The Roof Is In Place

Yet, traditionally, Oriya villagers have been deprived of even this much as everything depended on chance—the right amount of rain/sun, the quality of seeds, pest attacks etc. Though belonging to a privileged "rich Brahmin" family that owns huge agricultural land and cultivates everything from paddy to potato to chillies to cucumber and has large coconut plantations, Dash states, "How much, or whether you would eventually earn anything from your farm was up to chance earlier. So you can imagine how the others fared."

Now Dash claims things have changed for the better. In the past decade or so, the Orissa government has been providing sops, subsidies and other help to the rural folk who account for 70 per cent of the state’s population.

As 70-year-old Muzaffar Mohammad, a farmer from Kuran Sasan gaon of Cuttack district, observes, "I am happy... unlike in the past when there was nothing to eat when the crop failed, now there is some surety." That comes from the family BPL card which allows the family to get 25 kg of rice at Rs 2/kg every month. Over the past decade-and-a-half, paddy prices have risen from Rs 200 to Rs 800 a quintal. Farmers appear content with better access to irrigation water, availability of subsidised seed and bank loans to purchase motor pumps. The old age pension of Rs 200 a month for villagers over 65 is another bonus.

Clearly, there is reason to be upbeat, which is evident even in Satkania village in Khurda district, where a majority of inhabitants are landless labourers with no steady livelihood. While detractors point out that the BPL cards (distributed to around 53 lakh families since January 2009) are election gimmicks, most villagers are unwilling to question the government’s motives. For them, the sops are enough to pledge support for chief minister Naveen Patnaik.

Unfortunately, the sops are not enough to hide the mostly marginal conditions of the villagers (by urban standards). A few hand-pumped tubewells and well-maintained roads leading up to the Indira Abason houses in almost every village are some signs of improvement. If the electioneering tenor is anything to go by, the BJD’s former partners, the BJP, are promising to provide BPL families rice for Rs 1 per kg, dal for Rs 5 per kg and salt for free. It remains to be seen which sop will swing the vote.

Dola Mitra in Puri, Khurda, Cuttack, Kendrapara