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As the government moves from 'relief mode' to 'rehabilitation mode', in areas affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami, it must do so seamlessly so as not to further marginalise already marginalised communities. Otherwise, these communities could face serious food scarcity as they struggle against caste biases and attempt to get their livelihoods back on track
It’s now well over a month since the devastating tsunami struck coastal districts in Andhra Pradesh, Pondicherry, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and there is an urgent need to evaluate the nature of relief and rehabilitation. Is relief and rehabilitation moving smoothly, ensuring succour and restoring some degree of normalcy to all those who were so tragically affected?
Initial assessments, particularly by the media, seem to indicate that everything’s going well. In an article in the newspaper Tehelka, V K Shashikumar writes: “If Tamil Nadu sustains the momentum of its relief and rehabilitation programme, the state can lay claim to (being) the first success story in disaster management.”
There is evidence to support this upbeat assessment, particularly the swift manner in which the Tamil Nadu government moved to ensure interim compensation, distribute relief, reopen schools and put in place measures to reintroduce a sense of normalcy to the region. For this, the Tamil Nadu government deserves credit.
However, the greatest blind spot of all agencies, from the central government to the state government to the various non-governmental organisations (NGOs), both national and international, to academic scholars is an unwillingness to take on board a fundamental reality of Indian society -- caste discrimination and how it plays out in relief and rehabilitation, ensuring that dalits and adivasis are completely marginalised.
The marginalisation has been so serious that dalit and adivasi communities face a serious and impending food crisis.
Caste realities in coastal districts
Though there is little doubt that the community most severely affected by the tsunami is the fishing community, it would be irresponsible to assume that all those who form part of the fishing operations belong to one caste.
The fishing community broadly consists of three main caste categories -- the meenavar community (most backward caste), dalits (scheduled caste) and pazhankudi makkal (scheduled tribes) -- that exist in a hierarchical structure. Though these communities might live in the same village, there is complete segregation between them.
While the meenavar community is the one that takes the boats out to sea, the jobs listed below are carried out by dalits and members of the pazhankudi community:
- Manual labour that lifts the fish catch from the sea on to the boat
- Manual labour that lifts the catch on to the shore and sorts it
- Truck drivers who transport the fish to different regions for export/sale
- Those who sell fish on the shore in baskets or on bicycles
- Those who repair/paint boats, etc
- Those who do inland fishing
- Labourers who form part of fish-packing activities
- Prawn farm labourers
Equally important to the subsistence of a fishing village are agricultural operations that are carried out in the immediate hinterland of the fishing area. These include those who own and cultivate the land, sharecroppers, tenants, landless agricultural labourers, those who take land on lease, etc.
Apart from these categories of people there are those who constitute the commercial backbone of the village economy, including petty shop owners and other service providers like barbers, tailors, cobblers, etc. Then there are labourers in other industries, like the saltpans in Vedaranyam and those involved in construction, basket-making, etc.
The devastating tsunami of December 26 has had an impact on this entire diverse range of people, affecting livelihoods right across the board.
Although the losses suffered by these communities in terms of life and destruction of houses have been addressed to some extent in the various state government orders extending compensation, the crucial issue of livelihood rehabilitation of those who own nothing but their labour has been completely ignored.
Problems of relief distribution in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami
The immediate aftermath of the tsunami witnessed a flood of relief. There were truly inspirational acts of solidarity by ordinary people who reached out to people in enormous distress. However, alongside these gestures, the ritualistic practice of caste discrimination persisted to exclude dalits from relief. This reality has been exhaustively and sensitively documented by dalit and human rights groups.
In a report, which came out as early as January 1, 2005 , Annie Namala, on behalf of a fact-finding team,notes: “As we watched, trucks of food and clothing came to the village and were getting distributed among the fisher community. The dalits who ran after the lorries came back empty-handed. They complained that since morning three-four trucks had come to the village and the fisher community did not allow any of them to give relief to the dalits. The standard question was -- how many deaths are there among you? Some people had brought idli and pongal in the morning, but though it was already past 11 am, no one in the dalit colony, not even the children, had anything to eat.” The report poignantly notes: “Can one erect a hierarchy of deaths, where death in a fisher family is more costly to the family than a death in the dalit family, or can we grade the dead like we grade the living, along caste lines?”
A report from Cuddalore documents how this discrimination is as systematic as it is petty. “One social worker showed me a list of affected people, and the damage they sustained, from Samiarpettai -- another large village with several communities. This list was made on the letterhead of the fisher panchayat. The list does not mention the name of a single person from another community. When asked about it they said that when relief comes they would distribute to them what their due is.”
