Both photographs by me. Sunday, 17 March 2006, Dantewada district, en route from Dantewada city to Bhairamgarh Block. On the trail for this story.
From a year-old story on Salwa Judum:
In truth, though, Bastar is a starved chicken’s neck pincered at the tri-junction of Orissa, Andhra and Maharashtra. Its many treasures have been reaped and carted away for profit by a line of coloniser-contractors. Its ecology has been scratched and smashed by cynical hunters of fortune — leopard skin, deer meat, iron ore, bauxite, they’ve scavenged it to the bare bone.
The natives of the land have been left to eke out their inhuman indices — literacy is as low as 21 percent; nearly 700 of the 1,220 villages have no schools (where there are schools, they are mostly shut); only 59 have primary health centres, if only in name — death due to disease and malnutrition is rampant. Eighty-four percent of the tribals remain marginal agricultural workers, often having to migrate in search of daily wages. Most of Bastar still lives an essentially pre-modern existence. The roads are excellent and there is surplus power but that only deepens ironies. Both have been used by the outsider to exploit and extract Bastar’s riches, both have limited uses for the tribal. The state mostly slept on its slogans and promises. It filled the legislative bodies with the minimum required by quotas and it painted more slogans. [Sankarshan Thakur, May 2006]
