Jenu Kuruba

In World’s Biggest Early Childcare Scheme, Workers Don’t Even Get Minimum Wage

Karnataka increased the monthly salaries of anganwadi workers to Rs 10,000 last year but the ministry of women and child development has approved only Rs 4,500 – both lower than the workers’ demand.

Mysuru, Tumakuru and Ballari, Karnataka: The mud-and-bamboo anganwadi is about three kilometres from her house, deep inside the Nagarhole National Park and Tiger Reserve in Mysuru district, Karnataka. But little keeps Sita B., a young Yerwa tribe woman, from walking the distance every day to the Manamelkudi village anganwadi, where she works as worker and helper.

On the way, she picks up fresh vegetables and eggs to serve 14 children of the Jenu Kuruba tribe, aged three to six years, registered with the anganwadi. There are nine more children aged six months to three years, and Sita gives them their monthly share of take-home rations under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme of the Government of India.

ICDS is the world’s largest programme for early childhood care and development, with over 158 million children (2011 Census) in the 0-6 years age group, and pregnant and lactating mothers in the country. It offers six services: supplementary nutrition, preschool non-formal education, nutrition and health education, immunisation, health check-up and referral services, through 1.36 million functional anganwadi centres spread across all the districts in the country (as of June 2018).

Sita attends to a child in her care. Photo: Nidhi Jamwal

According to the Union health ministry’s Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey 2016-2018, 32.5% of children younger than five years in Karnataka are stunted (lower height for age) and 12.4% are severely stunted. Over 32% are underweight (lower weight for age) and 19.3% are wasted (lower weight for height). A little over 34% of children aged one to four years also have anaemia.

The national scenario isn’t better. The same survey found that 35%, 33% and 17% of children under five in the country are stunted, underweight and wasted, respectively. About 11% of children aged six to 59 months months were in fact found to be acutely malnourished.

The Karnataka state department of women and child development has launched multiple schemes to fight malnutrition and is implementing them through anganwadi centres. For example, under the Ksheera Bhagya scheme, children aged six months to six years receive 150 ml of cream milk five days a week, supplied by the state government at a cost of Rs 124.14 crore per annum.

As part of the Srusti programme, children aged three to six years at anganwadi centres are provided eggs twice a week. Severely malnourished children aged six months to three years are provided eggs three days a week, whereas severely malnourished children aged three years to six years are offered eggs five days a week.

Apart from its 50% share under the ICDS, the Karnataka government gives Rs 11.50 per pregnant and lactating woman under Mathrupoorna, a scheme that grants nutritious meals, counselling and other healthcare facilities to pregnant and lactating women at anganwadi centres for six days a week.

Families with children who have severe acute malnutrition receive Rs 2,000 in medical benefits, plus Rs 1,000 a year for medicine kits at each anganwadi centre in the state.

The data suggests all these schemes together have had appreciable effect. For instance, 36.2% of children under five in Karnataka were stunted according to the 2015-2016 National Family Health Survey and 32.5% in the 2016-2018 survey. Similarly, wasting in children younger than five years has dropped from 26.1% in 2015-2016 to 19.3% in 2016-2018, and the fraction of underweight children has dropped from 35.2% to 32%.

These achievements also highlight the centrality of anganwadi centres – and the women who work there – to the state’s ambitions regarding the health and care of its most vulnerable people.

The ICDS population norms specify one centre for a population of 800 and a mini-anganwadi for a population of 150 to 300. According to the state department of women and child development, Karnataka has 65,911 anganwadi centres: 62,580 are main and 3,331 are mini-centres.

These centres are staffed by frontline health staff: one anganwadi worker and one anganwadi helper each, both typically women. Thus, Karnataka has 65,911 anganwadi workers and 62,580 anganwadi helpers. All the anganwadis together cater to the needs of 3.86 million children between the ages of six months to six years.

Two anganwadis of Balle village, a Jenu Kuruba village located inside the Nagarhole National Park, operate out of a tin shed. Photo: Nidhi Jamwal

The tribal village of Manamelkudi is home to 42 Jenu Kuruba tribe families and has a mini-anganwadi centre, where Sita works as worker and helper both.

“I have been working at the Manamelkudi anganwadi for the last five years and am used to walking three kilometres to the centre [every day]. Sometimes I feel scared of tiger or elephant attacks, which are common in [the] forest area,” Sita told The Wire. She receives a monthly honorarium of Rs 4,750.

