Hunter, Helper, Leader, Thief? Unemployed Youth in the Indian Himalayas a report on some preliminary fieldwork findings Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey, 7
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Unemployed Youth in the Indian Himalayas A report on some preliminary fieldwork findings Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey, 7th September 2012 Preamble Between March and June 2012 we conducted three months of research in Bemni Uttarakhand, India. We completed a socio-economic survey of the village, a follow-up to a similar survey that Jane conducted during a 15-month research stint in 2003-04. We also carried out semi-structured interviews concerning young people’s educational and employment experiences, marriage, views on the state and politics, and political activity. We interviewed about thirty young people (aged 18-30), roughly five Scheduled Castes (SC) men and five SC women and twelve Rajput or “General Caste” (GC) men and eight GC women. We also carried out some participant observation around the village. Bemni is located in a relatively remote part of Uttarakhand, bordering Tibet, at an altitude of about 2500 metres.1 The district in which Bemni is located – Chamoli district – is overwhelmingly rural and agricultural in character: 90 per cent of people lived in rural areas in 2011 according to the national census (ORG 2011). People typically practice a form of agro-pastoralism. They cultivate crops for subsistence – mainly wheat, millet and barley – while also managing large areas of the surrounding forest for pastoral use. Villagers have adopted a form of small-scale transhumance whereby they move annually between two or three settlements located at different altitudes. These seasonal shifts allow them to coordinate arable and pastoral land use and maximize the potential of agricultural land at different altitudes.i The village of Bemni – which is actually comprised of three smaller settlements at different heights on the same mountainside – contained 645 people in March 2012, of which 69% were GCs and 31% SCs. To reach Bemni from Delhi it is necessary to first take a bus, train, plane or taxi to Dehra Dun or Rishikesh – two of the main gateways to the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand State. This in itself can take a day. From these cities you travel by road upstream along the River Ganges. An eight-hour journey takes you to the small town of Nandprayag and a rough road leads from there along the Nandakini Valley to the even smaller town of Ghat. From Ghat, it is necessary to board a local jeep. In 2003, this jeep took you to a tiny hamlet on the banks of the Nandakini from which you must make a steep 9 kilometre (four hour) trek to the village. From late 2010 it was possible to get a jeep directly to Bemni, but only after negotiating a truly hair-raising road cut into a serious of landslides above a steep thousand-foot precipice. Bemni looked physically very different in 2012 to how it did in 2003: less green, dustier, more “developed”. A few people had built new houses, several two-storied. Within the GC areas of the village, many people had plastered their stone houses. In 2003 most people regarded a private lavatory as unhygienic; there were just two houses with one at the time. Now there are 42 latrines in the village and another 10 households were building them while we were there. The government greatly increased its development assistance to rural areas between 2003 and 2012 and this was also reflected in Bemni’s built landscape. Two JCBs growled around the hillside while we were in the village, building a new “cricket stadium” and widening the road. A communications tower was constructed in the village in 2009. Change was manifest, too, at the attitudinal level. Between 2003 and 2012, Bemni was more thoroughly absorbed into wider circuits of knowledge and information, especially as a result of rising phone ownership: 60% of households had at least one mobile in 2012. As it might be expected, people were keener on education in 2012 than in 2003 and the desire to enter service work and leave the village had increased among the young. Allied to this “transformation” of sorts has been a decline in agriculture. The area being farmed in and around Bemni appears to have halved in the nine years between 2003 and 2012, partly because of sales to the government for the road and other projects and partly because of people’s general disillusionment with farming – villagers reported that extreme weather events have repeatedly destroyed their crops in recent years and the prices in the local town have been low. Younger generations, in particular, have little appetite for agriculture, and children were less involved in agricultural tasks in 2012 than they were in 2003. The population of livestock had also declined markedly with this general retreat from farming and people’s dependence on shop-bought food. At the same time, the road and building construction had taken a heavy toll on the surrounding jungle, a situation greatly exacerbated by the fact that the head of the village council responsible for managing the forest – a notoriously roguish figure – had allowed many households to plunder Bemni’s jungle. We investigated