The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : They prefer TVs, mobiles to nutritious food

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Friday, Mar 04, 2011
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

They prefer TVs, mobiles to nutritious food

G. Nagaraja

Rise in income makes many tribals spendthrift

—PHOTO: A.V.G. PRASAD

BLEAK SCENARIO: A child suffering from malnutrition in the Kondreddy tribal habitation of Upparelli in the West Godavari agency.

UPPARELLI (WEST GODAVARI AGENCY): The lanky Vetla Vijayabhaskara Reddy with swollen belly, a one-year-old child from the Kondreddy tribe in this habitation of the West Godavari agency, seems having all the features of boys of his age in Somalia.

The wealth flowing into the tribal households as an offshoot of the boom in cash crops and the government initiatives like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) in the West Godavari agency in the last 5-10 years seemingly brings no change in his fate.

Each of his five-member family earns Rs. 200 by cutting bamboo shoots in the reserve forests and finds work for 4-5 months at the rate of 15-20 days in a week. In addition, they also find employment under the MNREGS and in the farm fields.

All these earnings hardly helped him save himself from quacks when he recently fell sick. His aunt Chinnamma says: “What all we feed him are the gruel made of broken rice twice in a day and powdered milk.”

The wealth started flowing into the hinterlands, including the agency falling under Buttayagudem, Jeelugumilli and Polavaram mandals in the last 10 years or more due to boom in cash crops such as sugarcane, virginia tobacco, mirchi, cotton and maize heralded by subsidised power supply for agriculture made available during the regime of N.T. Rama Rao in the mid 1980s and the free power offered by the Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy government in 2004.

Weekly spending

Kachchala Challamma, the village sarpanch of Kannarapupadu, considers owning a colour TV set supported by DVD player, a motor cycle and mobile phone to be more essential than the spending on milk, curd and egg consumption. Challamma and her husband earn Rs. 400 a day when they find bamboo cutting work. But their weekly spending on groceries and vegetables in a village shandi will not cross Rs. 200 and they feed on curry cooked with bamboo shoots for around six months in a year. The tribal youths in their jeans and T-shirts are fast going trendy. K. Sudhakar, secretary of the district committee of the CPI-ML (New Democracy) has attributed such spending habits of tribals to their undue exposure to consumerism promoted by the TV channels while disputing the assertion made by RBI Governor D. Subbarao from Bhubaneswar a couple of days ago that the ‘rising rural prosperity' leading to a buoyancy in consumption of food items was the cause for increasing food inflation.

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