WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
By Manipadma
Jena
Champa Sabar tends
to tomato plants on her homestead plot in
Kharibandh hamlet in Odisha's Ganjam district. (Credit: Manipadma
Jena\WFS)
Ganjam (Women’s
Feature Service) – It takes a walk of 20 minutes through fields of bleached
paddy stubs left from the last harvest to reach Kharibandh hamlet. Comprising
13 Sabar tribal households, it lies in the Khalikote block of Odisha’s Ganjam
district. As we approach the village, something unusual catches the eye: A row
of bramble-barricaded plots, green with fruiting vegetable plants, lying at a
right angle to a long row of mud and thatched huts that are built three feet
above the ground level, each having a common wall with its neighbour, typical
of tribal settlements in Odisha.
In July 2010, all the
families in Kharibandh received land titles to plots measuring 4,356 square
feet, or one-tenth of an acre, of homestead land under ‘Vasundhara’, an Odisha
government scheme for landless rural families that had been facilitated by the
Bhubaneswar-based non-profit, Rural Development Institute (RDI). The NGO works
to ensure land rights for the rural poor in Odisha and elsewhere in
This also meant that
the local women got access to the land, because under Odisha’s reformed land
laws, women are either sole or joint owners of the plots, depending on their
marital status.
"So the women
got to work," explains Sauri Sabar age 53. “Because the houses stood on
unclaimed private land, us women, who had formed self-help groups, once we got
our land titles, decided to use our entire plots to grow vegetables.”
This has now made a
significant difference to the quality of their families’ meals. Take Sauri’s
example. Even though her family is large – she has a married son, his wife and
their two small children living with her – there is still no need to buy any
vegetables from the market throughout the year.
While the garden now
produces tomato, brinjal, indigenous beans, papaya, green chillies, and tubers,
even in the gap periods between the vegetable harvests, there are always the
highly nutritious leafy greens to fall back on. In fact, not a square
centimetre on Sauri’s plot remains unutilised – even the coconut trees are
encircled by potato plants to help the family tide over the lean seasons.
Down the dirt lane
lives Rabibari Sabar, 51, with her son who works as a teacher in a neighbouring
village. There is no other member in this family, so after their daily
requirements are met, Rabibari is able to sell Rs 150 (US$1=Rs 49) worth of
produce in the market every month. The extra money comes in handy to buy fish
occasionally from a vendor who cycles into the village thrice a week. The
vendor now has assured sales in Kharibandh as the families are able to use the
money that once went into buying vegetables to get some fresh fish, which comes
to them straight from
Everywhere there are
signs that the nutrition levels in this hamlet have risen. Champa Sabar, 30,
owns a rooster and three hens, which ensures a daily tally of three eggs. She
does not sell any. Her two sons, one of them a toddler, all of 11 months, gets
to eat about half of the 90 eggs, or so, she gets from her hens every month. The
rest are hatched. Says Champa, “A three-month-old-bird sells for Rs 300 and I
use that money for my older son’s school expenses.”
Her neighbour Puniya
Sabar, 45, bought a milch cow and a calf just last year and since his own
children are grown up, he sells the cow’s milk to others in the community and
earns up to Rs 30 every day.
Such long-term
planning and investment may not appear unusual anymore, but just one generation
earlier no one in the Sabar community had even seen a school. Today, most of
the young children in the hamlet are getting an education in the same area
where they, just a couple of years back, had worked on farms alongside their
parents. According to the local revenue officer, Binaya Kumar Das – who
incidentally was closely involved in settling Kharibandh’s land titles – one of
the major reasons for children attending school is that migration from this
hamlet is now down to a trickle because people don’t have to go in search of a
livelihood.
The women here,
however, have not rested on their land titles. With technical guidance from
RDI, they are transitioning to producing organic vermi-compost, mainly using
organic household waste like vegetable peels. The two pedal pumps donated by
RDI are judiciously shared among them to transfer water through pipes from a
nearby pond to their fields.
“The villagers
believed that the soil here was saline and that nothing would grow on it, so
these plots, which now support lush vegetables, were used as paddy threshing
yards before the people got their land titles,” reveals Nakula Sarbar, one of
RDI’s local field assistants, who facilitated the land settlement for the
villagers. He points out that vegetable farming has made all the difference to
nutritional levels. While families would have once eaten just rice, with a
little dal now and then, today they have a more balanced and healthier diet.
Reiterates Sanjoy
Patnaik, State Director of RDI Odisha, “Our homestead development programme has
demonstrated that even small plots of land can enhance a family’s food
security, improve nutrition and health, increase access to government extension
services and programmes, augment existing income and result in better social
capital.”
In fact, such
positive links between inclusive land rights for women and better nutrition
within families here, prompts Patnaik to observe that the entire Indian
paradigm of nutrition should shift to production-based interventions to be more
effective.
The world over,
development practitioners, academics and policy-makers are realising that when
women have assets in their own name – especially secure rights to land – the
consequent increase in their status and power within the community and within
the household translates into better nutrition for the entire family. There is
also a growing realisation among land rights experts that the reason for
malnourishment among children in
The State of
Realising this, RDI
and the district administration have joined forces to set up – at the
tehsildar’s office building itself – a Women Land Rights Facilitation Centre.
Puspanjali Behera, facilitator and revenue clerk at the Centre explains how it
functions, “It is a single-window to identify homestead-less women, assist them
in applying for land, and ensure that their cases are given priority.”
In
Once a woman gets a
field of her own, the benefits flow to everybody within the family. That is the
message out of Kharibandh hamlet, with its neat farm holdings bursting with
local vegetables and promise.