these changes in village life through reference to the social predicament and struggles of young people in Bemni, especially educated unemployed youth. This report is built around the portraits of four of these young people. Biju: poverty and educational failure Biju was 29 in May 2012 and belonged to a SC caste. He studied up to 12th class (senior secondary school) in Bemni and a nearby village. He tried to obtain secure salaried work but failed in two different government competitions and then became discouraged. He said that he had withdrawn from formal education after 12th Class because of the expense and he could not see the point of doing a BA. He also said that the standard of his school education had been poor and that education is in an even worse state in Bemni at the moment. “The children don’t learn and the teachers don’t teach”. When we asked about the “benefits of education” (“parhai ka fayda”), Biju was dismissive: “What is the point of education if you cannot get salaried work? Education allows me to read an architect’s plan when I am working as a construction labourer in the village, but that’s about all the benefits.” Biju worked for five years in Delhi after school. He did manual warehousing work for an Australian logistics company called Linfox. He said that he got the job through a contact in a nearby village. He rose to the position of a shift supervisor and earned Rs. 12,000 a month – a comparatively large salary at the time. In about 2002 Biju’s father fell seriously ill. As the eldest son, Biju had to return to the village to care for him. He commented that, “An eldest brother’s responsibilities are huge, the same as those of a father.” Biju married at roughly the time he returned to the village and how has five daughters. In May 2012, he was employed as a carpenter in the village, earning on average Rs. 200 a day but only obtaining work for about 15 days in every month. He also did work for government employment scheme for about thirty days in a year. When we asked whether he had any hopes or intentions for the future he replied in an exasperated tone, “What hopes and intentions? What am I ever going to get now?” Biju said that he had often experienced problems managing both his work and his family, especially when his father was acutely ill. He was increasingly worried about his capacity to educate his daughters. He said that he could not benefit from government development programmes because of widespread malpractice within the district bureaucracy. We asked whether he could complain to officials about corruption: Biju: To whom would we complain, who will listen? The problem is that individuals cannot speak out. If you speak out alone, there will be trouble. It is a village thing. People do not want to make enemies here. So they just talk and talk about it among themselves and then keep quiet (gup chap gup chap chup rah jate hain). Craig: Have you heard of Anna Hazare [the anti-corruption activist]? Biju: Yes but he is a very big man. We are just small people, no on will listen. Craig: Can politicians perhaps help? Biju (grinning) Oh yes, they come and say that they will do all these things for the village and provide all this money. But they do nothing. Biju’s case is more broadly indicative of the struggles of poor households in Bemni. Parents want their children to acquire education and are willing to prioritize spending on schooling. But they cannot afford to keep children in school for long periods of time. Agricultural land is shrinking. Land sales allied to the subdivision of landholdings associated with the prevailing system of partible inheritance means that the average landholding per household had declined from 25.8 nalis (the local unit of land) in 2003 to 16.7 nalis in 2012. Most villagers said that an average family required thirty nalis to be self sufficient. Twenty-two of the thirty SC households in Bemni – including Biju’s - owned fewer than 5 nalis. Moreover, local construction, allied perhaps to climate change, had led to a decline in the water table and a decrease in soil fertility. Food prices have risen sharply, and many of the poor complained that their diets have become highly restricted. The following quotation from an elderly SC man in the village is indicative of the type of statement we heard many times in Bemni: Things have become so expensive it is impossible. I’ve stopped eating tomatoes since last year. They were Rs. 20 now they are Rs. 40 or Rs. 50. The difference between price of things a few years ago and the price of things now is like the difference between the earth and the sky. Daal now costs Rs. 70. An average person cannot get those things. If a person earns Rs. 120 a day – the government employment guarantee wage – and he goes to buy daal, his whole salary will be used up on the daal. How is he going to buy the other things that he needs? Corruption compounded these problems. Many of the poorest households in the village were not eligible for government resources because they had not bribed sufficiently the government inspectors, who had falsely registered them as Above the Poverty Line (APL) rather than Below the Poverty Line (BPL). Only BPL families are entitled to subsidies. Even those households labeled BPL - and therefore