Hunter, Helper, Leader, Thief? Unemployed Youth in the Indian Himalayas a report on some preliminary fieldwork findings Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey, 7
Download 274.01 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Jaipal: social and political practices
Hema: double disadvantage Bemni villagers do not usually expect young women to enter paid employment. As the Tables in the appendix show, very few young women are in paid work, indeed only two SC women work for money outside the home. But expectations are slowly beginning to change, and this is creating dilemmas as well as some opportunities for young women. Hema is thirty and unmarried. Between March and June 2012 she was living with her mother, who has no education, in the family home in Bemni. Like Rajesh, Hema has a long history of engagement in formal education. She is not quite the most educated young woman from Bemni – there is a contemporary of Hema’s who is studying for a PhD in Dehra Dun. But Hema is among only seven young women (six GCs and one SC) to have acquired a degree. Hema obtained her primary and secondary schooling in and around Bemni. She then did a BA and MA in Hindi from Gopeshwar college. Next, she acquired a B.Ed. from a college in Haridwar and a Masters of Education degree from Meerut, a city in Uttar Pradesh. Hema did her degrees “regular” rather than “private”: she actually went to study for six months in Hardiwar and six months in Meerut. She said that when she was in ninth class her grandfather and grandmother did not want her to study any further. But her father supported her in carrying on. “He did not differentiate between girls and boys when thinking about education.” Hema’s situation parallels that of Rajesh’s in key respects. She has found it impossible to acquire a teaching position because of a lack of opportunities. She said that as a woman she could not enter business. The only forms of paid employment that she said a woman could do locally – teaching and NGO work – had little scope. She said that there are no facilities for starting a private school and people locally “spend their money on liquor they are not interested in the education of their children”. NGO jobs are temporary and, as a woman, she could not spend time travelling around the region looking for the more secure posts. Hema told us that she would continue to apply for government jobs if they appeared, but in another interview she mentioned having resigned herself to not getting permanent paid employment. She said that, when she marries, her mother-in-law and husband are unlikely to countenance her working. She has received offers of “love marriages” from men who would encourage her to work, but that she would not think of marrying behind her parents’ back. The prospects for Hema’s arranged marriage are in some respects rather bleak. Hema is considered “over age”, and her advanced education also counts against her. Prevailing norms around gender and education mean that many men feel threatened by a young woman who has better qualifications than they do. Hema occupies another type of limbo, too. While she claimed that as an educated person she is able to adjust to any kind of environment and that she feels as at home in the village, she also made rather disparaging remarks about the village. On one occasion she remarked that that there is “no reason to stay here [in Bemni], it has nothing to offer.” Moreover, other young women in the village, including those with degrees, said that Hema had become “out of place” in Bemni. They said that she is arrogant because of all the time that she had spent studying outside the village. One young woman said that Hema has become “bahar-ki” (“of the outside”). This young woman told us, “Hema just stays with her mother and works with her mother when they go to the forest. She does not have much of a relation with other girls in the village.” This brief portrait of Hema is more broadly indicative. There were some opportunities for young women to obtain paid work in and around Bemni, even in the absence of secure well-paid government employment. A few young women with high school or degree qualifications worked part-time in local schools. Three of the young women with degrees in the village worked in one of the village government anganwadis (nurseries). These provided young women with a sense of being on the path to remunerative government work – as nursery teachers they can apply for promotion to become quite well-paid nursery “supervisors”. All three of these women were married and had children, and they came from relatively wealthy families. Three young women with high school qualifications had part-time jobs caring for physically challenged young people in the village. For example, Meena had just completed 11th class and was married late in 2011. She was planning to enroll in 12th class later in 2012. In the meantime, Meena had taken on the work of looking after a disabled SC young man in the village. She taught him to walk and assisted him with his studies. Meena had completed five days of training in Gopeshwar before undertaking this work, which she seemed to think would help to prepare her for her future employment. She hoped that she might work in a government school but otherwise in a nursery (anganwaadi). In addition, Meena earned Rs. 800 a month for the caring work – a small sum but important in marking her out as someone on the road to paid employment outside the home. Yet Meena’s prospects are poor. Most of the high school or degree-educated young women in Bemni found it difficult to acquire permanent salaried work. There was less pressure on them, as compared to men, to acquire such work. But by equal measure it was harder for them to do so because they had to battle both the scarce job market and prevailing gender norms. In addition, the great uncertainty about whether future in-laws would support their daughter-in-law in the search for paid work discouraged single women with high school qualification or degrees from planning careers. With the exception of temporary teaching work and involvement in local development projects, for example through MGNREGA, young women found it tough to obtain paid work while waiting for a government job to materialize. It is much more