 |
| A village in Madhubani district |
(all conversations took
place in Hindi)
Case 1: (Kishanganj)
Me: Will you work after you are married?
Girl: In Rajput families, women are not allowed to work. Except as a
teacher.
Me: So what happens to all the education that you have had?
Girl: Doesn’t matter. My dad will still have to pay that much dowry.
Case 2: (Patna)
Me: How many children do you have?
Domestic Help: Six, four sons and two daughters
Me: How old are they? Are they studying?
DH: The oldest two are working. They are old enough to earn.
Me: Did they finish their education?
DH: No
Me: Who goes to school?
DH: Silence
Me: Are you planning to send them to school?
DH: No
(A six or seven years old daughter helps her with jhadu-pocha twice a day in five homes)
Case 3: (Kishanganj)
Young guy: That uncle of mine is very good. He makes a profit of minimum
Rs.20 lakhs whenever he gets a project.
Me: How?
YG: He gets tender from the government for maintenance of all health
centres and hospitals in Bihar. He has to give a bribe of Rs.10-20 lakhs to
government officials, then increases the tender amount. So, when he gets the
tender, he finishes his work within the original tender amount and rest is his
as ‘profit’.
It felt surreal. Things had changed visibly, physically yet nothing
had changed. The part which had not changed – mostly attitude, socio-cultural
norms, social structures and values – infact seemed so deeply ingrained that I
felt truly hopeless. I had returned to the state of my Alma Mater after a gap
of two decades, and I came back with a sense of great agitation which I have
not been able to shake off even now. Physically I could recognize nothing,
except my much loved school and the space where my childhood home once stood.
Building, apartments, malls, hotels, flyovers, millions of SUVs (mostly given as dowry or political favour), girls in jeans
(wearing jeans then often led to eve-teasing), roads which had no potholes,
smooth highways, electricity in far-flung areas – one would feel that Bihar
definitely was progressing.
Just beneath that surface however, lies a story which is perhaps as
old or even older than me. Caste hierarchies, institutionalized dowry system (an informal rate list existed then and new vocations have been added now such as drivers who get a minimum of Rs.6 lakhs), violence against women especially dowry related deaths, not much interest in
education, underhand or shady ways of working, financial manipulations (I was charged Rs.472 for a courier which actually costed Rs.272), patriarchy,
poverty – all seem to have taken much deep roots. One of the activists/NGO
founder and last of the revolutionaries I met there, said that the situation of
women has infact worsened. During my school days there was no sex-selective
abortion, now it’s prevalent in many areas.
One might argue that all these are present everywhere in India in
varying degree. But what bothers me is its on-the-face presence here. A
college student who is working now, readily accepts that she will not work
after marriage, a domestic help in the capital city is not interested in providing
education to her children even though there are many opportunities, a young guy
does not understand that a corrupt way of doing business is not the ‘right’ way
of working.
It hurts. Because when we were young, we understood that most of the
problems, social and economic, existed because the state was extremely poor and
people extremely orthodox. We had hope then that thing would improve in future,
with education and livelihood opportunities. Twenty years ago, there was a
genuine excuse for similar cases as above.