Managing children, their daily meals, preschool lessons, health and hygiene, and counselling pregnant and lactating mothers isn’t easy because she has to do it all alone. (Per ICDS norms, there can be only one worker-cum-helper per mini-anganwadi.)

However, Sita has been able to make sure the children in her anganwadi eat their meals hot, cooked freshly by her, and drink clean water. She also regularly monitors their growth and records the information in their respective growth charts. Unfortunately, the Manamelkudi anganwadi does not have a toilet.

Not very far away lies Balle, another Jenu Kuruba tribal village lying inside the Nagarhole National Park. It has two anganwadi centres and both function from the same tin-shed structure, without a toilet.

“Our anganwadis [have been] operating since 2010, when they were located inside a government school building,” Pushpa, one of the anganwadi workers. “A few years ago, the school building collapsed but the forest department didn’t permit new construction, so we are functioning out of a tin-shed structure.”

Sharda, the other worker, said the forest department had recently okayed a new anganwadi building and that it was expected to come up soon.

There are about 14 anganwadi centres functioning inside the boundaries of the Nagarhole forest. This isn’t easy. There is a constant threat of animal attack, and the anganwadi workers and helpers come from houses located far away. It is difficult to find educated local tribal women to work at an anganwadi because a worker has to be college-educated and an anganwadi helper has to have studied till at least class IV.

It is women like Sita, Sharda, Pushpa and thousands more who form the backbone of the ICDS scheme.

As it happens, they are not happy.

“We have been demanding the legal minimum wage from the government but the Central government has been deaf to our demands,” S. Varalakshmi, president of the Karnataka State Anganwadi Workers’ Association, told The Wire. “It is not ready to compensate us adequately for the labour and the number of hours we put in.”

In April 2017, Karnataka raised the honoraria for anganwadi workers and helpers from Rs 4,000 and Rs 3,000 a month to Rs 8,000 and Rs 4,000 a month, respectively. The state government also reimburses their medical expenses to the tune of Rs 50,000 a year and provides pension. Additionally, the state department of women and child development has supplied twin-burner stoves, LPG cylinders and water filters to all anganwadi centres in the state.

Last October, the state government decided to further increase the monthly salaries of anganwadi workers and helpers to Rs 10,000 and Rs 5,000, respectively, and of mini-anganwadi to about Rs 6,500. “The state government has sanctioned higher honoraria but the same have not been implemented thus far due to some technical glitches,” Varalakshmi said. “It is expected to be fixed soon.”

However, the Union ministry of women and child development has approved a much lower salary amount. In September 2018, it issued a circular on “enhancement of honorarium” of anganwadi workers from Rs 3,000 per month to Rs 4,500 per month. The pay for anganwadi helpers was raised from Rs 1,500 per month to Rs 2,250 per month. For mini-anganwadi worker-cum-helper, the ministry approved just Rs 3,500 per month.

Varalakshmi alleged the Centre was trying to push the entire burden onto the states. “Earlier, the honorarium for anganwadi workers and helpers was shared between Centre and the states in the ratio of 90:10. Now, the Centre has revised it to 60:40,” she said. According to her, anganwadi workers should get at least Rs 18,000 per month and helpers Rs 9,000 per month. Kerala is the only state that provides minimum wages to all workers. The Goa government offers a monthly salary of about Rs 13,000, and both Haryana and Andhra Pradesh give Rs 11,000 per month.

Is this enough?

Anganwadi workers and helpers in various states, including Karnataka, have been demanding a raise. Last December, anganwadi workers across Karnataka launched a protest against the state government’s decision to start pre-primary classes in government schools. There were protests in Belagavi for delays in the release of incentives for anganwadi workers and helpers.

Anganwadi workers and helpers form the backbone of India’s ICDS scheme, and have been demanding minimim wages for their labour. Photo: Nidhi Jamwal

The Karnataka government has a ‘convergence’ programme as part of which it uses funds allocated for the fulfilment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to build anganwadi centres in the state.

For example, the anganwadi in Somlara village of Tumakuru district is 14 years old. For the first 12, it operated out of a rented space against a payment of Rs 700 per month. Two years ago, the government erected a new anganwadi building with Rs 6 lakh from MGNREGA funds.

“One of the villagers donated four gunthe of land to construct the anganwadi. Children love the new anganwadi and parents are also happy sending them here,” T.K. Bhagyamma, the anganwadi worker at Somlara, told The Wire.

At Giriyammanapalya village in Madhugiri, Reshma has been managing an anganwadi centre since 2007. “Until April 2018, I was running the anganwadi from a rented place. In May 2018, a new anganwadi building was constructed with MGNREGA fund,” she said.