legally entitled to subsidized wheat, rice, sugar and mustard oil through the Indian Government’s Public Distribution Scheme - found it difficult in practice to acquire these products. Intermediaries embezzle funds, as they do in the case of the midday meals scheme that runs in local schools, the widow’s pension scheme, and various smaller government development projects. The requirement placed upon parents to buy uniforms, books, and stationary for school therefore comes on top of other pressing calls on meager household finances. The poor sometimes said that they faced a choice between education and eating. In addition, many parents need their children’s help in the home, forest and field. As the example of Biju suggests, these difficulties often manifested themselves at specific “crisis moments” in the lives of rural households. In particular, the illness of a family member often presaged a child abandoning school or a younger person giving up their higher education or a promising early career. Sometimes even a relatively “minor” injury, for example a mother injuring her hand meant that a child, most usually a girl, had to leave school to help in the home. There are no good functioning hospitals locally - the local doctor treats patients in an idiosyncratic manner - and obtaining medical assistance outside the village is expensive and time-consuming. The Uttarakhand State has failed to invest in educational facilities, curricular reform, and the monitoring of schools. In addition, widespread corruption in the educational bureaucracy means that teachers can bribe to be posted in urban areas. The student/staff ratio in Bemni and surrounding villages is often 100: 1. There are no science teachers in local schools because no one suitably qualified wants to reside so far from the city. A young woman with a 12th class pass told us: Education now is terrible. After class 5 the children cannot read or write Hindi properly. They can’t even write ‘ab’ (now). But all the classes are so easy, that everyone passes everything. It is true that the educational levels of those aged 16-25 and 26-35 are considerably higher than those of people aged 36-45. For example, 16 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women in this youngest cohort have at least a BA compared to 7 per cent and 0 per cent in the oldest cohorts, respectively (see Tables 1 and 4 in the appendix). Moreover, even SC girls are seeing an improvement in their educational levels (Table 6). But many young people do not continue in school after Eighth Class. This is especially the case among SCs, who own only a third of the land of GCs per capita, have fewer fixed assets, and poorer social links outside the village. Fifty per cent of SC men and sixty per cent of SC women dropped out of formal education before Eighth Class. The sex-based inequalities in education reflect gender norms surrounding employment - boys are expected to enter paid employment girls much more rarely so - and the greater need for girls’ assistance in the home in the context of prevailing norms around gender and work. Young people acquire basic skills from education that are important in terms of navigating modern life. They obtain, in the case of those able to remain in schooling, qualifications that are a minimum prerequisite for competing for government jobs. But education does not provide a great deal of confidence or political power (cf Sen 2000). It is still harder to claim that a local education boosts people’s employment prospects to any significant degree. Few villagers spoke about the civilizing or empowering nature of education, as people did in rural western UP in the 2000s (Jeffrey et al. 2008). One poor SC man in his fifties told us that he sent his children to school simply to avoid being disparaged by his neighbours for not doing so. A GC young woman with a 12th Class pass said: The benefit of education is nothing really. I’ll just end up working in the fields anyway, so it was just something to do when she was young. It was easier than working at home. The situation of educated unemployed youth must therefore viewed against the backdrop of widespread poverty and the depressing state of the local schooling regime. Many young people – indeed the majority of SCs and girls – do not manage to obtain a 10th class pass. Moreover, many of those who do acquire an education are unable to spend long periods searching for secure employment or developing their careers outside the village. Rajesh: the everyday work of “being unemployed” Rajesh Singh, a Rajput (GC), was thirty in 2012 and came from a family that was slightly richer than that of Biju. Rajesh was educated in Bemni primary school and then at a government secondary school close to the village. In the late 1990s Rajesh received a BA (Arts) from Gopeshwar College, the government degree college in the district town a dozen miles from Bemni. He did the degree on a “private” (correspondence) basis because his parents could not afford for him to study as a “regular” student. At the age of about twenty, and at the behest of some friends, he went to Mumbai where he worked for six months in a hotel. Mumbai did not suit him, he said, and so he travelled to Delhi where he had three jobs in succession: an