The Citizens Platform for Tsunami Affected, Tamil Nadu, states: “What is emerging as a pattern across many of the affected coastal regions is the fact that dalit communities are not being provided relief material. Even when the material (dry rations, clothes, utensils, etc) is supplied to the affected villages they are not shared with the dalit families within the village. In some cases, these families do not even have tokens issued by the panchayat to access relief material. In other cases, though a token might be given they are not allowed to stand in the queue to collect relief material, which is their right. Not only does this cause hardship, leading to starvation among the affected dalit families, it also creates the basis for avoidable caste-based hostilities to be generated.”
Most groups overseeing relief distribution in Nagapattinam district accept that the dalit and pazhankudi makkal communities have been on the fringes of receiving relief. This has also been highlighted in the media. Dalit groups working in the area have identified dalit villages and hamlets that have not yet been enumerated as tsunami-affected. A handful of these villages have subsequently been included in the existing processes to ensure that relief reaches them as soon as possible.
Thus, while the government has officially declared the immediate relief stage over, more and more villages that have been left out of the relief process continue to be identified by dalit groups like the HRFDL.
Present situation of affected dalit/adivasi communities
While the gigantic waves of the tsunami did not differentiate between castes, the relief and rehabilitation policies of the government and NGOs certainly do. In the aftermath of the month-long relief operations, caste-based access to food relief has become accentuated.
In one of the villages we visited, Vanagiri, where 70 dalit families live alongside 700 families of the meenavar community, the food situation is precarious. The only relief that reached the dalit families is the 60 kg of rice and Rs 4,000 given by the government. Even this is yet to be provided to around 20 families. Caste equations in Vanagiri have stopped NGO and donor help in the form of foodgrain and non-food relief from reaching the people. The meenavar community openly challenge the ‘affected status’ of the dalits, with questions like, “How many people were killed in your community? Only we were affected. Why should you be given relief?”
The uneven distribution of relief means that dalit communities are likely to face serious food scarcity much earlier than the meenavar community, although it does not imply that the latter is free from this possibility.
The restoration of livelihoods is critical in preventing any kind of food crisis. For the meenavars this means they have to get boats and nets as soon as possible to resume their fishing activities.
While there can be no denial that the brunt of the tsunami was borne by the fishing community, the plight of marginalised labourers who assist in fishing and fishing-related activities, and landless agricultural labourers, must not be overlooked. There has been no concerted effort on the part of the government to evolve a package specific to these marginalised sections of society. In Nagapattinam district, the stipulated monetary relief and 60 kg of rice have not reached many workers. In the village of Nadukalampete , near Karaikal ( Pondicherry ), the situation is alarming. Although houses and agricultural lands have been badly affected here, the local administration has put them down as ‘partially affected’, entitling the people to only 10 kg of rice, which is now exhausted. And the livelihood restoration process is nowhere near started.
For the huge population of agricultural labourers, who are predominantly dalit, the situation is equally frightening. While the government is still at the stage of enumerating salinated lands, the reality remains that the entire standing crop has been lost; salination implies that there may not be another crop soon. Although there’s talk of a rehabilitation package for people whose agricultural lands have been affected, once again the target group is landowners, not landless agricultural labourers, leaseholders, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, etc, who depend on agricultural labour for their survival.
For this set of affected people, already marginalised, there is no real possibility of livelihood restoration in the near future. While many of those who received government relief have almost exhausted it, others are already talking of ways to cope with hunger.
Developments over the past two weeks, where people affected by the tsunami in Nagapattinam (Tamil Nadu) and Karaikal ( Pondicherry ) districts took to the streets in desperation, highlight the serious problem of food scarcity that is emerging in the affected coastal villages. Different sets of people are in various stages of food insecurity. While some do not have food for their next meal, others will run out of foodgrain stocks in a few days or weeks. After that there is no guarantee of access, especially with livelihood restoration slated to take at least three to six months in the case of the fisherfolk and longer for agrarian communities.
Previous experiences of cyclones in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh have shown that, post-disaster, not enough attention was paid to the rehabilitation of those who did not own property, resulting in their exploitation. With only their labour to offer in a situation where there was little work to be done, most were forced to work at abysmally low rates.
Flaws in government policy
Flaws in the state governments’ approach to relief and rehabilitation have contributed substantially to the impending food scarcity. They include:
- Limited scope of the ‘affected person’ definition. While the initial approach was based on the number of lives lost and property damaged, it was later modified to include petty traders, farmers, landless agricultural labourers, etc, in the ‘livelihood affected persons’ category. The ‘affected person’ definition has still not been approached rationally and there is a lot of confusion surrounding those who were ‘primarily affected’, ‘secondarily affected’ and ‘not affected’. Even with the identified categories, recognition has not translated into effective mitigation of the losses suffered. It has also not meant that these communities have been targeted with adequate relief. In many villages, government officials have told people who have totally lost their livelihoods that they are not entitled to relief, as they “have not been affected”.
