Staying with Shyambati

By Sharmistha Sarkar, Praxis Programme Officer (based in New Delhi)

My stay at Shyambati Komre’s house was an experience which both enlightened as well as humbled me. My colleague, Raffaella, and I traveled to Rajnandgaon district of Chattisgarh State to facilitate an immersion program for some UNICEF staff. It was in the Mohala block, 75 kms from Rajnandgaon.

After all the participants had been introduced to their respective host families in different villages, we also went to meet ours in Putargondikala (Thakurpara), which is a small hamlet of 11 households in the main village. All of the families there are from the Gond tribe.

We arrived at Shyambati’s house in Putargondikala at around seven in the evening. Upon reaching there, we saw a heavily pregnant woman cooking in the courtyard. She welcomed us with a warm smile. She was alone finishing off the household chores as her 2-year-old son, Nitesh, slept inside. Her mother-in-law had gone to visit relatives in another village and her brother-in-law, Jiten, had gone out with friends. Due to the lack of employment opportunity in the village, her husband, Naren, has to migrate to bigger cities in search of work.

In Chhattisgarh, there is a culture that any visitor (otherwise referred to as ‘Saga’ in the local dialect) will always be welcomed warmly by the residents of the house. It doesn’t matter whether they know one another or not. Similarly, we were received by Shyambati with warmth and affection. We ended up sharing her hot and tasty and yet simple food and sleeping in what turned out to be the only room in the house.

The next day, we woke up at 7 o’clock in the morning, and when we came out, we saw that she had already started working. Her son Nitesh meanwhile kept giving us curious stares, probably trying to figure out why and how these two strange women had come to his home from out of the blue!

Shyambati studied up to 8th standard after which she was forced to follow her family’s wishes and get married.
Since then, her routine has been fixed: Work from morning to night without taking any rest. Here is a short summary of her chores…cooking, mopping the floor with cow dung, digging the ground and fetching mud to make bricks with, fetching water in a container which she carries on her head, cleaning the cowshed, and going to work on the field. In addition to doing all this work, she still finds the time to take care of her infant son as well as the other people at home. She only eats two meals during the day and nothing else in between. The normal diet there is rice with some chatni or seasonal leafy vegetables. She brings water from the hand pump 4 to 5 times in a day for drinking, washing utensils, and bathing her child.

Raffaella and I decided to help her with some of the chores and we soon realised that we could barely keep up with her, which left us amazed at how she managed to accomplish all these things everyday. Her brother-in-law
stays at home but doesn’t help in any household chores. He is also a daily labourer, but that is only when there is any work available under the NREGS , otherwise he just sits at home and whiles away his time. We found out that even the little money which he could have got after working with the Panchayat for 7 days under the NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) was not given to him. The family has two acres of agricultural land, which gives 4 to 5 quintals of paddy in a year but this year due to less rains they were able to get only one quintal. Every year their economic situation forces them to take loans of 6000 to 8000 rupees at the rate of up to 10%, because the quantity that they get from the field is not enough for the consumption of the family for a year and almost half of the produce has to be sold off in order to repay the previous loans along with interest. Most often, the loan is taken either from landlords or government employees of the main habitat of Putargondikala village.

The economic condition of his family forces Naren (Shyambati’s husband) to migrate to Nagpur and work there as a daily wage labourer. He earns Rs. 50 per day but can barely save any of it as most of the money is spent in covering his basic needs. To add to their frustrations, Shyambati’s family doesn’t even have a BPL (Below Poverty Line) card despite constant promises form the Sarpanch that it would be provided to them. They buy their rations from a private shop at double the price as what they would have if they had the card. Nitesh (Shyambati’s son) has a liver problem and has to take regular medication to keep it under control. His malnourished look did not go unnoticed.

But, despite of all these hardships and struggle to survive, Shyambati said that she has hope that the situation will improve in future and they will get more work. We left her house full of love and compassion and a greater understanding of how this poor tribal woman lives her life. Soon after coming back to Delhi, we were given the good news that she had delivered and that both mother and child are doing well.