attendant in a shopping mall and two different positions fixing up computers. At the time, Rajesh had imagined remaining in Delhi and establishing a small computer repair business. In 2003, however, Rajesh’s father fell ill and he had to abandon his work in Delhi to fulfill obligations at home. As in Biju’s case, it usually falls upon the eldest son to assist the family in a time of trouble. Rajesh had a brother, Harpal, who was much older. But Harpal left home when he was just 12. It seems that he absconded from school and then travelled abroad. By the late 1990s, Harpal had become quite rich and sent money to his family; but he could not be relied upon to return to the village to look after his father. As a consequence, Rajesh managed the process of obtaining treatment for his dying father in Bemni. After his father’s death, Rajesh helped to secure a marriage for his sister, and he also oversaw the construction of a new six-room, two-storied brick house for the family. Once Rajesh’s sister had been married, the family needed a young woman in the home who could milk and feed the cows and buffaloes, which is perceived as “women’s work”. Rajesh’s mother was not very well herself and could not carry out these chores much longer. It fell again to Rajesh to assist the family. He married a woman with an 8th Class pass from a nearby village. In 2012 they had two daughters, aged about 7 and 5, and a younger son, aged 3. Rajesh still considered himself young, a youth (jawaan). But he also felt the burden of “adult” life. “Responsibility” (zimmedaari) was a word he used quite a lot. Rajesh went back to college but, again, only as a “private” student, doing his degrees by correspondence. He got a BA in Gopeshwar and in 2012 was conducting a MA in English Literature from Garhwal University in Srinagar. Rajesh cannot obtain the original texts that form the backbone of the degree. “The books are only available in Srinagar and I am never there,” he said. Instead, he purchased six “cheat books”, some of them as fat as telephone directories, which he uses to bone up on how to answer possible questions he will face in the exam. The process was fairly mechanical: Rajesh simply learnt how to reproduce critiques of plays like Shakespeare’s Tempest and books like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, without consulting the originals. Rajesh was employed on a temporary basis in the local secondary school, helping with physical education and doing some occasional teaching. He earned a salary of Rs. 3000 – nowhere near the amount required to keep body and soul together. He also ran private tutorials for many local young people out of which he earned about Rs. 1000 per month for the three months running up to the examinations. He cultivated the family’s medium-sized (30 nali) farm and had a large vegetable garden close to his home. He spent about forty days a year working on government projects in the village through an employment guarantee scheme. He also occasionally went to collect forest products from the jungles and meadows above Bemni, which could be sold to local traders. Rajesh said that these various forms of employment allow him to “get by”. But he desperately hoped that he would be able to get a government job in the near future. His chances of success seem remote. Rajesh was among 86,000 applicants for 80 low-ranking bureaucratic jobs advertised in March 2012. He said that he would not find out whether he had cleared the first round until December 2012, and even then it would be matter of competing in further examinations, physical tests, and the like. He also applied for the post of tehsildar – administrative chief of a sub-district unit. In Uttarakhand you need to pass a written examination, do a physical test, and also pass a horse riding examination to become a tehsildar (you need to be able to ride between villages). Rajesh does not ride and so his chances are slim. Rajesh said that his next move would be to apply for a B.Ed degree and then enter the competition for secondary school teaching positions. Here, again, the odds are stacked against him. There are reputed to be 300,000 people studying for B.Eds in Uttarakhand as of August 2012 and there are about 200 new posts being made available every year. So common have B.Ed holders become and so degraded is the B.Ed degree that the State government is having to introduce a new qualification test for teachers; where a B.Ed was once enough to guarantee a secondary school post, there will now be an extra hurdle. And village-based young men like Rajesh without the capacity to buy the latest books or gain the relevant experience of new teaching methods are precisely the type of candidate that the news tests will be designed to weed out. In the meantime of course there are host of private college principals eagerly trying to persuade young people like Rajesh of the benefits of acquiring a B.Ed. So what can Rajesh do? We talked about the possibility of him migrating again to look for work. He said that his village and family responsibilities precluded that. He said that a pattern has emerged in the village whereby young men go out for a while and then return to Bemni for the majority of their adult lives. Rajesh: Young men often go to Delhi or