Hunter, Helper, Leader, Thief?
Unemployed Youth in the Indian Himalayas
A report on some preliminary fieldwork findings
Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey, 7th September 2012
Preamble
Between March and June 2012 we conducted three months of research in Bemni Uttarakhand, India. We completed a socio-economic survey of the village, a follow-up to a similar survey that Jane conducted during a 15-month research stint in 2003-04. We also carried out semi-structured interviews concerning young people’s educational and employment experiences, marriage, views on the state and politics, and political activity. We interviewed about thirty young people (aged 18-30), roughly five Scheduled Castes (SC) men and five SC women and twelve Rajput or “General Caste” (GC) men and eight GC women. We also carried out some participant observation around the village.
Bemni is located in a relatively remote part of Uttarakhand, bordering Tibet, at an altitude of about 2500 metres.[1] The district in which Bemni is located – Chamoli district – is overwhelmingly rural and agricultural in character: 90 per cent of people lived in rural areas in 2011 according to the national census (ORG 2011). People typically practice a form of agro-pastoralism. They cultivate crops for subsistence – mainly wheat, millet and barley – while also managing large areas of the surrounding forest for pastoral use. Villagers have adopted a form of small-scale transhumance whereby they move annually between two or three settlements located at different altitudes. These seasonal shifts allow them to coordinate arable and pastoral land use and maximize the potential of agricultural land at different altitudes.[i]
The village of Bemni – which is actually comprised of three smaller settlements at different heights on the same mountainside – contained 645 people in March 2012, of which 69% were GCs and 31% SCs. To reach Bemni from Delhi it is necessary to first take a bus, train, plane or taxi to Dehra Dun or Rishikesh – two of the main gateways to the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand State. This in itself can take a day. From these cities you travel by road upstream along the River Ganges. An eight-hour journey takes you to the small town of Nandprayag and a rough road leads from there along the Nandakini Valley to the even smaller town of Ghat. From Ghat, it is necessary to board a local jeep. In 2003, this jeep took you to a tiny hamlet on the banks of the Nandakini from which you must make a steep 9 kilometre (four hour) trek to the village. From late 2010 it was possible to get a jeep directly to Bemni, but only after negotiating a truly hair-raising road cut into a serious of landslides above a steep thousand-foot precipice.
Bemni looked physically very different in 2012 to how it did in 2003: less green, dustier, more “developed”. A few people had built new houses, several two-storied. Within the GC areas of the village, many people had plastered their stone houses. In 2003 most people regarded a private lavatory as unhygienic; there were just two houses with one at the time. Now there are 42 latrines in the village and another 10 households were building them while we were there. The government greatly increased its development assistance to rural areas between 2003 and 2012 and this was also reflected in Bemni’s built landscape. Two JCBs growled around the hillside while we were in the village, building a new “cricket stadium” and widening the road. A communications tower was constructed in the village in 2009.
Change was manifest, too, at the attitudinal level. Between 2003 and 2012, Bemni was more thoroughly absorbed into wider circuits of knowledge and information, especially as a result of rising phone ownership: 60% of households had at least one mobile in 2012. As it might be expected, people were keener on education in 2012 than in 2003 and the desire to enter service work and leave the village had increased among the young.
Allied to this “transformation” of sorts has been a decline in agriculture. The area being farmed in and around Bemni appears to have halved in the nine years between 2003 and 2012, partly because of sales to the government for the road and other projects and partly because of people’s general disillusionment with farming – villagers reported that extreme weather events have repeatedly destroyed their crops in recent years and the prices in the local town have been low. Younger generations, in particular, have little appetite for agriculture, and children were less involved in agricultural tasks in 2012 than they were in 2003. The population of livestock had also declined markedly with this general retreat from farming and people’s dependence on shop-bought food. At the same time, the road and building construction had taken a heavy toll on the surrounding jungle, a situation greatly exacerbated by the fact that the head of the village council responsible for managing the forest – a notoriously roguish figure – had allowed many households to plunder Bemni’s jungle.
We investigated these changes in village life through reference to the social predicament and struggles of young people in Bemni, especially educated unemployed youth. This report is built around the portraits of four of these young people.
Biju: poverty and educational failure
Biju was 29 in May 2012 and belonged to a SC caste. He studied up to 12th class (senior secondary school) in Bemni and a nearby village. He tried to obtain secure salaried work but failed in two different government competitions and then became discouraged. He said that he had withdrawn from formal education after 12th Class because of the expense and he could not see the point of doing a BA. He also said that the standard of his school education had been poor and that education is in an even worse state in Bemni at the moment. “The children don’t learn and the teachers don’t teach”. When we asked about the “benefits of education” (“parhai ka fayda”), Biju was dismissive: “What is the point of education if you cannot get salaried work? Education allows me to read an architect’s plan when I am working as a construction labourer in the village, but that’s about all the benefits.”
Biju worked for five years in Delhi after school. He did manual warehousing work for an Australian logistics company called Linfox. He said that he got the job through a contact in a nearby village. He rose to the position of a shift supervisor and earned Rs. 12,000 a month – a comparatively large salary at the time.
In about 2002 Biju’s father fell seriously ill. As the eldest son, Biju had to return to the village to care for him. He commented that, “An eldest brother’s responsibilities are huge, the same as those of a father.” Biju married at roughly the time he returned to the village and how has five daughters. In May 2012, he was employed as a carpenter in the village, earning on average Rs. 200 a day but only obtaining work for about 15 days in every month. He also did work for government employment scheme for about thirty days in a year. When we asked whether he had any hopes or intentions for the future he replied in an exasperated tone, “What hopes and intentions? What am I ever going to get now?”
