Kanjar Care

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Getting to know the Kanjar

It is past 3 in the afternoon and we are in Beriakheri, one of the 18 Kanjar villages in Jhalawar district. Majority of those who congregate under a shady tree are not the singing-dancing type kanjar found elsewhere. Theirs is the story of pain, of daily survival, of economic deprivation, of resource crunch and of social exclusion. Each of the 37 households may have been granted land lease but their patch of lands is someone else property, the ones who exude power over the meek. Rightly said, the meek will have to defend themselves!

Houses are random assortment of mud bricks or stone tiles, empty from within and consequently bereft of doors. With limited access to much publicized social development programs, the kanjar live on the edge of survival. Since their surrender before the police a year ago, their presence is counted on a daily basis by the night patrol. `We all line up when the police comes calling past midnight each day,’ the youth echo in chorus. They feel it is to their convenience, escaping (often false) charges that they have been booked under for most of the post-independence era.

The more you hear them the more intriguing it gets. What keeps them going? Locally brewed liquor seems their survival fluid, for beating hunger and for catching sleep. Curiously, they have survived generations without accumulating physical resources. Many youth do possess mobile phones, but that’s about all one could see in their possession. We begin to wonder if conventional baseline data could take us any further. Unless we fathom the household survival economics, cultural dynamics and external influences, getting to know the kanjar will remain an enigma.

Clearly, these are early days in our quest to know the kanjar. Within the keywords listed above, we see a ray of hope in mapping their individual and group existence.

- Sudhirendar Sharma, RPS Yadav and Harish Gena

Innovative Initiative: To match a `thief'

WWF and the Madhya Pradesh forest department have embarked on a unique initiative to gentrify the `criminal' Pardhi tribe and stop large-scale tiger poaching. The project has two linked objectives - one, persuading the adults to change their ways and two, giving the community's children a shot at education and a subsequent normal life. Called `residential bridge course', the Pardhi children spend none months away from their families in such `borading schools' before crossing over to conventional schools. By now, nearly 250 children have gone through the bridge course in the last three years.

"Dissuading children who accompany their parents on dangerous hunts for wild boars, leopards and tigers haven't been easy,'' says S S Rajput, Chief Conservator of Forests, Bhopal. The challenge is to show Pardhi tribe that it is profitable to protect wildlife than poach it. The need is to co-opt them in the Indian state rather than fight them. . . .more

The Initiative

Started in Nov 2009, rehabilitating the Kanjar in Jhalawar district of Rajasthan is a joint initiative of IFFDC (http://www.iffdc.org.in) and Rajasthan Mission on Skills & Livelihoods (www.rajasthanlivelihoods.org) with support from UNDP. The project aims to not only develop a comprehensive understanding of the tribe's past but relate to it in devising inclusive livelihoods options for the stigmatised community. The specific objectives of the initiative are:

1. to sensitize and mobilize Kanjar families towards improvement in their living standards.

2. to strengthen the linkages of community groups with other agencies to improve their access to productive resources in Jhalarapatan and Gangdhar blocks of Jhalawar district.

3. to respond to contemporary poverty related issues, including health and primary education, of women and children.

4. to enhance state-civil society-community partnership towards policy advocacy.

Plotting Kundli as an idea to understand social dynamics

Kanjar offer a formidable challenge in ameliorating their plight. There are wide array of inter-related issues that impact their lives - from cultural isolation to social stigma, from resource poverty to low incomes and from official apathy to economic exclusion. Understanding inter-relationships between issues and the manner in which these influence an `intervention' is critical to designing livelihoods programs for them. `Kundli chart' as a `concept' is being piloted to understand how each of the variables impact the outcome and to get a sense of the combination of factors that need to be tweaked to create a tangible impact.

The `co-production' idea

Speaking of the Bhils, the Pindaris and the Thugs, Gandhiji had said: `...all are our own countrymen. To win them over is your and my work. So long as we fear our own brethern, we are unfit to reach the goal.'

In response to Gandhiji's remark, the idea of Co-production is being mooted to bring Kanjar into the mainstream. Co-production is a concept that gives responsibility to people who are regarded as `the problem', and makes them feel useful when they had been condemned as useless - and by so doing transforms their lives. It is not same as `participation' because co-production means `reciprocity'. The point is that practically everybody does have something to give and both they, and the community around them, are better for the giving.