Plant trees and feed generations

I ran into Birji Ram. He was a Meena, a well-known Scheduled Tribe of Rajasthan. Land is not a problem here in the hills and Birji has historical rights. With a good rainfall year, he can sow 10 bighas or more of land. But this year he has water only for 2 bighas. That is bad news. He gets around 100 kg of maize from a bigha of land. Three of his sons from his wife Devli are married and the fourth, only eight years old, goes to school. Their only daughter is married. The family will need work and it buys grain from the PDS shop. All over the country there is now evidence that the poor want the PDS to function. Last year the rains were also bad and disaster struck the family. They lost as many as four cows, because there was finally no fodder, after the hills became barren. He has two cows still, which he was tending when I met him. Since he is older, it is the sons and daughters-in-law who go looking for work. He is looking for the government to open drought works this year. The oldest boy is a casual worker in a guest house in Mumbai.

Meena is gaunt and undernourished. I ask him if he and the family spent days in hunger. He says no. When he had married Devli there were days of hunger, but not now. There is some work and the government shop. The fire burns in the chulha, two times a day. By the dollar-a-day standard he is poor, also from the calorie standard set by the Alagh Task Force in 1979, which is still the Poverty Line, but he proudly says he can feed his people. If he got a greenback, he probably would not know what to do with it, even in a globalising world, but he wants the subsidised grain. What about trees I ask him. Parmar, our neta was here, he says, and he said we should dig pits for trees and the saplings will come. But they have not come.

I think of Harnath Jagawat in Dahod and how his wife, Sharmishta, had organised the tree growing. Almost a hundred thousand acres are under green cover. In the ghats near Mangalore, Virendra Heggade implemented our agro climatic plan for the ghats and gave every encroacher with historical rights, a bushel of rice a day if they planted and looked after trees. When he got me to meet them, they were each worth lakhs of rupees. In the same ghats near Mangalore, where he had not reached, the local counterparts of Birji were denuding the forest and getting a hundred kilos of nachane, the local sorghum. In Ahmednagar, Father Bakar and Crispen Lobo, of WOTER, are also doing what Heggade is doing. It can obviously be done. In Kagdar, there is also the local small dam called the Kagdar dam.

With 60 million tonnes of grain in the bins, we should be able to feed Birji and his family and let him grow profitable trees. I am not quite sure whether Birji lives in Dungarpur district or Udaipur district . He is a brave man and his ancestors had protected Rana Pratap, not very far from his home. I wish the local collector well in pushing him to grow trees as part of the food for work programme. But I go away with the sinking feeling that my generation, the midnight8217;s children, passed him by. Maybe this millennium8217;s software generation will click him in so that their own future is safely green.