Indeed, these new buildings are swanky and spacious, with separate kitchens and tiled toilets. Many of them have attached gardens as well, and vegetables grown there are used to prepare meals for the children.

Srikanth, deputy director of the department of women and child development for Tumakuru, said, “We follow a 60:40 ratio – 60% fund is the wage component and 40% is for building materials. The wage component is [obtained] from MGNREGA and the rest … is shared with the Union ministry of women and child development and the state department.”

Thus Tumakuru alone has built 450 anganwadi centres using MGNREGA funds – the highest in the state.

Data from the state department of women and child development suggests a large number of anganwadi centres still continue to function out of rented spaces, such as schools, community halls, etc., but the state expects to cover them under the convergence scheme in a phased manner.

Anganwadi buildings in Karnataka. Source: http://dwcd.kar.nic.in:8080/icds.jsp

But while the government has been modernising anganwadis and introducing new programmes, the workers say their demand for better pay remains unaddressed.

“The labour of women is never seen as labour, but viewed as a service,” Sylvia Karpagam, a public health doctor and researcher and a member of the ‘Right to Food’ campaign in Karnataka, told The Wire. “The language used in the context of their work is ‘honorarium’ and not ‘salary’. This discrimination has to go and they should be treated as employees and not workers or helpers.”

Sundaramma has for the last decade been working as an anganwadi helper at Yerahalli village in H.D. Kote block, Mysuru. A short distance away, at the second anganwadi centre in Yerahalli, Nagaveni has been working as a helper for 17 years. Ask them if they’re satisfied with their salaries and they go quiet.

Gayathri, an anganwadi supervisor in H.D. Kote block, said she oversees a hundred anganwadi centres; Chandibai, a supervisor in Madhugiri block of Tumakuru, said she oversees 68 centres. The norm however is only 25 centres per supervisor.

In February 2019, anganwadi workers marched to the Parliament in Delhi to protest against the Centre’s reluctance to increase their pay and pension. In October the same year, anganwadi workers and helpers in Jharkhand protested demanding higher salaries.

In a country with such high malnutrition, it’s important to acknowledge the crucial role these women play as frontline health workers. Without them and their labour, the world’s largest programme to ensure good quality early childhood care and development would flop.

Nidhi Jamwal is the environment editor of Gaon Connection, India’s largest rural media platform.

Forest Rights Act: Schoolchildren Understand Coexistence, Why Can’t SC?

On the eve of a Supreme Court hearing on a writ petition questioning the constitutional validity of the Forest Rights Act, over a million Adivasis face an uncertain future.

On February 13, with four hearings having taken place in the wilful absence of a government lawyer to defend the FRA, a three-judge bench ordered the eviction of over a million Adivasis and other traditional forest dwellers across 17 states. In a woeful distortion of justice, an Act that contains no eviction clause has perversely resulted in the potential expulsion of lakhs of this country’s citizens from their own land.

The court’s inability to understand the need for coexistence in and around forests sharply contrasts how deeply conscious tribal communities, including their children, are of the issue. At a recent workshop with children at the government school at Mangala Panchayat in Bandipur, our facilitator asked them to discuss in what ways the world had changed and in what ways it had stayed the same. Environmental issues were at the forefront of their answers. Most of these students were from the Jenu Kuruba and Soliga tribes. Some talked about the need to manage pollution, others discussed sustainable transport, still others talked about plastics. All of them discussed these problems in very immediate terms, relating these global issues to concerns about their place of origin, and accepting that they too needed to change to coexist well with nature.

Also read: The ‘Other’ in the Forest Rights Act Has Been Ignored for Years

On the other hand, most of us are able to appreciate the need for sustainability and coexistence only in highly abstract and theoretical terms, acknowledging the need for our species to coexist with nature. But when it comes to specific issues and problems related to wildlife and natural resource management, we’re either unable to compromise, and either vilify the wildlife itself, casting it as intrusive or dangerous, or we conversely attempt to create a fortress around conservation areas, into which no one, including historic forest dwellers, can enter. Coexistence as a principle drops by the wayside.

However, research and policy lessons from all over the world tell us that dynamic coexistence is the principle upon which conservation efforts must be built and that such coexistence cannot be obtained through policies and practices that exclude people, particularly indigenous communities, from environmental governance. In India, the FRA, passed in 2006, is the main instrument through which coexistence as a principle of environmental management is built into how we govern our natural resources.