Dehra Dun for a while. They might earn Rs. 5000. They spend Rs. 2000 on room rental and Rs. 3000 for their expenses. And once they have children they cannot afford to live in the city. It is too expensive. They return to the village because they do not need to pay rent. Rajesh could buy a couple of mules and probably make another Rs. 3000 per month this way. But this is hardly the type of work that Rajesh has come to expect. Rajesh could channel his efforts into farming, perhaps by borrowing land from other families. During the past few years the potato price has been very low, however. It is not economical to sell barley and wheat. Unseasonal hailstorms have ruined people’s crops twice in the past three years. And, again, Rajesh has not studied for twenty years of his life to weed potatoes. We asked whether Rajesh had thought about growing medicinal plants as this is an area in which there seems to be some scope, and he has an interest in horticulture. But Rajesh complained about the high start-up costs and his lack of specialist knowledge. Rajesh was more enthusiastic about setting up a private school. His home is large enough to house a small school. He has experience of teaching, and it is the type of job he would like to do. Rajesh’s tutees – including the village head’s daughter – achieved very good results in their secondary school examinations in June 2012. But, again, the start-up costs for a school are high. There is also a shortage of locals prepared to pay for private education; the rich prefer to send their children to urban schools. Rajesh therefore continues to “make do”, balancing farming, study, part-time teaching, and earning opportunities associated with the local environment. Rajesh’s case adds to our understanding of the educational difficulties faced by young people growing up in Bemni. Higher education, like the school system, is in a dire state. The Government has not invested in improving the curricula in most government institutions where courses continue to reflect colonial educational priorities. There is very little active learning. In addition, government universities have become highly politicized. For example, in May and June 2012 teachers and administrators in the largest university in Garhwal as well as all affiliated universities (including Gopeshwar College) went on a 34-day strike that wholly disrupted students’ capacity to prepare for and sit their examinations. At the same time, a wide range of private educational entrepreneurs has entered the fray, the majority of which are fraudulent institutions. Corruption is endemic with respect to the issuing of permits to open private colleges, accreditation of colleges, admission of students, enrollment of staff (many university teachers are registered at many different institutions simultaneously), and granting of degrees. In general terms both government and private universities have been reduced to being “degree shops” in which properly qualified lecturers are absent and students rely on cheat books and sample answers to pass exams. Students and their parents – even those living in relatively remote areas – recognize many of these problems. A GC young man with a BA degree said that, College life is useless. “There are no teachers and there is no good teaching. It is not like the colleges in the richer part of the world and big metros [major Indian cities]. The only actual activity in the colleges is the practicals. And even in the practicals things do not run right. Students fill in their own form. Young people in Bemni also said that the lack of an atmosphere of learning in university towns and cities had given rise to a spirit of non-seriousness within the student body, as manifest in the rise of “love story” (posturing and flirting). But critique ran ahead of practice: Most parents villagers with the required resources continued to invest in the pursuit of degrees, especially BAs and MAs. If a government job was not forthcoming, they most commonly opted for a B.Ed. This continued willingness to invest in higher education reflected in part a weary hope that education might pay dividends “in the end” and in part an inability or reluctance to accept the extent to which Uttarakhand degrees have been devalued in employment markets. Another important point that emerges strongly from the example of Rajesh is that of the difficulty that young people face in acquiring the types of secure, usually government, employment that they have been led to expect. Government jobs provide relatively high salaries: a government secondary school teacher, for example commands a starting salary of Rs. 30,000 (equivalent to about 400 pounds) per month, compared to Rs. 6,000 for someone starting in an urban NGO in Uttarakhand or Rs. 8,000 for someone working as a private manager in a factory. Moreover, people argue that many government jobs do not require a person to work especially hard. In addition, there is a history of young people joining government service (mainly the army) in this region and a sense that government work is high status. School textbooks also make great play of the value of serving the state. There were dissenting views; some young people said that private service is preferable because you are less likely to face