- Hierarchical prioritisation by the government, wherein members of the fishing community are at the top and the landless somewhere at the bottom, is a major flaw in terms of the constitutional mandate to substantive equality by the government. Thus the interests of the most marginalised people have been ignored despite them being as, if not more, vulnerable. In Karaikal, for example, the fisherfolk have received 60 kg of rice, while landless agricultural labourers have received only five kilos. This is inexplicable, as both categories lost their livelihoods to the tsunami, the fisherman having lost his boat/nets and thus the ability to fish, while the landless agricultural labourer his/her ability to work on land that has turned saline.
- Non-governmental agencies have also sidelined non-fishing communities in their relief efforts, except those whose mandate is to work with such groups. In Nagapattinam, relief distribution was coordinated by the NGO Coordination Centre, which focused entirely on fishing villages, more specifically on the meenavar community. No attempt was made to assess the losses and needs of people in villages where agricultural lands had turned saline.
- The local administration views the affected people as a ‘community’ without being sensitive to the fact that this grouping is not a homogenous one, and that there are serious caste-based divisions where the more powerful communities obviously dominate. This, combined with inadequate relief monitoring, means that whatever relief is being supplied is cornered by the dominant communities.
- The inexplicable stoppage of relief at a preliminary stage, jumping into the so-called rehabilitation process, can also be blamed for the food scarcity. Relief was stopped even before all categories of affected people were properly ‘identified’. We have jumped into rehabilitation without ensuring that relief efforts were properly implemented. One reason for this is an incorrect assessment of the impact of the tsunami. Unlike the Bhuj earthquake in Gujarat , the tsunami has totally obliterated the livelihoods of lakhs of people. Thus, unless livelihoods are restored these people will not be able to fend for themselves.
- Given the reality of destroyed livelihoods and lack of earning opportunities among the affected populations, the government’s food-for-work scheme suffers from over-bureaucratisation and lack of imaginative approach. The local administration in Nagapattinam says under this ‘special’ scheme, affected people have to identify suitable work, get it approved by the ward members or panchayat president and personally go to the Collectorate to submit the proposal. This, when accepted by the administration, will allow them seven kilos of rice and Rs 15 as daily wages -- less than the stipulated minimum wage.
Pointers towards a more inclusive approach
The immediate need is for policy decisions on issues that have come to the fore yet have not been paid adequate attention by the government.
Enumerating affected communities
- The enumeration of populations affected by the tsunami, and the various categories of occupations they engage in, is necessary to ensure food security. It serves two purposes: firstly, it enables us to understand the impact of the disaster and, secondly, it helps us frame a comprehensive relief and rehabilitation policy for the affected people.
Compensation-related
- The government must work out a compensation package for those not yet catered to. This will necessarily imply compensation for loss of livestock and could be worked out in such a way that families are able to purchase the livestock they lost. It is also imperative that the government immediately announces a compensation package for tillers whose agricultural land has turned saline. The compensation must be announced in the names of the tillers, ie to the owner where s/he is the tiller or to the sharecropper/ tenant where s/he is the tiller.
- The government must immediately announce and disburse an ex-gratia amount to landless agricultural labourers working on lands that have turned saline.
- Pensions for destitute women, single mothers, the elderly, the disabled, widows, etc, must be immediately announced and disbursed. The National Old Age Pension Scheme, National Family Benefit Scheme and National Maternity Benefit Scheme must be activated.
Relief
- Relief and rehabilitation must not be viewed as two mutually exclusive processes. Instead, the government must view them as parallel processes where the relief part ends only when rehabilitation is complete. Relief has to be continued till the rehabilitation is over and not stopped when the process of restoring livelihoods has only just begun. This holds true even for the fisher people where some semblance of rehabilitation has already set in. In the case of farmers and landless labourers, for whom no rehabilitation plan or process has been initiated, the stoppage of relief is inexplicable.
- The first step in this process is the distribution of relief cards to all the affected families. This must be done in consultation and with the active participation of panchayats, CBOs and NGOs. Care must be taken to see that caste biases do not mar the process. This would then result in the further marginalisation of already marginalised sections of society.
- There must be an immediate round of foodgrain relief to all categories of affected people, not merely to those who got relief in the first round. Distributed relief must consist not only of cereals, pulses and oil but also of vegetables and fruit. Foodgrain should be distributed through the PDS system, while vegetables and fruits can be supplied through village self-help groups (SHGs) at subsidised rates. The government could provide loans to SHGs to facilitate this, thereby opening up alternative livelihood options to a few of the affected people. The problem of nutritional security, as apart from mere food security, particularly for children, pregnant women and old people must be addressed.
- Balwadis/anganwadis must be immediately restarted to ensure nutrition not only to children but also to destitute women, pregnant women, the disabled, etc. The Mid-day Meal Scheme must be extended to provide nutritious meals to vulnerable sections of society, three times a day.
