KADAKNATH CHICKENS SELL FOR UP TO ₹900 EACH AT THE FARM LEVEL, AGAINST ABOUT ₹300 FOR A REGULAR CHICKEN
reach the target weight of 1.5 kg and are sold either to local traders or to a company that has tied up with the district administration to buy the chickens in bulk. And then it’s time for the next round of chicks to arrive.
The district subsidises 90% of cost for the first batch of chicks, and 75% for the second batch. KVK helps with training and basic infrastructure like construction of the sheds and chicken feed.
Most of the birds go to markets in Hyderabad and Vijayawada. There is now demand growing in Delhi too, but it’s difficult for the birds to survive a journey of 16 hours. So there are plans for a slaughterhouse and cold storage in Dantewada.
Eventually, the subsidies will be phased out, the farmers encouraged to buy incubators (the Kadaknath does not hatch its own eggs) and the farming of the black chicken will, hopefully, take off in earnest.
Most of the women are aged 18 to 45; high-school dropouts, former farm labourers, widows and single parents.
Champa Atami, 24, is both a dropout and former labourer. “I used to earn ₹172 a day, on days when I could find work,” she says. “Since May, I earn a steady ₹30,000 every three months.”
A new tin roof glints on Atami’s mud home. Where her parents – paddy farmers – couldn’t afford her school fees, she is now saving up so her sister Ranjeeta, the youngest of four siblings, can graduate.
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In Kasoli village, a sparkling Hero Splendor stands in Jhunni Netham’s courtyard. The 40-year-old mother of four has earned ₹1.5 lakh over seven months, thrice as much as her husband, Sukalu, makes in a year from his millet farm.
In Karli village, about 7 km away, Lachhan Dai’s family eat paneer twice a month, courtesy the clucking birds. “With the money we earned from farming, we used to live on dal-rice and sometimes leafy greens from the forest,” says the 40-something Dai, who is now helping support her two brothers and their five children.
Elsewhere, savings are accumulating in banks. “Since October, we’ve earned ₹30,000,” says Asmati Arya, 33, head of a 10-member self-help group in Hiranar village. “We plan to start a kirana store.”
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Dantewada district is divided into four blocks – Dantewada, Geedam, Katekalyan and Kuakonda. Together, they hold five towns, 14 iron ore mining reserves (of which three are active), and 229 villages with a combined population of 2.83 lakh.
Until the black chicken, the main source of income here was paddy cultivation, foraging for forest produce and poultry farming. This gave the villages a per capita income of ₹26,000 (as of 2006-07), putting the district in the bottom 50 in India.
In 2015, the union government introduced District Mineral Foundations
(DMF) in states affected by mining activity. Funds collected from mining companies as royalty went into the DMF to be used for development and welfare programmes. Dantewada receives ₹70 crore annually under this scheme, since 2015.
With this money, collector Kumar identified gaps in the public sector and began allocating funds for projects. There was no public transport in Dantewada, so he offered e-rickshaws on subsidy to women who were willing to learn to ply them. Women now ferry locals about in 144 battery-charged autos in the district.
Women are also growing mushrooms
Kadaknath reached Dantewada’s KVK in 2015 and the birds were distributed for rearing last year.
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Sadly, several parts of Dantewada district are still out of the reach of most of these initiatives. “When we tried to set up self-help groups in the interiors of Katekalyan, Naxalites threatened to chop off our feet off,” says Chhaya Ishwar, 25, of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission.
In the market area of the district headquarters, though, there’s a free wi-fi zone, an Education City houses a polytechnic institute, a school for children with special needs, and Livelihood College for courses in fashion design, carpentry, cooking.
Next door is Yuva, the district’s first BPO, launched in January in partnership with Hyderabad-based Sixth Generation Technologies, where 300 employees work on data entry, earning ₹8,000 per month. Hindi voice training is underway too.
“These initiatives are concentrated in certain parts of certain blocks, and a few centrally located villages,” says tribal rights activist Soni Sori, now a local leader with the Aam Aadmi Party. “Real change will happen when they are expanded to the grassroot level – to the many villages in each block that are 20km away from the centre and still disconnected.” For more snapshots from Dantewada, go to hindustantimes.com/lifestyle