pressure from superiors and have more scope for innovating. But the consensus was that a government job was the most desirable form of employment - teaching, army, or the educational bureaucracy were especially favoured. Very few of these educated young people can acquire government service. The percentage of Bemni men aged 36-45 in government service is higher than that of young men aged 26-35 in spite of the marked increased in education in the younger of these two cohorts. The low-ranking government jobs for which most villagers apply often go to those with bribe money and the right social contacts. This may be changing slowly. We heard several version of the following statement, from a young GC man said: The atmosphere has changed in the last 3 or 4 years. There is now some flexibility because people have raised their voices against corruption. The Right to Information Act (RTIA) means that people cannot stop you if you are a hard worker. Now we have a chance. The RTIA allows citizens to request information on any aspect of government functioning and while no one we met in Bemni has employed it, the mere existence of this Act may have been enough to prevent the most open and egregious forms of corruption among recruitment officials. But villagers were adamant that corruption continues “in secret” (“andhar hi andhar”). The protracted nature of the competition for work exacerbates the hardships that young people experience as candidates for government service. The process is drawn out in a double sense. First, young people can continue to apply for most government jobs until the age of 30, for secondary school teaching jobs 35 and for higher educational positions until forty. This point partly accounts for the pervasiveness of the sense among twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings that they may be “on the road to something better” in Bemni. Second, the process is protracted because it takes so long to pass through each stage in a government recruitment competition. It can take as many as 24 months from initial application to the final result. Many young people said that they feel deeply anxious about their underemployment. They often referred to the English word “tension”. The following quotation from a GC young man was typical: There is no service work here. Only the District Magistrate’s relatives get jobs. It all happens via whom you know. This is the land of the panch pandavas [holy scriptures], isn’t it? Kedarnath, Bardinath and the other pilgrimage sites: that is the only service work available, to go and work there. Also there are no masters coming to the schools to teach. The schools are being ruined (bigar jate haim). And only those with money will be successful, whether they have 8th class, 10th class, whatever. My mind has rally gone bad because of this situation (mera dimarck kharab ho gya). Several young people referred to themselves as “unemployed”, either using the English word or the Hindi term “berozgaari”. In other instances, they responded to the question “what do you do” by using the self-derogatory phrase “breaking rocks” (pathar thorna). In still other instances, they used terms that suggest a complete absence of activity “timepass” or “khaali” (which means empty or blank). Several young people said that they “do nothing” all day or just play karem (a board game), watch television, and play cricket or volleyball. In two cases, men referred to heavy drinking. There has been a sharp increase in the number of illegal stills in the village in part as a result of the frustrations faced by young men. In practice, however, most young men realized that they could not afford to do nothing, especially after marrying and having children. Our overall impression was of the industry of rural youth, even while they continued to imagine themselves as “underemployed” or “unemployed” in some sense of these terms. Indeed, young people themselves commented on their own industriousness and ethic of restless energy. One SC man in his mid-thirties said: A person cannot just say, ‘I want shahi paneer’ [an elaborate cheese dish]. He has to work at making the shahi paneer. You have to do many things if you want to achieve success. You have to try a lot. You have to do a lot. Rajesh’s story provides some useful pointers to the work typically conducted by young men. Young men commonly engage in various agricultural tasks (especially ploughing), run small businesses, travel to tourist spots for work, and conduct laboring work for the government or privately. They typically prioritize different forms of work at different times of the year. For example, young men often go to work in Badrinath or Kedarnath during the tourist season (June-August) and collect caterpillar fungus in May. Even while engaging in this array of occupations, they continue to seek college degrees and apply for government jobs. It should be noted here that, in spite of a general determination to avoid working in manual labour, educated young people did not object to conducting tasks such as collecting leaves in the forest or making cow dung cakes. Small enterprise is common among educated unemployed or underemployed youth but tends to be in a few narrow fields. Several men have responded to their failure to