‘Aren’t there other places with hills which have road, power?’

When visitors come next, Baijnathpura may have an answer. In 2015, construction began for a road till the foot of the hill on which their settlement lies, under the MGNREGA.

Over the past two years, teachers have been making their way up, asking parents to send their children to residential schools. Most families now have ration cards. Even if nutrition is still a problem, every family gets rice under a state government scheme, and children are fed by a reasonably regular anganwadi worker.

“Because of the rice especially, the nature of deaths has changed. Earlier, there were many more because of hunger. Now it is disease and illness,” Gangaram Pekra, who heads Choupal, an NGO working for the Pahari Korbas, says.

A road will hasten the change, the villagers assert.

It could also finally bring what Bhubaneswar has long been hoping for. He points to the pole that stands in front of his hut. Close to a decade ago, Bhubaneswar says, they put the pole up.

“They put two others in the village. We have 22 homes, and for one year, two of them got electricity. Then one day, the lights went out in those homes as well. Days later, villagers from the plains came and stole all the wires. Somehow we saved the pole, hoping someone would come back. A decade has passed, and there has only been darkness.”

Bhubaneswar does not seek electricity for any amenities, he says. “Here in the jungle, animals keep coming near our settlements. Since five-six years, there have been more and more wild elephants, who crush our huts and fields. Nobody has died but we have come close. Light will help. We can see them coming, and it will keep them away. The first thing we need is electricity,” he says.

Bisheshwar Singh, also from Choupal, says the needs of the Pahari Korbas are “daraavne (frightening)” in how basic they are, pointing to the small cement tank that is the source of water for the 22 families. The water has a thin white film of algae on it. Inside are six tadpoles.

“We clean the tank with our hands, just removing the leaves in it. We refill the water from the stream nearby, but it gets dirty in days,” says Aminsai, one of the tribals. The district administration gives them bleaching water, but it was last provided two years ago.

The long trek down in the absence of a road means most tribals fall back on quacks in case they fall ill. Gyan, a villager in Baijnathpura, talks of Mandu, who died a fortnight ago. He suffered for a month, and it was only on the last day, when the “jadi-booti (herbs)” didn’t work, that he was taken to a dispensary. “He died within hours. Doctor sahib said he had something called TB,” Gyan says.

Cradling his two-month-old daughter, Gyan talks of the day she was born, at home. The men had all gone out, and there was no way to contact them. There is one phone for a hundred people in Baijnathpura, and it was with Gyan. “After she was born, we went to the Mahadevi Sarna and sacrificed five chickens and a goat. She has lived,” Gyan says.

Chhattisgarh has only 37,472 Pahari Korbas left, scattered across four districts. Gyan, the highest earner in Baijnathpura and the only one with a fixed salary, is a cook in an ashram for tribal students in Birimkela village, down in the plains, and earns Rs 1,200 a month.

The others, like Bhubaneswar, are subsistence farmers for half the year. The rest of the time, they sell wood or look for menial labour in fields nearby.
Officials have over the years tried to convince Baijnathpura residents to come down to the plains, given the inaccessibility of where they live. But Pekra says the tribe has a deep mistrust of people in the plains.

“In their culture, land is owned by the community and not individuals. So they never had land in their names and were taken advantage of. Other tribes, which had access to greater education, took the land from the Korbas and got ‘pattas’ transferred in their name. The Korbas found themselves pushed to the periphery of villages where the infertile soil was. They got increasingly cut off, and receded back into the hills. It is the government’s responsibility to reduce that trust deficit,” Pekra says.

There is also fear of losing their culture and identity to “shahari log (people of the town)” if they moved. Already, those who can speak ‘Korba bhasha’ in Baijnathpura are down to three, all of them elders. Everybody else talks Surgujia, a dialect spoken across tribes in the district.

Towards the end of the year — his 13th year in office — Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh had announced an 11-point programme for the “particularly vulnerable tribal groups” such as Pahari Korbas, to be delivered within two years. It included water, housing, electricity, ration cards, health check-ups for each settlement, apart from a transistor, a blanket and an umbrella for each tribal home.

The blanket and umbrella, Bhubaneswar says, he already owns. He tells you why the transistor is important. “If they gave us a transistor, maybe we would have known that the state government said this… But they should give us our electricity first.”

As lights come on in the plains below, up in the hills in the darkness, Aminsai insists they will never leave their home. “Aren’t there other places in India which have bada bada pahad (big-big hills), and there is still a road, clean water and electricity?”