A mass suicide wrenches apart vulnerable tribe’s reclusive life
JASHPUR (CHHATTISGARH): For the last two weeks, a pattern has been established. A vehicle rumbles uphill, bouncing up and down the unpaved road cutting through wild shrubbery, shock absorbers straining. As the engine groans as it negotiates the incline and the decrepit road, women rush inside their huts, stealing glances at the outsiders from houses that have no doors. The men from the vehicle begin to walk, descending down one hillock, and then ascending the other, and arriving at a one room house next to a guava tree.
For decades on end, the Pahadi Korvas of Jhumra Dumar have lived away from the modern world, their practices making them one of the seven “particularly vulnerable tribal groups” (PVTGs) in Chhattisgarh and one of 75 such tribes across 17 states in India. For years, no fourwheeler ever came to the village; children spent their lives without seeing a motorcar.
On April 2, a mass suicide changed everything.
It is a suicide the police are struggling to solve because of how reclusive the tribe is; a suicide that has shone light on the lives of PVTGs, underscoring why they found special mention in Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget speech, in which she earmarked ₹15,000 crore for their upliftment; and a suicide that has brought vehicles to Jhumra Duwar, all of which stop next to the guava tree, from the branches of which Raju Ram (28), his wife Bhinsarin Bai (22), their daughter Devanti Bai (5), and son Devan (3) were found hanging.
The suicide
At 7am on April 2, 42-year-old
Budhai Korva, Ram’s uncle, who lives 200m downhill from his hut, first saw the bodies hanging.
As he spotted the corpses, he began to scream, running as fast as his legs could carry him to Dev Kumar, Raju Ram’s brother, who was sitting next to his small tomato crop, protecting them from the advances of grazing cattle. They got the bodies down, and made a decision. For once, outsiders had to be involved. A suicide like this was unheard of. They went to the police. “We went to the Bagicha police station(14km away), and filed a complaint. It was the first complaint any of us can remember,” Kumar said.
Kumar remembers that his brother had been tense. A day before the suicides, his brother had come to him and told him he would stop going to collect mahua, because he had been in an argument with Jagan and Baijnath, both of the same tribe.
The 133 Pahadi Korvas in Jhumra-Dumar have no official land records, each family dividing the forests of sal, teak and mahua among themselves for small farms, mostly for subsistence. They grow tomato, paddy and kodokutki(local millets). Mahua is important; not only because the fermented fruit is the source of locally brewed alcohol, but because it is also the only source of disposable income. One mahua tree gives a village resident an average income of ₹3,000 a year.
Raju Ram had 15 such mahua trees, located a 15km-walk away from his hut, deep inside the forests. Like everyone else, during collection season, he had been living in a small makeshift hut made of leaves and wooden logs, next to his trees this March.
“Two days before the incident, Raju Ram had a fight with Jagan, who was also collecting Mahua.
We questioned him, and he only told us Raju attacked him without telling us why. Raju apparently left and jungle and walked away,” said a senior police officer that is investigating the case.
Police officials said that Raju Ram left the forest and went to his mother-in-laws village of Kerapet where he stayed the night. On April 1, he walked to Jhumra Dumar, where he last met his brother at around 1 pm. “He told me he would not go to collect mahua because he had a disagreement with Jagan and Baijnath. He was upset, but this was no reason to die by suicide,” Kumar said.
In an election year (Chhattisgarh goes to the polls in late 2023), the mysterious mass suicide created a storm. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) formed a fact-finding committee, headed by leader of opposition Narayan Chandel that alleged that starvation and poverty caused the deaths. They said that the family travelled between 15km and 20km to collect mahua, and had no money. “The Pahadi Korvas lack basic facilities like roads and drinking water. A home under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana was allotted to him in 2016-17, but it was not constructed,” Chandel said in a report submitted to the state governor Biswabhusan Harichandan on April 10.
UD Minj, the Congress legislator for Kunkuri however said that it was the BJP that was instigating tribals. “The deceased family was the beneficiary of government schemes and the Congress government is certifiably pro-tribal. The incident is being investigated by the police.”
Except the police investigations have run up against a, fairly basic, societal wall. The Pahadi Korvas are an extremely reticent tribe; most affairs are handled internally; and there is a grave
distrust of “outsiders.”
“We are investigating the case from all angles but the Korvas are very sensitive, and do not speak like most do. We hope that we will get a breakthrough soon,” said D Ravishankar, superintendent of police, Jashpur.
An investigator told HT they had ruled out murder. “The autopsy does not show any signs of struggle. But more than that, and it may sound difficult to believe, but because Korvas do not lie,” said a local police officer.
What are PVTGs?
The Union ministry of tribal affairs categorises PVTGs as the most vulnerable among India’s scheduled tribes that usually inhabit isolated, remote and difficult to access areas in small and scattered habitats.
In the early 1960s, the UN Dhebar-led commission for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes said that there were four “layers” of scheduled tribes, the lowest of which were “extremely underdeveloped.” Based on this, in 1973, the Union government created a separate category called “primitive tribes”, renamed particularly vulnerable tribal groups(PVTG)
in 2006, each with abysmally low development indices.
