Kanjar Care: June 2010

Friday, June 18, 2010

Tanks of collective action

Titarwasa, June 5, 2010: Two of the eight Kanjar hamlets, Narayanpur and Titarwasa, in Patan block have now got 2,000 litres capacity water tank each to augment water supply for household purposes. The tanks are filled with water pumped from wells owned by individuals in each of the hamlets. The tanks are a spinoff effect of well deepening work undertaken by the project in these hamlets. While the deepened well in Titarwasa is owned by an individual, the one in Narayanpur is a community well.

Since handpumps in both the localities have failed to meet the growing demand, the need for tapping additional sources of water supply have been felt for a while. A resolution submitted to the district administration for providing a water pipeline from nearby overhead tank has been pending for consideration. However, the collective actions by the households in each of the kanjar hamlets has eased the situation for now. A monthly fee of between Rs 10 and Rs 15 for each of the households is indeed a bargain for the convenience it offers at the doorsteps.
How indeed the water sharing system gets managed and the source gets protected for sustained supply would need to be closely monitored over time? Of additional interest would be the comparison between individual ownership and community-owned water source. Without doubt, these are early days and there is great enthusiasm amongst 83 households in both the hamlets over the success of their collective action.

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.