Biju said that he had often experienced problems managing both his work and his family, especially when his father was acutely ill. He was increasingly worried about his capacity to educate his daughters. He said that he could not benefit from government development programmes because of widespread malpractice within the district bureaucracy. We asked whether he could complain to officials about corruption:
Biju: To whom would we complain, who will listen? The problem is that individuals cannot speak out. If you speak out alone, there will be trouble. It is a village thing. People do not want to make enemies here. So they just talk and talk about it among themselves and then keep quiet (gup chap gup chap chup rah jate hain).
Craig: Have you heard of Anna Hazare [the anti-corruption activist]?
Biju: Yes but he is a very big man. We are just small people, no on will listen.
Craig: Can politicians perhaps help?
Biju (grinning) Oh yes, they come and say that they will do all these things for the village and provide all this money. But they do nothing.
Biju’s case is more broadly indicative of the struggles of poor households in Bemni. Parents want their children to acquire education and are willing to prioritize spending on schooling. But they cannot afford to keep children in school for long periods of time. Agricultural land is shrinking. Land sales allied to the subdivision of landholdings associated with the prevailing system of partible inheritance means that the average landholding per household had declined from 25.8 nalis (the local unit of land) in 2003 to 16.7 nalis in 2012. Most villagers said that an average family required thirty nalis to be self sufficient. Twenty-two of the thirty SC households in Bemni – including Biju’s - owned fewer than 5 nalis. Moreover, local construction, allied perhaps to climate change, had led to a decline in the water table and a decrease in soil fertility.
Food prices have risen sharply, and many of the poor complained that their diets have become highly restricted. The following quotation from an elderly SC man in the village is indicative of the type of statement we heard many times in Bemni:
Things have become so expensive it is impossible. I’ve stopped eating tomatoes since last year. They were Rs. 20 now they are Rs. 40 or Rs. 50. The difference between price of things a few years ago and the price of things now is like the difference between the earth and the sky. Daal now costs Rs. 70. An average person cannot get those things. If a person earns Rs. 120 a day – the government employment guarantee wage – and he goes to buy daal, his whole salary will be used up on the daal. How is he going to buy the other things that he needs?
Corruption compounded these problems. Many of the poorest households in the village were not eligible for government resources because they had not bribed sufficiently the government inspectors, who had falsely registered them as Above the Poverty Line (APL) rather than Below the Poverty Line (BPL). Only BPL families are entitled to subsidies. Even those households labeled BPL - and therefore legally entitled to subsidized wheat, rice, sugar and mustard oil through the Indian Government’s Public Distribution Scheme - found it difficult in practice to acquire these products. Intermediaries embezzle funds, as they do in the case of the midday meals scheme that runs in local schools, the widow’s pension scheme, and various smaller government development projects.
The requirement placed upon parents to buy uniforms, books, and stationary for school therefore comes on top of other pressing calls on meager household finances. The poor sometimes said that they faced a choice between education and eating. In addition, many parents need their children’s help in the home, forest and field. As the example of Biju suggests, these difficulties often manifested themselves at specific “crisis moments” in the lives of rural households. In particular, the illness of a family member often presaged a child abandoning school or a younger person giving up their higher education or a promising early career. Sometimes even a relatively “minor” injury, for example a mother injuring her hand meant that a child, most usually a girl, had to leave school to help in the home. There are no good functioning hospitals locally - the local doctor treats patients in an idiosyncratic manner - and obtaining medical assistance outside the village is expensive and time-consuming.
The Uttarakhand State has failed to invest in educational facilities, curricular reform, and the monitoring of schools. In addition, widespread corruption in the educational bureaucracy means that teachers can bribe to be posted in urban areas. The student/staff ratio in Bemni and surrounding villages is often 100: 1. There are no science teachers in local schools because no one suitably qualified wants to reside so far from the city. A young woman with a 12th class pass told us:
Education now is terrible. After class 5 the children cannot read or write Hindi properly. They can’t even write ‘ab’ (now). But all the classes are so easy, that everyone passes everything.
It is true that the educational levels of those aged 16-25 and 26-35 are considerably higher than those of people aged 36-45. For example, 16 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women in this youngest cohort have at least a BA compared to 7 per cent and 0 per cent in the oldest cohorts, respectively (see Tables 1 and 4 in the appendix). Moreover, even SC girls are seeing an improvement in their educational levels (Table 6). But many young people do not continue in school after Eighth Class. This is especially the case among SCs, who own only a third of the land of GCs per capita, have fewer fixed assets, and poorer social links outside the village. Fifty per cent of SC men and sixty per cent of SC women dropped out of formal education before Eighth Class. The sex-based inequalities in education reflect gender norms surrounding employment - boys are expected to enter paid employment girls much more rarely so - and the greater need for girls’ assistance in the home in the context of prevailing norms around gender and work.
Young people acquire basic skills from education that are important in terms of navigating modern life. They obtain, in the case of those able to remain in schooling, qualifications that are a minimum prerequisite for competing for government jobs. But education does not provide a great deal of confidence or political power (cf Sen 2000). It is still harder to claim that a local education boosts people’s employment prospects to any significant degree. Few villagers spoke about the civilizing or empowering nature of education, as people did in rural western UP in the 2000s (Jeffrey et al. 2008). One poor SC man in his fifties told us that he sent his children to school simply to avoid being disparaged by his neighbours for not doing so. A GC young woman with a 12th Class pass said: