Palani of Kalasamuthiram village left behind his 42-day-old baby boy. His wife Lokanayaki is a young widow now.
Moorthi of Murugapadi village left behind eight-month-old daughter Kaviya in the hands of his young wife who has to take care of his elderly parents now. Their one acre land is bereft of irrigation source.
Of the 20 persons shot dead in AP forests, 12 are from Tiruvannamalai district. Most of them have left behind young children, wives and elderly parents. Most of them happen to be lone bread winners of their families. And many of the families live in abject poverty.
Thanjiyammal, another young widow, looks frail and malnourished. With vacant eyes she sits in front of her dilapidated hut with a palm leave roof. A small piece of land nearby is her only property now.
The seven families this correspondent spoke to said their men left home by Monday afternoon in the guise of going for a legitimate employment somewhere. The policemen knocked their doors to give the shock of their lives.
While the families deny in one voice that their men were not woodcutters, several villagers concede that many youth, including some of the deceased frequented the AP forests.
Painters all
The 10-km uphill kaccha road leading up to Arasanatham village in Dharmapuri district is riddled with boulders rendering the image of a landslip-hit terrain. In a certain way, it alerts the visitor to the poverty that awaits in the little hamlet uphill.
The Malayallee scheduled tribal population here had assumed that the men from their village were out in Coimbatore on a painting contract.
For this village, with little accessibility and few livelihood options, painting job contracts in Erode, Tirupur and Coimbatore holds the promise of money.
Some use their marginal landholding of one or two acres for cultivation of millets, paddy, tomatoes and all of it hinges on availability of water. Many go to Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh to pick tamarind.
“The men always go in groups for painting contracts, and they usually return after 20 days,” says a villager. A youth says no broker has ever stepped into the village. He thinks those killed were probably brainwashed. Married for less than eight months, 20-year-old Kanaga swooned after a day-long mourning on hearing the death of her husband Venkatesan (23). “He would come back after 20 days usually with Rs.7,000 or such amount after a painting contract. He has never returned with big money and would call every day, once on job,” says Vijaya (26), whose husband Sivakumar was also killed.
