Kanjar Care

Monday, February 8, 2010

Nothing has changed in the last decade

Migration from Rajasthan after Independence proved to be the undoing of the Kanjar Bhat. With no land to call their own and unable to find jobs which could bring home money, some from the community opted for dacoity. And that damned the community. In the eyes of the police and in the eyes of society. Nobody likes the Kanjar Bhat.

The police added to the myth, painting them as diabolical killers with an ancient signal system to warn and make good their escape. Today, the Kanjar Bhat are thought of as a community whose men have an axe for a weapon, who duck the law by letting out cries which mimic the mongoose and the birds.Still, the police are always in hot pursuit. In the last twelve months, a crackdown on the Kanjar Bhat in and around Yavat has led to more than 50 `surrenders'. Now boys from the community are being roped in as `spotters' to help step up the `surrenders'.

Maybe another 50 men will surface in the coming months. It is good going for the police. But what of the Kanjar Bhat? Will the surrenders get them jobs? Can they return to the mainstream? Nobody knows.

The police say that they have sought help from social organisations like the Association for Attitudinal Healing and policewoman Kiran Bedi's India Vision Foundation, both working with prisoners and their families, for vocational guidance. Some plans for schooling and sheep rearing are also being talked about. But officials admit that unless a concrete rehabilitation programme is chalked out, the surrenders will not mean much.

For full story by Rachna Bhist Rawat, published in The Indian Express, Mumbai on March 18, 1999, please click

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.