difficult for them than it is for men to spend long periods outside the village, and young women were much more involved than were men in unpaid household and farm work: conducting daily chores around the home, looking after livestock, collecting firewood and grass for fodder, and undertaking numerous tasks in the fields. Jane carried out a lot of participant observation in these areas, especially in 2003/04 but also in 2012. This suggested that young women’s work was slightly less intense in 2012 than in the earlier period, as a result of a decline in the amount of land under cultivation and reduction in the number of livestock. But women’s responsibilities remained extremely burdensome, especially during peak periods of agricultural activity such as June and November. Young women used the time they spent together undertaking household tasks to exchange ideas, joke, and discuss village matters – and these social experiences are probably important in allowing many women to cope with the disappointments of local educational regimes, absence of paid employment opportunities, and continued diminished agency with respect to work and their “futures” more broadly. Uncertainties over marriage often exacerbate young women’s difficulties still further. Under a brideprice system prevalent in the Bemni region in the 1970s and 1980s young women were often married within their own village and could break a relationship if they were unhappy. Under the dowry system that has become more prevalent over the past twenty years it is no longer possible for young women to negotiate a separation and they more commonly married outside the village, sometimes at a considerable distance from Bemni. Marriages have also rapidly become more expensive in Bemni. The typical cost of arranging the marriage of a daughter in Bemni is Rs. 300,000 and Rs. 250,000 for a son – and relatives often have to spend Rs. 20,000 per marriage on gifts. The emergence of this dowry system may be adversely affecting young people in general, and especially young women, in three linked ways. First, it may exacerbate a tendency for young people, particularly perhaps young women, to assess their own appearance, education, and employment in narrowly instrumental, even monetized terms. In western UP, where the dowry system is more advanced, it is has become common for parents to construct pricelists for grooms with particular occupations and educational qualifications. Likewise, parents sometimes refer to a need to pay a high dowry to compensate for a perceived shortcoming in a bride. Second, and as the Hema example suggests, the dowry system often compels young people to make quite direct comparisons between their own position and that of more purportedly successful youth. Young women may reflect negatively on their schooling, employment status and appearance, for example, and men often become especially conscious of their insecure work, poor education, and inability to fulfill norms of successful adult masculinity. For example, a friend of Hema’s who had a Masters degree recently got married in Bemni said that her choice of partner was highly constrained because young men were concerned about marrying someone so educated and also a little worried about her advanced age. One of her prospective marriage partners complained after meeting her of her being too “tez”, a double-edged word which means both “bright” and “headstrong”, or “sharp”. Third, the dowry system may lead to intra- and trans-generational social conflict. Conflicts may occur over parents and young people’s interpretation of the success or failure of past social “strategies” as these become evident at the time of negotiating a marriage. This may indeed be the case in Hema’s instance; her parents are certainly intensely worried about how to negotiate a good match for their daughter. (Intra-household politics is an area we would like to investigate in our next round of research in Bemni). “Love marriages” - in the sense of unions that are not “arranged” and do not involve the elaborate celebrations associated with “traditional” unions - have become more common. This partly reflects the rise of notions of romantic love, for example in higher educational contexts, and increased opportunities for young people to meet one another away from the prying eyes of their parents, again most notably in school or college. It also reflects the extension in the age of marriage and the rising cost of arranged marriages. But a love marriage is not a solution for most young women, because they do not want to risk the approbation of their family and village community and because they have few opportunities in practice to seek out life companions. Young women therefore experienced a type of “double disadvantage” as educated unemployed youth: they were excluded from the labour market and also partially excluded from the “work” of unemployment that we have described for young men like Rajesh. Moreover, a string of qualifications can become a positive disadvantage unemployed young women at the time of marriage. Jaipal: social and political practices The example of Jaipal gives a strong sense of what young people were doing in public “political” spheres in the context of unemployment. Jaipal obtained his primary education from Bemni, went to junior high school at a school close to Bemni and spent 11th Class and 12th Class in Ghat. He said that the schools were excellent at that time. The teachers were very good, and they took their responsibilities seriously. He went on to do a BA degree at Gopeshwar College and then an MA from the same institution. Between 2004 and 2008 he lived in Dehra Dun. There he did a B.Ed, competed in competitions, and taught in a CBSE private school. He spent the next three years, he said, “khaali” (“free”) in the village. During this period, he served as vice-head of the block (sub-district) government council and a member of multi-village area council also charged with local government work. He did not earn money from these positions and sustained himself through doing occasional tutorials on a paid basis and farming in the village. Jaiapl was not very interested in discussing party politics. He said that he did not like this level of “politics” (rajniti). Much of Jaipal’s work as a politician