Dispassionate Analysis

OK, I've vented about my discomfort with our travels through Andhra, so now I'll try to be a bit more objective and talk about what we learned.

Yes, there is definitely valuable, important, and worthwhile work going on in the villages we visited, and that's the important thing.

In a village where handloom weaving is the major economic activity, lack of a market and falling prices where there is one, are driving people to unemployment and poverty. The Indian marketplace is flooded by high quality, cheap fabrics from overseas. No one in India wants to buy the coarse handloomed Indian fabric anymore. People here totally buy into the idea that anything produced outside India is better than that which is produced indigenously. In order to encourage production and consumption of handloomed fabric, the government has subsidized thread for producers and offers hefty discounts to consumers. But the subsidies only reach a handful of producers, and the discounts translate to lower profits. Furthermore, producers do not have direct access to the market-- they have to go through intermediaries and retailers who take most of the money from the sales. So for a sari that costs the consumer Rs 500/-, the producer will get less than half of that. And because handloom weaving is all that people in these villages have done for time out of mind, it's not like they have any other skills to fall back on to find other means of income generation. Chethana has been working in these villages to help acquire cheap materials and have also been helping the producers in these villages reach a market for their goods as well as providing education and training in other marketable skills.

We also visited several tribal villages to learn about the issues they face and what is being done to help. Land and water issues and education were the recurrent themes here. Land is often granted to tribal peoples by the government, but they never own this land and are thus often forcibly removed from it when the government decides to use it for industry or commerce. And even if they get land, there is no housing initiative. So many people in these villages do not have adequate or permanent housing. These villages are often without an effective drainage system, so during the rainy season the entire village is often flooded and the people have to relocate elsewhere, to even more temporary housing. Also, due to the flooding, illness is rampant during the rainy months and there is no accessible hospital. Farming is the najor economic activity in these villages, but because of the dry climate and lack of rain this activity is not a reliable source of income (last year, most farmers worked fewer than 90 days). Bereft of their only source of income and completely uneducated, the men will either move to the cities to take demeaning jobs (tribals are severely looked down upon by "civilized" society) or will become tenant farmers where the majority of crops and money they raise go to the landlord. Similarly to the handloom weavers, most of the people in these villages are totally uneducated and there are no nearby schools. In these areas, BIRDS has been doing a lot of great work. Mainly, they focus on empowering the people-- educating them about their rights and teaching them how to stand up and approach the government to claim these rights. Also, in a huuuuge compound central to several small, isolated villages, BIRDS has set up a hospital with a full-time doctor and an ambulance to provide medical care to those who would otherwise have no access to it. They also have what they call an orphanage (although it doesn't really sound like an orphanage the way we understand it) where kids stay during the school year and get bussed to and from the nearest school. They also conduct training programmes and provide education for women from the villages and educate farmers in alternative, sustainable farming practices. Additionally, all the workers in the compound are hired from these villages.

That's some of what is going on. Hope it helps.