Its preamble outlines two key issues. First, it promotes a symbiotic relationship between Adivasis and forests, saying:

The forest rights on ancestral lands and their habitats were not adequately recognized in the consolidation of state forests during the colonial period as well as in Independent India, resulting in historical injustice to forest dwelling scheduled tribes and other forest dwellers who are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest system.

Second, the act also stipulates a set of responsibilities for forest dwellers and tribes, including “the responsibility and authority for sustainable use, conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecological balance, and thereby strengthening the conservation regime of the forests while ensuring livelihood and food security of the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers.”

However, the FRA has been unfairly represented by several wildlife conservationists as placing the interests of people over the environment, and being the very instrument that will decimate a conservation edifice built upon the principle that forests should be inviolate preserves. The FRA, in this view, amounts to nothing more than a land grab and indigenous people are no more than encroachers on forest land.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For one, the FRA is the exact opposite of a land grab. No new land titles can be granted under the Act. To even apply for access under individual forest rights involves establishing presence in the area that dates to before 2005. Second, emerging research shows that tourist presence rather than Adivasi access has been having a negative impact on forests and their animals.

A study conducted by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, for instance, found high markers of stress in faecal matter correlated with vehicular disturbance in the tiger reserves, suggesting that unsustainable wildlife tourism causes distinct physiological stress in tigers in protected reserves. It would make more sense to focus on tourism management as a key element of forest management – reducing tourist numbers, for example – instead of focusing on curtailing the ability of forest dwellers to access the forest.

Further, research from around the world now also acknowledges that indigenous people are not encroachers but that they are our most able stewards of forests. In fact, the first peoples’ loss of zoological and botanical knowledge has been a major handicap in devising effective solutions to forest management.

Our own fieldwork has shown us multiple examples of this. When we asked Adivasi communities how they cared for the forest, they provided us with detailed accounts of the principles they learned from their elders about historical and cultural practices that keep in mind the sustainability of the produce. For example, they were taught effective methods to collect lichen, ways to remove parasites from trees used for non-timber forest produce collection, and principles for harvesting tubers sustainably.

Also read: An Archaic Conservationists’ Bias Haunts the Forest Rights Act

One Adivasi man told us:

I used to go into the forest often with my grandfather. We collected lichen from the trees. My grandfather taught me to only collect lichen that was within our reach, he would instruct us to leave the rest. He also taught us to make very small cuts on the truck of the tree to be able to climb. The cuts would literally just give us a toehold. He would also teach us how to harvest the tubers from the forest and replant the eyes and a bit of the shoot, for it to grow back. If we saw five honey combs on the tree we were only allowed to collect three or four and leave the others undisturbed. I also learned about the different calls of animals, alarm calls or other vocalisations. We never entered the forest without remembering the gods of the forest.

When it was passed in 2006, the FRA was heralded as an example of enlightened forest management policy. It ought to be a matter of national shame that the effective implementation, indeed the very future of the FRA, is under such threat today. It is also of the utmost irony that the consequence of the SC order is going to be felt entirely by people who barely eke out subsistence-level livelihoods, and will have the altogether inauspicious result of completely separating forest lands from communities best equipped to take care of it.

Meanwhile, of course, tourist access to forest areas will continue unchecked. We need to remind ourselves – if schoolchildren in a remote rural school can understand and appreciate coexistence as a core environmental management principle, so should we. And so we need to do everything we can to protect the FRA.

Nithila Baskaran lives and works in the villages around Bandipur National Park. She started the Vanam Foundation, which focuses on education and works with Adivasi communities. Shiv Ganesh is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies and writes about communication and collective action in various parts of the world including India, New Zealand, Sweden and the US. Kashika Sharma has a MSc in ecology and environmental science and has studied human-animal conflicts in the villages around Bandipur.

When We Speak of Human-Wildlife Conflicts, Who Are the Humans?

It would do all of us concerned about the future of forests much good to pay more attention to communities who do not subscribe to a worldview that isolates people from their surroundings in the first place.

A few weeks ago, after the forest fires that ravaged at least 10,000 acres of forest in and around Bandipur in February, we were talking with an Adivasi woman named Bommamma. She lives in a resettlement colony there, and spoke with us at length about how she viewed the place of her community in the forest. “When I’m walking in a forest and I see an elephant, I don’t feel any fear. In fact, even when it comes straight towards me, I don’t feel any fear.”

Her son Manba interrupted: “When we look straight at the elephant, we can see what mood it is in.” Bommamma continued: “I don’t feel any fear from it even when it is close, because when I look at it, we both know that it needs to go its way and I need to go my way.”

