Miles away from the fancy investors’ summits and the capital city, the state’s most basic concern remains as unaddressed as ever.
Credit: Khabar Lahariya
“I first went to get my ration quota online in 2015, it was sometime in May. I was told I would get my card by July. Then in 2016, I was told it was cancelled. I was asked to apply for it afresh in May since systems were being transitioned, so I did. Nothing happened through the rest of the year – either servers were not working, or something else was wrong.”
In a nutshell, Neelam, from Banda town’s Bijli Kheda colony in Bundelkhand, describes how the last year panned out for her while navigating through the jungle of red tape that surrounds the making of a ration card. “Ab 2018 aa gaya hai, hum phir aa gaye hain. (And now it’s 2018, and I’m back here again),” she concludes.
Her need isn’t an ordinary one, though if you go by the numbers game, then it is perhaps the most ordinary of all. In India, if you are part of the below poverty line (BPL) population, then your ration needs are meant to be addressed urgently; the government provides it to you at subsidised rates, or free of cost. Your ration card – the singular access point to avail the ration, is meant to be processed and issued at once, hassle-free. However, the picture on the ground tells an entirely different story.
As Naniya of Piparhari village in Naraini block of Banda district shares, “I’ve spent days and days crying and pleading with the pradhan. He asks me, “Whose share of ration shall I take from to give you, tell me?’ What can he do when my name isn’t on the list?”
It has been an unchanging scenario, an ugly one through the decades. But in 2017, when UP finally voted for change and brought in the BJP, there had been hopes of transformation. In April 2017, when the fortnight-old chief minister Adityanath held his first cabinet meeting citing the myriad concerns that needed his immediate attention, it seemed as if the electoral mandate had been justified. Here was a sarkar that was displaying energy and agility, and a head of state who, at 45, was proving himself to be the young, dynamic neta of everyone’s dreams.
The issue of ration, most notably its lack of availability to those who are, on paper, entitled to it, was among the priority items on Adityanath’s agenda in this meet. Even prior to the meet, the chief minister had issued an official statement on the problem while chairing a review meeting of officials from the Gorakhpur and Basti divisions: “The poor people must be issued ration cards, while stringent action be initiated against the food grain and ration mafia…”
And soon enough, decisions were taken and moreover implemented. First off among these was the name-change game that the BJP seems particularly fond of – policies prefixed with ‘Samajvaad’ were changed into ‘Mukhyamantri yojnayein’. A campaign to declare invalid ration cards as “fake” gained momentum and the dated ones were held back from being distributed – seeing as they all had the ex-chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s smiling face on them.
And there was more. In 2017, a team of experts from UP was sent to Jharkhand to study the public distribution system (PDS) model followed there – an ironic move seeing how Jharkhand has been in the news for starvation deaths.The UP system underwent an overhaul of sorts shortly after – the application process went online, as did routine updates, and Aadhaar IDs were linked to the PDS.
Of course, the obvious deficiency apparent in a system that relies so heavily on biometrics – rural Bundelkhand has often last-mile connectivity issues, to say the least, with internet facilities being iffy and working minimally, in the best of situations – were not addressed. “Hamaara angootha nahi mil raha (They can’t seem to match my thumbprint)”, says Janki from Kevtara village, Banda, not a cryptic statement, especially when it’s juxtaposed against what Rajeev Tiwari, the district poorti adhikari, tells us, “The problems we’re facing are low-speed internet, machines that break down, Aadhaar linkages…”
The situation is crippling in many ways – even when the system works, there are random glitches that end up wreaking havoc on lives. Take the case of Pushpa for instance, another Bijli Kheda mohalla local, who has been trying to have the per-unit error rectified for almost a year now. She’s entitled to seven units, she says and has been surviving on just one, “That’s five kilos. Who all am I supposed to feed with that?”
In a state that 16.5% of the country’s population calls home, it is almost a joke that the statistics that currently seems to matter the most to the chief minister are the very questionable ‘ease of doing’ numbers. UP, he said, glowing with pride, to the interviewee in a recent TV interview for Economic Times ahead of the much-touted UP Investors Summit in Lucknow, has moved up on that list from 17 to seven – “a jump of ten spots”, he emphasised, well-versed in the power of rhetoric that relies on repetition.
But there are other data too, which does not find iteration often enough. Our profiled ration report reviews the situation across two districts of Bundelkhand, wherein official statistics for kachcha housing is as follows: Banda at 44.23% and Mahoba at 62.22%. Doing the math for the number of people living in these homes – all of whom are presumably being turned away from ration shops – is perhaps more the need of the hour, if we’re talking only numbers.
As Manish Dwivedi of Ramnagar colony in Mahoba town, Mahoba district complains, “It’s been a year now, chakkar laga raha hoon. I’ve come here five times, I’ve filled the same form five times. Ho jayega, ho jayega (it’ll happen), is what they keep saying. But it just never happens.”
All the expressways and defence corridors of the world – meant to uplift the poorly developed Bundelkhand region – cannot replace this most pressing issue. Because, first and foremost – you have to eat.
Khabar Lahariya is a rural, video-first digital news organisation with an all-women network of reporters in eight districts of Uttar Pradesh.