find secure work by engaging in mule work, running shops, or starting small transport businesses. Most of these businesses are forms of self-employment rather than requiring young people to hire others. These businesses are typically self-financed – from personal savings and informal loans from relatives. Young men seem generally averse to taking official loans. They frequently mention the problem of bank officials and other bureaucrats taking a large cut of their loan money. They also speak of high interest rates and the inherent uncertainty of their work in an environment in which corruption, crime and poor infrastructure are abiding concerns. In addition, some young people said that they suffer from a lack of confidence (himmat) and “mind power” or “brain” (dimark). They did not feel that their schooling had given them the problem-solving skills and sense of possibility required to take a risk in the field of business and they were demoralized by their failure to acquire government work. A central government sponsored micro-credit scheme runs in the village, but the first venture – a mushroom farm – failed in 2011, and interest in micro-credit is low. Likewise, several relatively wealthy and older villagers have begun to experiment with the growth of medicinal plants, and it seems there is scope for people to make large amounts of money in this way. But to date this is not a path that younger villagers – and the educated unemployed among them – have taken. Young people were also pessimistic about the possibility of acquiring good work through migrating to large cities, such as Haridwar, Dehra Dun and Delhi. Like Rajesh, they said that expenses often swallow up one’s earnings and village responsibilities often mean that they have to return to Bemni after some time. Biju’s short but rather successful career was exceptional in this respect. Since 2003 two forms of new employment have become prominent in the working lives of educated underemployed youth in the village – young women as well as young men. First, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), plays a role in supporting the efforts of young people to survive economically. Under the MGNREGA scheme, each household is entitled to work for 100 days each year at a rate of RS. 120 per day. In practice, young people typically obtain between 20 and 35 days work a year under MGNREGA. Young people report difficulties in obtaining their wages – many SCs, in particular, have had to wait over a year to get paid. But MGNREGA boosted young people’s earnings. Some young men, and a few young women, also collect mukku (lichen), which is sold in local markets and used as a dye on the plains (see Dyson 2008). Mukku collection was a major activity for teenage boys and girls in 2003/04. In 2012 some young men and women in their twenties also went to collect mukku, often travelling greater distances. Most villagers said that the supply of mukku has nevertheless dwindled to such a point that trips are often fruitless. Mukku collection is also dangerous: It involves climbing high up trees and spending long periods in the jungle. More important than MGNREGA and mukku are new opportunities for young people to collect caterpillar fungus – called “kira jali” – which is sold to local traders (see our articles on this in BBC Magazine and the Guardian). It seemed that young men were far more involved in this work than young women, but girls and women did appear to be beginning to collect the fungus. The thin black fungi are about an inch long and can be found extending out of a mummified caterpillar. Apparently, the Chinese consider the caterpillar to an aphrodisiac, and the fungus reputedly forms the basis of a performance-enhancing drug used by Chinese athletes. The kira jali are found at about 15,000 feet, one day’s long and strenuous hike from Ramni. The significance of kira jali to the local economy should not be exaggerated: probably half of the many people who now go to collect kira jali obtain only trivial quantities of the fungus – for example three or four pieces in ten days. But many others do make good amounts of money, and there are a few kira jali specialists in the village who collect hundreds of the fungi each time they visit the high pastures. One young SC man gathered 500 in a month in 2011, and made Rs. 40,000. Two GC brothers collected the same amount in three weeks in 2012 and expect to collect Rs. 75,000 this year. Five years ago the fungi would fetch Rs. 10 a piece. In 2012 they were trading at Rs. 150 a piece or Rs. 400,000 (5,000 UK pounds) a kilogram. A GC young man from Ramni told us, “Why would I go and live in Delhi when I can earn as much from kira jali in one month as I could earn in two years in the capital?” The newness of such seasonal moves to high altitudes should not be overstated; herders of sheep and goats have long travelled up to the mountain pastures during the summer. But the sheer numbers travelling to the high altitude meadows is unprecedented. At the end of May 2012 there were about 1500 people in “Simbe bugyal”, which is the main hunting ground for kira jali for those from Ramni and surrounding villages. One young man commented wryly that Simbe is “the new Gopeshwar” (Gopeshwar is the district headquarters]). Almost