On March 1 this year, Sitharaman underlined the need for special attention and launched the ₹15,000 crore Pradhan Mantri PVTG Development Mission, to be implemented in three years under the Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes. “This will saturate PVTG families and habitations with basic facilities like safe housing, clean drinking water and sanitation, improved access to education, health and nutrition, road and telecom connectivity, and sustainable livelihood opportunities”, she said.
But experts and local stakeholders that have worked among the primitive tribes say that even well-intentioned poverty alleviation schemes that target these tribes must begin with a crucial premise that has failed most policy thus far — an understanding of their lives.
Understanding the life of a Pahadi Korva
Around 14km from the closest town of Bagicha, Jhumra Dumar is a village of 133 tribal families in the “Samripat” region, “pat” being the local word for an elevated plateau. Of these families, 70 are Pahadi Korvas, their detached habitations spread wide, barely visible from each other.
The last survey by the state government in 2016 showed that there were 44,026 Pahadi Korvas left in Chhattisgarh, across the districts of Sarguja, Balrampur, Jashpur and Korba with a literacy rate of 33.53%.
The tribe once practised shifting cultivation in the forests, and when a boy attains manhood, he must build a hut away from his family, an explanation for the scattered settlements. There is no Pahadi Korva that works in the local service sector; all of them are dependent on forest produce and the cultivation of paddy, maize and millets for their families. “There is no irrigation and the main problem is water. We are dependent on the rains so there is only one crop cycle,” said one of them, Nunku Ram.
There is one handpump installed at the ramshackle Chhattisgarh government primary school that has classes from 1 to 5, and an anganwadi centre. Most Pahadi Korva children give up school after this point. With homes so far apart and only one formal drinking water source, most residents still drink water from natural springs in three different corners of the village.
“We use the same pools to bathe and to drink water. Nurses come to our village sometimes, but when someone falls unwell, it is difficult to reach the closest sub-health centre in Samarbahar, which is around 5 kilometres away because nobody has any conveyance, and the state of the roads,” said Kandru Ram, another resident.
Records of the Jashpur Women and Child Department say that there are 36 Pahadi Korva children in Jhumra Dumar, only two of whom are malnourished. But at the village, there is not a single child that does not seem to have a distended stomach, or hair the light shade of brown that only comes from undernourishment and hypochromotrichia.
A senior Jashpur based administrative officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that over the years, there have been attempts at government intervention. In 2015 for instance, then Chief Minister Raman Singh launched an 11 point programme for PVTG’s, including land for the homeless, clean drinking water, and health facilities. “But because they live in such remote areas, taking these services to them is often very difficult. It is impossible from an administrative point of view to design policy for remote tribes specifically with all their peculiarities,” the officer added.
For instance, even if the administration were to build a cement home under a government scheme, and urge a family to move in, they find it empty in a matter of days. “We require studies to understand their culture deeply, find leaders within them that we can interact with and make examples of them. Only then will there be acceptance. It has to come from within,” a second official said.
Officials also point to the reduction in land that Pahadi Korvas can call their own, in the face of growing land grab. “Section 170 B of the Chhattisgarh land revenue code bars sale of tribal land to non-tribals but allows a tribal-to-tribal exchange. This has left the door open to more worldly tribals acquiring their land, or acting as conduits for local businessmen. This enrages a Pahadi Korva because nothing matters more than their land or their forests. There need to be separate safeguards for PVTG’s,” the second official said.
Amarendra Singh, a social activist that lives in Jashpur and has worked with these tribes for three decades said that government intervention has often end up ostracizing Pahadi Korvas even more. “Over the years, broader laws have meant a ban on hunting, a ban on felling of trees, regulation on forest produce, which have meant a change on food habits. When these policies are applied in PVTG areas, there needs to be an understanding of what that means for their communities,” Singh said.
Over the years, a division has grown among the Pahadi Korva and the tribe they are closest to in cultural practices- the “Dihari Korva”. The Dihari Korvas were named such because they lived near the bottom of the foothills, and the latter on hillocks. “Over time, the Dihari Korvas began to see the Pahari Korva as inferior. Marriages stopped between the two communities and social stratification occurred. The Pahadi Korvas became even more insular,” said Anshu Mala Tirki, a researcher in the region.
Ram Prakash Pandey, another area expert said that the first focus should not be housing, but roads and emergency services. “We need to protect their lands. When someone dies from a family, they demolish the hut and move somewhere else. This is why they have no land records. But this has invited all kinds of pressure groups. They are frustrated and helpless,” Pandey said.
At Jhumra Dumar, the village has a task ahead. Ordinarily, someone from Raju Ram’s home would have demolished their thatched hut, to mark death, and built another home, to mark the continuity of life. This time tough, there is nobody from the immediate family left. “The village will have to demolish the home. And there will be no home to rebuild, because there is no life to rebuild,” said Dilip Ram Pahadi.
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