Pipalia, just five kilometers away from the Jhabua town is very close to the main road. Villages in Madhya Pradesh, are a cluster of hamlets called falias. Each falia belongs to a particular caste. In Pipalia, the main caste was the Bhils tribe and each sub-caste inhabited a single falia. In Jhabua, these hamlets are very scattered and may have a distance ranging from five to even eight kilometers between them. Each falia had its own handpump as the main source of water. The village boasted of an impressive primary and even a middle school which was located in the main falia of the village. Next to the school were the ration shop and also the aganwadi. The ration shop was compensating for the lack of activity in the aganwadi by a huge line of people waiting for their food rations. Lack of any other market in the village, the ration shop was by far the busiest spot in the village. These scattered hamlets had one thing in common-no electricity. No electricity also meant no television and I found out that only 4 households from the total population of 1800 possessed a TV set.

Thin alleys connected the houses splitting the greens on either side. Pradhan Mantri Sadak Yojana reached out from the main busy road to the main falia of the village. I also noticed that only women worked in the fields. Men either have migrated to Gujarat to work as a daily wage earner or are in the Jhabua city working in the market. I asked the women if they read newspapers to get information about government schemes. All the answers negative, not because there is another source of information, but because almost all women I spoke to are illiterate. Women in the field were also accompanied by children playing along side. I was curious to know why they weren’t in school and I didn’t get any answer to that. They did not seem to be working with their mothers, nor did they seem over or under-age for primary school. Later, the school principal told me that some families did not like sending their children to the government primary school because of caste differences.

Radhika Iyengar

Doctoral Student, Teachers College, Columbia University
Consultant, Jan Shikshan Sansthan, Jhabua (www.jssjhabua.net)