The temperature was soaring that day when we reached the top of the forested Nagada hills. We were in an SUV. When we reached, we found an ice-cream vendor on a motorcycle going around the hamlets. Children crowded around him excitedly. But when they bought the ice-cream, they were not quite sure how to eat it. So they put it into small bowls, waited till it melted down, then they drank it up.
“This is the first time an ice-cream vendor has come to our village,” said Rabi Pradhan.
Perched on top of a thickly-wooded hill, the five tribal hamlets have been inaccessible for decades. The only way to reach them was a seven-kilometre arduous trek through thick forests and rocky terrain.
The road out
Now, the first-ever road to Nagada is being laid. In a few weeks, the serpentine access will be complete and we see road graders at work. Happiness is writ large on the faces of Rabi Pradhan and Alimai Pradhan of the Tala Nagada hamlet.
To be connected by road to the outside world is not something they had imagined would happen in their lifetime. The few hundred Juang tribal families who live here have walked up and down these hills since the beginning of time, living much the same lives their ancestors did a century ago.
In these many decades, chromite worth millions has been extracted from the nearby hills of the Sukinda block of Odisha’s Jajpur district, but these hamlets have been out of the government’s purview. Until, that is, June of last year, when 19 children died of various diseases. Upon further investigation, it was found that the chief culprit was malnourishment.
When the administration woke up to the news, the deaths had already been happening for over a month. The Women and Child Development department conducted a survey and found children with severe to acute malnutrition, with wasted, stunted bodies, vulnerable to disease and death.
Hidden from view
Until last July, the five hamlets of Nagada—Tala Nagada, Majhi Nagada, Upara Nagada, Tumuni and Guhiasala—had no road connectivity, no electricity, and no source of potable water.
The nearest hospital was a private one at Kaliapani, 27 km away. There was no primary school, only an informal one that had been started by a voluntary organisation in November 2015. The lone anganwadi worker assigned for the Nagada hamlets lived in the foothills.
When news of the deaths broke and the government woke up, doctors and nurses had to make several strenuous treks up the hills to set up tents just to provide basic medicines and nutrition.
Today, the Juang tribes find vehicles ferrying doctors and government officials reaching their homes at regular intervals. Welfare schemes they had not even heard of now arrive at their doorsteps.
The hamlets now have three mini Anganwadi centres, and the Mamata scheme has been implemented, a conditional cash transfer programme under which pregnant and lactating women are given financial assistance of Rs. 5,000 for the first two live births.
A health sub-centre has been set up with one auxiliary nurse midwife; and one multi-purpose health worker is to be deputed. Integrated Child Development Services teams visit regularly to keep an eye out for malnutrition; anti-malaria measures have been initiated.
All houses now have solar lights, as do streets, and they were all working when we visited. Meanwhile, sub-stations are being erected for electrification. The Biju Pucca Ghar Yojana has been invoked to start constructing pucca houses. The informal school is now run by the government with the help of the NGO, while another primary school is being built at Guhiasala, expected to start functioning after the road is built. Two 100-bed hostels for Scheduled Tribe students have been sanctioned at the foothills and work will begin soon.
Some things remain
The major problem that continues, at least in Tala Nagada, is that of drinking water, and women and girls are still fetching water from forest streams. Wells have been dug in three other hamlets, but the one here has been a failure. There is some ongoing work to divert water from hill streams using pipes.
Despite these basic facilities reaching the Juangs, strangely enough, their food habits have not changed. They still subsist on boiled rice and salt. They also eat boiled wild tuber that they collect from the forest.
Although several families have cows, they don’t drink the milk. They believe that a cow’s milk is meant for her calves. At the Kaliapani hospital, we found one malnourished child from Nagada undergoing treatment. “Most of the malnutrition is primarily because of the mothers being in poor health,” said a doctor who is part of a medical team that visits Nagada twice every month.
Child marriage is another factor: most couples have more than three children and not enough to feed them. Andhari Pradhan is a mother of three. Her four-month-old daughter was recently in the district hospital in Jajpur town, 110 km away, for 25 days.
And when we spoke to her, she seemed unaware of the basic concepts of family planning or child nutrition.
The Odisha government now wants to extend the Nagada experiment to other tribal hamlets across Odisha. Though the specifics might vary, the government plans to first start connecting the inaccessible pockets to the interior regions of the State.
State Development Commissioner R. Balakrishnan is in charge of the project. In 1986, when he was the sub-collector of the then Jajpur subdivision, getting to Nagada and back took him nine-and-a-half hours. Now, it will take around 30 minutes. He plans to visit the Juang families oftener and see the plans take off.
The Juangs, classified as a “particularly vulnerable” tribe, believe their ancestors sprung from the earth of the hills where the River Baitarani springs from. They don’t believe in god and only worship nature. Soon, these primeval people will be fully integrated into the larger world around them, fast-tracked into modernity. There is a happy innocence with which the Juangs look forward to this.
prafullakumar.d@thehindu.co.in