entailed instead circulating discourses critical of the state within his village and the surrounding rural area. He spent a lot of time discussing the failings of the school system. Jaipal was also critical of the manner in MGNREGA projects run in the village. He said that the projects should be oriented towards improving the local environment. “MGNREGA was set up to promote projects for soil moisture retention, tree planting, and that sort of thing”, he said. “But the local village council has only focused on building paths and walls in the village. It is as if something that has to be concrete to qualify as development”. As an educated but underemployed young man, Jaipal had the time, energy and skills required to act on his sense of frustration. As vice-head of the Block, Jaipal he chaired the education committee. He emphasized the issue of teacher/student ratios while holding this post and paid close attention to the norms for appointing teachers. When he got elected to the area council in 2008, Jaipal made electricity his other priority. He set up an information committee on the issue of rural electrification. He met the Chief Minister and went to seminars attended by all the District Magistrates. He brought the executive engineers responsible for the rural distribution of electricity to Bemni. Jaipal: “I had them walking around grass that was waist high in the rainy season, and we discussed where the low tension wires should be placed and where the high tension wires should be placed.” Officials only came up with only temporary solutions to the electricity problem, and so Jaipal kept the pressure on them through writing scores of letters of complaint. He said that every newspaper carried 10 or 15 stories about his activities – he has the cuttings in Ghat and he indicated a stack over a foot high. When we asked why electricity was such a pressing concern, he said that it is because the young need computers and other modern technology. Jaipal also engaged in direct protests. In 2005 Jaipal was the brains behind an extraordinary demonstration related to road construction to the village. Frustrated that the Government had not extended an existing road from the nearby village of Sung to Bemni, Jaipal organized villagers to construct a road themselves. They borrowed equipment for Ghat shopkeepers and spent ten days with picks and shovels carving an improvised road out of the side of the mountain. This publicity stunt worked. The story of villagers building their own road travelled as far as Delhi and embarrassed the district administration into action. In addition, Jaipal acted as a mediator between rural people requiring assistance from the state and different sections of the government administration. For example, he was often able to help villagers bypass the local head of the village council (pradhan) and instead directly appeal to the Block Development Officer (BDO) on issues such as the non-receipt of a widow’s pension or inability to obtain registration as Below the Poverty Line. Jaipal could also help poor people in negotiations with school principals, government doctors, and lawyers. Jaipal participated in other forms of community service: running microcredit schemes, rural heath camps, and training schemes for SCs in artisanal work. Jaipal imagines himself as a type of social “motivator” (he used the English word). In 2012 alone, Jaipal had persuaded a young man to take a loan in order to seat up a small business supplying recorded music at local weddings. He had also persuaded two other young men to try to enter the business of medicinal plants. Jaipal also tried to politicize the population by talking about the importance of voting in elections (although he was not affiliated to any political party). In 2009, Jaipal landed a government job as a secondary school teacher in a town about 100 miles from Bemni. But Jaipal often returns to the village to engage in social and political work. Jaipal’s case draws attention to young people’s work as social helpers. This assistance took a variety of forms. Educated unemployed youth – women as well as men - often advised younger youth and parents on schooling opportunities and courses. They helped sometimes with homework or provided tuition free of charge. They also provided advice on employment opportunities and business. Especially charismatic leaders among these youth acted as “motivators”, for example persuading young people to join rotating credit schemes. The most important social role that educated unemployed young people played was helping rural people obtain medical treatment. Seeking help from a doctor or hospital administrator and maintaining this assistance entails having to bribe, cajole and negotiate with various higher ups. It also entails making frequent trips to urban areas and organizing priests to perform relevant religious ceremonies. Educated unemployed young people had the time, confidence and skills required to manage these varied tasks. Educated unemployed youth also manage interpersonal conflict in the village, a task that was formerly performed by older members of the village. This became especially evident in June 2012 when conflict threatened to erupt in one of Bemni’s GC households. A young man named Trilok Singh had returned from working in a factory in Gujarat to Bemni. Trilok was married with three children. One evening his lover, Kriti - who had no previous knowledge of Trilok’s marriage and had indeed been expecting to marry Trilok herself- arrived from the Uttar Pradesh plains and stumbled across Trilok and his wife in their home. The instant reaction of four or five of the educated underemployed young men in the village best known for their social service was to go to Trilok’s house and prevent any violent confrontation, smoothing things over as far as possible and especially making sure that Trilok’s elderly parents were not too upset. The next day they accompanied Trilok and Kriti to Ghat, where they saw her off – with the promise that Trilok would soon make a decision about how he wanted to proceed. The young men accompanied Trilok because they had heard that Kriti might have called upon her own friends and family in the plains to come up and “sort out” Trilok. Another rumour had circulated that the lover’s