, a communication network and power supply.
Back in 2000, the State government set up an anti-naxal force when suspected Maoists started increasing their activities.
Some sustained development initiatives have paid off. Eleven persons once associated with Naxalites have returned to the mainstream.
Menasinahadya in Koppa taluk is an obscure village that shot to limelight after a wanted high-ranking leader, Saket Rajan, and his associates were gunned down in an encounter in February 2005.
Now, the village has a residential school, which keeps half of its seats for tribal children. Fourteen such schools have sprung up in the district alone in an initiative to bring development to former Naxalite areas.
The results of the initiatives have been mixed. In a few villages where these schools have their hostels, there is no power supply except in the hostels. The government has distributed solar lamps to local families under a special package meant for Naxal-affected areas.
“The solar lamp works only for a couple of hours in a day,” says Ramesh of Menasinahadya. “But it is of no use to our children when they need to study at home.”
Highlighting the lack of a reliable telephone network — both land and mobile — during a crisis they faced about a month back, P.B. Prakash of H. Balige village says, “One of our neighbours had a serious health problem. We kept on telephoning an autorickshaw driver and reached him only after an hour.”
“If only we had a regular public transport service, we wouldn’t have to spend so much on each ride,” says Chaitra, 30, of Balige village.
Panchayat initiative
When C. Satyabhama, Chief Executive Officer of the Chikkamagaluru Zilla Panchayat, visited these villages, the people there asked her for transport to the polling booth. The officer assured them that she would try to make some arrangement for the aged and the physically challenged after consulting senior officers.
Ms. Satyabhama told The Hindu , “We are thinking of making available government vehicles on election duty for people who need assistance to reach the polling station.”