“Are there any animals you fear?” one of us asked. Bommi, Manba’s mother-in-law laughed. “The only animals we fear are human beings.”

The many conversations we have had with Adivasi groups in the area, especially with highly vulnerable communities like the Jenu Kuruba and Betta Kuruba, have underscored the deep, unique, holistic and organic connection they have with the forest and their suspicion of society outside. It is clear that Jenu Kuruba see themselves primarily as part of a greater unity of existence: the forest as an all-encompassing space and force from which they, like other forest species, are descended.

Several people have described their relationship with the forest to us as symbiotic, based on mutual need, saying such things as “we save the forest, and the forest saves us.” And their descriptions of their relationship with animals emphasised coexistence. For example, Mada, a Jenu Kuruba man, said, “We live with animals; we exist with them; that is part of our life.”

Also read: The ‘Newton’ Character That Missed Our Reviews – the Forest

This is perhaps why they view animals as having, at the least, an equivalent place to humans in the larger scheme of things: “They have their needs just as we have ours.” Some of their deities are named after animals. For example, Handiattayya is depicted as a wild boar, and Karadiattayya as a bear.

The central place of the forest in the Adivasi’s general life explains why several people we interacted with were both aggrieved and disbelieving that a few Adivasis had been arrested for allegedly starting the Bandipur fire. “People are blaming us for the fires, but we know we would be the very last ones to set fire to our forest,” one man, Gurumalla, told us. “Our life is good only when the forest is safe. We don’t have a life outside the forest; everything to eat, drink and be healthy is in the forest.”

This regard and reverence is also why it’s no surprise that none of the 40+ people we spoke to in five villages see their relationship with animals in terms of conflict. Even those who had lost up to 75% of their crops to elephants and wild boar were accepting of the loss; more to the point, they did not see it as a loss. According to Shivamma, “We don’t have a problem with animals; in fact, we expect them to be there.”

Manba and family. Credit: Nithila Baskaran

Another woman named Belamma said, “We don’t face any problems from wild animals. After all, they live for their stomach – and we also live for our stomach.”

None of these people had applied for government compensation for crop damage by animals. For one, they see engaging with a clientelist bureaucracy as a futile endeavour, compounded by their own lack of power, literacy and negotiating skills. Some were also reluctant to spend time applying for compensation because of the concomitant loss of daily wages.

Moreover, most of them weren’t even likely to frame crop damage as a big loss, but perhaps more subtly, their unwillingness to express their relationships with animals as a problem also indicates that agriculture as an occupation was not integral for them. Thus, they were less likely to understand or frame animal incursions into agricultural land as a form of conflict, economic loss or risk to life, at least as the bureaucracy defines it.

This in turn implies that the term ‘human-animal conflict’ is more suited with a view of environmental management that separates humans from their surroundings in the first place. In India, it is commonly associated with a wildlife-first approach propounded by groups that are often urban and elitist, and disconnected from the communities that have lived in and around forests in India for millennia.

We would also argue that wildlife-first ‘fortress conservation’ policies are more susceptible to be hijacked by private interests to create tourist enclaves instead of preserving them as the public commons that all of us need to care for. More insidiously, such Conservation policies can also provide implicit justification for overdevelopment and exploitation anywhere that is not designated a forest and contributing to degradation.

Also read: Do Protected Areas Deny Forest Rights?

The idea of pristine, people-free forests is not just an elitist fantasy that is untenable in an era where the pressure on land and resources is enormous. It is also an ineffective way to manage the environment because it excludes the very people who know most about how vulnerable forests can be nourished and protected. A growing body of research around the world has demonstrated that policies that try to create inviolate forests and zones are simply not likely to have much success.

India’s forests have never been devoid of people and people-first policies, especially those that involve Adivasis as guardians, are more likely to result in good environmental management than separatist policies. There are already many examples of such successes, such as in the BR Hills in Karnataka and in the Doyang reservoir in Nagaland.

In sum, we must be wary of encounters with animals being pitched as conflicts because that could just be the first step to further removing indigenous people from their forested lands. It would do all of us concerned about the future of forests much good to pay more attention to communities who do not subscribe to a worldview that isolates people from their surroundings in the first place.

Nithila Baskaran lives and works in the villages around Bandipur National Park. She started the Vanam Foundation, an organisation that focuses on education and works with Adivasi communities. Shiv Ganesh is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies and writes about communication and collective action in various parts of the world including India, New Zealand, Sweden and the US. Kashika Sharma has a MSc in ecology and environmental science, and has studied human-animal conflict in the villages around Bandipur.