family might be issuing a First Information Report with the police on the basis that Trilok might have kidnapped his lover. The young men were also there to make sure that Trilok received far treatment at the hands of the law. As it happened, these rumours were unfounded and Trilok was able to say goodbye to Kriti in Ghat who then travelled, without incident, back to the plains. As the example of Jaipal primes us to expect, young people were also important in communicating political critiques in the village. They complained vociferously during everyday conversations about corruption in the process of granting contracts for MGNREGA projects and disbursement of development monies in the village. They also complained about malpractice and neglect within schools, hospitals, the electricity department, and among officers responsible for maintaining a clean and regular water supply in the village. They said that the land revenue officer is corrupt and that the police in local towns are venal and unreliable. In addition to criticizing corruption, a few young people spoke more generally about the need for fairness in the village. They spoke, too about the issue of equality. One SC young man said, “The ethic (niti) of this country is that rich eat the money meant for poor people. This happens everywhere.” One GC young man expanded on this theme: It used to be the case that trade was simple. You had a kilo of salt and I had a kilo of sugar. You would give me some of the salt and I would give you some of the sugar – a swap. Now we have entered an age in which money is king. People with money can do anything they like. Those with agricultural goods – like potatoes or millet – cannot swap these things for the other things they require in life. They do not get any money for their agricultural produce. Those with money just hoard it up. They do not know anything about farming. Youth also circulated environmental critiques, criticizing the government for not repairing the trekking route that runs through the village, lamenting the environmental degradation wrought by the road, and – in particular - bemoaning the failure of the village forest committee to manage the jungle properly. For example, a SC young man said: This [village forest] committee should be saving the trees. Fifty people will come here and strip an area of forest to get wood for their houses and such like. I am part of a set of people who are trying to solve this problem. We are telling people not to cut down small live trees. But we may have an accident trying to save the forest. We have to tell people, ‘What will happen to the next generation, our children, if we cut down all the trees? Only be saving the forest will we be able to save them.’ Educated unemployed young people in Bemni also worked as mediators or “link people” between households and the state in its various local guises. They petitioned the village council head and block officers when development monies meant for specific family members did not arrive, for example. They also sometimes worked as intermediaries in the educational sphere, helping to get children enrolled in school or to obtain high school or degree certificates. In UP such intermediaries also linked the rural population and the police, but young people said that in Bemni an informal council of respected elders manage this work. There were a few educated unemployed young men who had turned their capacity to mediate between the public and officials to their own financial advantage. The principle route through which they made money from their local political know-how was through acting as intermediaries between the State at the district level and the rural population through taking on responsibility for construction projects, for example through MGNREGA. These young people could usually make reasonable sums of money from this work, although three powerful families tended to monopolize the larger contracts in the region. The contractor (tikedaar) was a figure of hate among most villagers, and especially the poor and SCs, because they tended to gave work only to their “own people”, often refused to pay wages, and embezzled large sums. Contractors defended themselves: they said that one has no choice but to be corrupt as a “tikedaar”. They cited the pressures associated with working among numerous corrupt officials and the need to make their own cut on development projects to feed their families. Young people also sometimes become involved in open protests. Most young men and women said that they had participated in demonstrations in Gopeshwar on the subject of local schooling. Roughly half said they had been involved in the road protests close to Bemni. And about a third mentioned having participated in demonstrations on the topic of the electricity supply to Bemni and construction of a communications tower. But the main way in which young people tried to place pressure on the state was through more individualistic interactions with government servants, chiefly the local village head and local teachers and doctors but also block officials and sometimes even the District Magistrate. In sum, “educated unemployed” youth were involved in various forms of social and political mobilization, and they were engaged in these practices to a greater extent than uneducated youth and also educated employed young people. They worked as conduits for critical discourse with respect to the state, mediators in village disputes, and lobbyists in the world of everyday state-society interactions. Too much should not be made of this trend: only a small proportion – perhaps a fifth – of men and a still smaller fraction of young women were nearly as active as Jaipal. Indeed, the atmosphere of demoralization in the village combined with the pressure to earn money discouraged young people from social and political action, which was less in evidence than it was for example in Craig’s work in rural western UP in 2000-2002. But educated unemployed youth were involved in some forms of everyday politicking and occasional protests aimed at helping their families and communities. Directory: esrc-files -> outputs outputs -> Golfballs on the Moor: Building the Fylingdales Ballistic Missile Early Warning System Download 274.01 Kb. Share with your friends:
|