Come election, voting is a ‘duty’ for the Pawaras
Ambapani, a remote hamlet in the Yawal tehsil of Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district, has a population of 810. Of them, 310 are registered voters this time. The village is inhabited by the Pawara tribe, which is mostly found in the Satpura range of Jalgaon and Nandurbar districts along the Madhya Pradesh border.
As Jalgaon constituency heads to polls in the fourth phase of Lok Sabha poll in Maharashtra on May 13, no one here knows who the principal combatants [Smita Uday Wagh from the BJP and Karan Pawar from Shiv Sena (UBT)] are. The reason is simple: no political campaigns have ever reached this area.
The villagers, however, feel casting their vote is one of the ‘duties’ they need to full even if it hasn’t made any dierence to their lives. Some do it out of fear that the Forest department might otherwise ask them to vacate the land even though a local court had ruled in the villagers’ favour in 2005. Most of them say they just press the ballot and get done, something they have been doing since 1994.
“I collect dink (Marathi word for a gum collected from trees) during summer and sell it in the market down the hills at Haripur village. Last week when I went there, I learnt that the peti (ballot box) would come on May 13 this year. The peti comes to our village and goes, our only job is to press one of those buttons and the ocers tell us our job is done,” says Rupsing Bajarya Pawara, 57.
“We do not understand these pictures (party symbols) on the ballot box, so we press whatever appeals to us the most,” laughs Swali Bai Pawara, 35, from behind her veil.
The early years entailed a 13-km trek to the nearest gram panchayat of Moharale village. In 2004, for the rst time, a temporary polling booth was set up at Ambapani. Since 2009, polling has taken place at a Zilla Parishad school inside the village, a kutcha structure.
Basic needs
The village has no hospital or Primary Health Centre. Since there are zero institutional births, none of them have birth certicates, which makes it dicult to get Aadhaar cards and ration cards. The voting booth might have come up in the village, but the residents still have to walk 13 km to collect rations from Korpawali village. There is a kutcha school but there’s no regular teacher.
Ayush Prasad, the Jalgaon District Collector, says the reason why few government schemes, if at all, reach the hamlet is because it has not been identied as a revenue village yet. A proposal to that effect is now with the Jalgaon sub-divisional ocer.
For now, the electoral caravan beckons, electronic voting machines will be brought to the village on foot as there are no roads for four-wheelers to ply. “The one way walk for the polling party would be 10 km,” says Mr. Prasad.