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Fruits of schemes elude Kondhs

Correspondent

It is due to language problem: researcher

KORAPUT: Nakachuan is a small village on the 22-km long ghat road between Laxmipur and Narayanpatna block headquarters of Koraput district. Only one person in the village has a patta land that he could tell on his own, Sambaru Maniaka, says a poor villager. With the non-existence of any agricultural land, members of all the remaining 13 households in the village depend on minor forest products and shifting cultivation on the top of mountains, according to him.

There is a tubewell in the village. But it just adds to the number of tubewells being dug by the district administration rather than doing any good for the villagers. Water from it is not consumable from the day it was dug some years ago. As a result, the villagers depend on the stream water and suffer from many water-borne diseases.

It is not the story of Nakachuan alone but true with more than 15 villages in the largest ghat region of the district, says Rajendra Miniaka, a villager from Malamba in the same region.

There are no schools or anganwadi centres for these villages and the nearest destination for getting health and educational care is Laxmipur, he says. Poles with electric wires pass through their villages. But having electricity in their village is a dream for them. These people, belonging to the Kondh community, are deprived of many schemes and programmes of the government, Girija Choudhury, a tribal researcher serving as a lecturer in English at Laxmipur college says.

He has attributed this problem to the difficulty in understanding Kuvi language that the Kondhs of the region speak. Kuvi , even though it is spoken by Kondhs is different from that of Kuvi , the language that the Kondhs in Phulbani speak. Kuvi has the Dravidian base and is influenced by Telugu, he says.

Owing to this difficulty to communicate effectively and without having adequate tools to understand the language, the district administration, including other non-governmental agencies engaged in the development sector, have preferred to carry out most of their developmental programmes in the areas with people speaking in Desia or Paraja language.

Even the primers used by the Department of Primary Education for tribal children of the district to get connected to the mainstream language is in Desia, a language completely different from Kuvi. This is not understood by the Kondh children distracting them from the educational institutions.

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