- The Annapurna Scheme should also be immediately activated and foodgrain distributed to destitute/senior citizens covered under the National Old Age Pension Scheme. This is a pressing need in view of the number of deaths in tsunami-affected areas, rendering old people more vulnerable.
The relief measures outlined above must be continued until such time as the affected families regain the capacity and the opportunity to resume their normal livelihood activities.
Interim livelihood rehabilitation
Although relief is only a temporary exercise, it is a necessary one until livelihood activities are resumed. The government must therefore take several steps to ensure that livelihood activities are resumed as soon as possible.
- The announcement of a special Food/Cash-for-Work (FCW) scheme. The government must declare the entire Nagapattinam and Karaikal districts as tsunami-affected, since the economic ramifications of the tsunami go far beyond the immediately affected coastal villages. The government must pass immediate orders for the activation of FCW schemes in the affected villages, and neighbouring villages as well. It must envisage, with the active participation of the people, schemes for dalit and adivasi families. For instance, the work could entail the establishment of cooperatives for brick kilns, dairies, etc. Low-rate loans for the initial capital could be provided to set up such ventures. People could be trained until they are capable of running the ventures independently. Ordinary FCW schemes must be run for a minimum period of 15 days a month.
- The Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana must be immediately activated. The focus should be on the rural poor who should be willing to do manual and unskilled work in and around the village. Once again, the emphasis should be on agricultural wage-earners, marginal farmers and non-agricultural wage-earners. Since the scheme stipulates that 5% of funds and foodgrain must be retained by the ministry and used in areas of acute distress arising out of natural calamities, the tsunami-affected areas must be allotted money and grain immediately.
Permanent rehabilitation
Till now, the government has adopted a property-owner-centric policy in addressing livelihood issues through rehabilitation packages. It recognises only those who owned boats and went out to sea, and those who owned and operated small shops in the affected villages. Surveys are being conducted by the revenue departments of various districts to assess the extent of inundation and degree of salination affecting the farming community that owned agricultural lands that were inundated by seawater. There have been indications from the government that a clear policy will be formulated once the situation is properly assessed.
Be that as it may, people belonging to fishing and farming communities who do not own boats, nets or land generally remain ignored in any livelihood rehabilitation package. The government must adopt a pro-poor policy in the tsunami-affected villages. This could include:
- A policy of providing agricultural land to landless dalits and adivasi agricultural labourers; a scheme (TADHCO) already exists whereby the government purchases one acre of land for dalit agricultural labourers. This scheme must be made compulsory in all the affected villages and a minimum acreage stipulated for purchase for such disbursal.
- The government must envisage and propose skill-training opportunities for dalits and adivasis. This has to be done in consultation with local communities.
- Creation of assets that can be used to generate livelihood options such as livestock, etc.
Implementing the orders of the Supreme Court
While all these problems need to be taken on board at the earliest, what has added momentum to their redressal has been the case ( WP [Civil] No 196 of 2001) filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in the Supreme Court, and the consequent series of orders wherein the court took serious note of food scarcity in tsunami-affected areas. In its order, dated 2.05.2003, the Supreme Court noted that, “the anxiety of the court is to see that the poor and destitute and weaker sections of society do not suffer from hunger and starvation. The prevention of the same is one of the prime responsibilities of the government -- whether central or state. Mere schemes without any implementation are of no use. What is important is that the food must reach the hungry.”
In a series of orders, the court ordered the respondents -- both the Union government and state governments -- to implement various schemes to alleviate the food scarcity situation. Perhaps of vital significance in the context of the tsunami is a court order dated 8.05.2002 in which the court directs the respondents to “focus the SGRY programme towards agricultural wage-earners, non-agricultural unskilled wage-earners, marginal farmers and, in particular, SC and ST persons whose wage income constitutes a reasonable proportion of their household income, and to give priority to them in employment and within this sector shall give priority to women”.
Similarly, the court has ordered the implementation of various other schemes such as the Annapurna Scheme, National Old Age Pension Scheme, National Family Benefit Scheme, National Maternity Benefit Scheme, Antyodaya Anna Yojana, Mid-day Meals Scheme and Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), among others.
It is vital that these schemes be implemented on a priority basis in the affected areas, and that there is adequate monitoring through the state commissioner to ensure that they work to allay fears about the possibility of starvation and distress migration from tsunami-affected areas of the country.
-- By Deepu, Niruj, Revathi, Clifton, Nithin and Arvind (members of the Citizens'
Initiative for Tsunami Victims -- Bangalore), and Revathi, a Chennai-based independent filmmaker. All have been based in Nagapattinam, Karaikal and other tsunami-affected areas in Tamil Nadu for over two months. They can be reached at
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InfoChange News & Features, March 2005
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