everyone we spoke to about kira jali emphasized the risks involved in collecting the fungus. The availability of the fungus depends upon the amount of rainfall and other aspects of the local climate. Locals also say that the amount of kira jali available year on year. 2011 was a good year, 2012 turned out to be disappointing. Travelling to collect kira jali has its opportunity costs – you miss out on labour opportunities in the village, for example – and many people were returning from Simbe in May 2012 cursing their luck. The long “chain” of intermediaries through whose hands the kira jali passes on the way to China is another source of frustration for young people, who recognize that the sum they receive for the fungus is miniscule compared to the price at which they are sold in China or the West. One GC young man explained that the low price that they receive reflects the existence of different fiefdoms controlled by various brokers: One dealer might have power over the area between Ramni and Ghat, the next dealer might have control over the area between Ghat and Nandprayag, and so on. That is why there is such a long “chain” in the sale of kira jali. There are legal risks associated with kira jali collection. There is a system in place for villagers to obtain licenses to collect kira jali. An individual pays Rs. 500 to the head of the local forest committee, called the “Sarpanch”, and in return receives a piece of paper that entitles him or her to collect the caterpillar fungus. But this system does not operate in many villages, including Bemni, and it does not prevent the government, in the form of the Forest Department (FD), from harassing collectors. The FD is worried that the villagers will try to harvest the medicinal plants that grow in the alpine meadows. They are worried, too, about the poaching of animals and the harm done by villagers’ fires to the mountain environment. In 2011 FD officials destroyed the tents of villagers collecting kira jali on the pretense that the collectors were also harvesting plants. The villagers each gave the FD representatives one kira jali, an improvised bribe that got the officials of their backs. The sale of kira jali is not licensed by the state. As several young people told us in Bemni it is – strictly speaking – “thieves business” (chori ka kaam). Villagers typically sell their harvest either to intermediaries (“beechwale”) who come to the village or else to similar brokers who reside in local towns. The price in the local towns is slightly higher than the amount villagers receive in the village and this has encouraged some youth to take their harvest down in the jeep to the local towns of Nandprayag or Chamoli. This is dangerous, as several people found out in 2011. Following an anonymous tip off, the police in the small town of Ghat heard that several villagers were bringing down a sack of kira jali to sell in Chamoli town. The Ghat police phoned the Nandprayag police. When the Bemni men arrived in Nandprayag they were promptly apprehended. The police were bullish, “you are carrying illegal goods”, they said. They confiscated the kira jali, doubtless in order to fill their own pockets. The villagers returned to Bemni empty-handed. Nor is selling kira jali in the village without risk. In 2010 several men sold their kira jali to a trader on trust. The man never returned to Bemni with the money he owed to the villagers, and people could not complain to the police because kira jali sale is illegal – a fact that the unscrupulous broker exploited. There are health risks with kira jali, too. Those who have been up to collect the fungus often complain of snow blindness, nausea, and exhaustion. Joint problems are also common because people lie still for long periods to look for the fungus. Several villagers have experienced advanced forms of altitude sickness, including a type of paralysis. One man recently died from what was probably High Altitude Cerebral Edema. There are also many accidents – one man famously survived for 13 days in the crevasse of a glacier before he was rescued. Fights over kira jali are becoming more common. In eastern Uttarakhand around the small town of Munsiyari villagers have taken to carrying guns. There was a fistfight recently between villagers in Kanol and Sutol, higher up the level from Bemni, over who had rights to a particular part of the meadow. And then added to the uncertainties is the lurking question of the environmental sustainability of collecting the fungus. It is likely that the heavy harvesting of the fungus will reduce the crop in subsequent years, this at least is what many commentators have argued based on observations in Nepal, where caterpillar fungus has been collected for a longer period of time. But in the short and perhaps medium term kira jali is the most important source of income for educated unemployed young men in Bemni after MGNREGA, and young people like Rajesh are willing to take the risks in their stride. Rajesh summarized the situation very well when he said that his farming and his MGNREGA is his “safe” employment and kira jali collection is his “risky” work – people need a “mix”. 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:
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