Covering India Invisible

UP in the air: meet the man who stays inside a roadside hoarding

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Following Rahul Gandhi’s remarks on migrants from UP working in Maharashtra, The Indian Express tracks the life of a migrant from the state who works as security guard in Pune and has made a hoarding his home to save money.

Newsclip from The Indian Express issue of November 20, 2011

IN 2008, when workers of Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) targeted North Indians in Pune, beating up auto-rickshaw drivers, hawkers and others, Ram Suhavan, a migrant from UP, escaped unhurt and unnoticed. It would have been hard to find him, living as he does in an advertisement hoarding.

Suhavan’s home in Pune, among the most expensive cities in the country, is a small space in between two sides of an advertising hoarding that stands at one of city’s busiest squares. One side of the hoarding displays an advertisement for residential apartments while the other hosts an ad for a car. The 3-ft wide hoarding that stands 60 ft above the ground, looks over a railway track where a train passes every ten minutes. For Suhavan who can’t afford a rented apartment, this is as good as it gets.

Suhavan, 43, is from Madedu village near Allahabad and works as a supervisor in a private security company in Pune. He has been living inside this hoarding for four years and now has company. His nephew Mohan too lives with him and seven other people from his village who have joined his security company as night watchmen, eat their meals and rest here during the day.

“When I came to Pune in 2007, I secured a job as security guard but had no place to live. I knew the hoarding contractor through one of my acquaintances. I told him I would guard the hoarding and would not charge him anything. He agreed and later he started paying me Rs 500 a month too,” says Suhavan. At work, he has been promoted as a supervisor and he has brought over a dozen other men from his village to join him in the security agency.

While Suhavan appears to have made peace with his home in the hoarding, the other boys living with him are far from happy. Sunder, who passed his class XII two years ago and landed in Pune two months ago with Suhavan says, “Look at our living conditions. Can we call this a home? When my parents call me and ask me about my home, I tell them I live in a nice house.”

The boys may not be happy but Suhavan says if they lived in a room in the slums instead, they would have to cough up rent and would not have been able to save anything.

Suhavan, who has studied only till class II and can barely read and write, hopes to get his 11-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son educated. Every month when he gets his salary – Rs 6,000 as supervisor and

Rs 1,000 for looking after the hoarding – he sends back about Rs 4,000 to his family.

Suhavan intends to stay here in the hoarding till he can. “l move out only if the contractor of the hoarding changes and the new one wants me to leave,” says Suhavan. He also has no plans to return to UP. “I came here because it was difficult to get a job back home. I left my village 15 years ago and worked in Punjab and Gujarat before coming to Pune. I keep bringing boys from my village to Pune simply because there are no jobs there,” says Suhavan. “It is difficult to live here but at least we have a job,” he says.

Covering India Invisible

Making waves

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A community radio service at Resode taluka of Maharashtra’s Washim disttrict is disseminating information on latest farming technologies.

ATIKH RASHID

Santosh Jadhav, 35, of Mothegaon village in Resode taluka would always spray pesticides thrice in his soyabean fields. But this time Jadhav changed the decades-old schedule, he has cut it down to just one spray following the advice of experts.

And he isn’t regretting taking the risk. With just one spray,the money spent on pesticides is saved and the growth of the crop has remained unaffected so far.

Likewise, Shyamrao Deshmukh of Tandalwadi village of the same taluka says he was inspired to grow tomatoes , a not-so-common crop in Vidarbha, after listening to the interview of a farmer. “I thought if he can do it in a similar soil and climate,then why can’t I? This season I grew tomatoes on two acres and and had a good yield.”

Both Jadhav and Deshmukh are avid listeners of a community radio service that was launched in June 2010 at Karda at Resode taluka of Washim in Maharashtra’s suicide-affected Vidarbha region.

The service, christened ‘Swaranant’,is disseminating information about latest farm technology and practices,and is run by the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK).

“While we are making advances in agricultural research,its dissemination is comparatively laggard. We thought a radio station can help tide over this time gap,” aid S K Deshmukh, convener, KVK, Karda.

The infrastructure for the radio station,including transmitters,s tudio, antennas, came from the Rs 22 lakh grant that the KVK got from the agricultural department under ATMA (Agricultural Technology Management Agency) scheme. The station has recently been approached by NABARD for holding awareness programme for its Financial Inclusion Scheme.

Recently,the station has also signed a deal with the Hyderabad- based Nagarjuna Fertiliser Pvt Ltd for broadcasting its advertisements.

‘Majha Vavar Majha Shivar’ (My Farm,My Village), Shetachya Bandhavar (On the Farmgate), Pashudhan and Krishi Sandesh are among the 33 different programmes the station broadcasts in a week.

Majha Vavar Majha Shivar deals with the recent technologies or practices recommended by experts to increase productivity and lower cost of production. It also involves interviews with agricultural experts and innovative farmers.

Pashudhan, which deals with livestock management, is also popular. “Many farmers say they went for livestock rearing after they got information about government schemes on the radio,” said Deshmukh.

“As phone-in programmes are usually popular,we have one named ‘Jhalkiyan‘ where audience can request to replay a piece of the programme which they liked during the last week,” says A R Parvez,the station in charge.

At present, the service could be tuned at 90.4 MHz in about 100 villages that lie within the a radius of 20 km abound Karda.

Covering India Invisible, Reportage

In Pune District, Zilla parishad schools are losing 10,000 students a year

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No amount of wooing students through free uniforms,food and textbooks seems to help Zilla Parishad-run schools as the number of students in ZP-run primary schools in the district has come down by 10,000 in one year.

ATIKH RASHID

NO amount of wooing students through free uniforms,food and textbooks seems to help Zilla Parishad (ZP)-run schools as the number of students in ZP-run primary schools in the district has come down by 10,000 in one year.

While parents and experts are blaming poor quality of education in ZP schools as compared to that in private schools,ZP education officer Dattatraya Shendkar says the decline in number of students is due to “fall in birth rate in recent years”.

According to official data available with ZP Education Department,in 2010-11,there were 3,613 ZP primary schools (from Classes I to VII) in the district that had 2,66,372 students on the roll.

This year (2011-12),while the number of schools have gone up by 112 to 3,725,the number of students has come down to 2,56,347. The most steep decline has been in Haveli,Bhor,Indapur,Junnar and Mulashi.

According Shendkar,the reason for the decline in the number of students is the changing population dynamics in the country. “The effforts that the government had been taking for population control has paid off. There is a fall in birth rate which is the the main reason for the decline in number of students in the ZP primary schools. I estimate that the number will keep going down (with the decrease in the birth rate),” said Shendkar who,at the same time admits that number of student getting admission in Class I is high (46.407 in 2011-12).

When asked if emergence of private primary schools,Marathi and English,in rural parts of the district could have played a role, Shendkar said they also could have played a minor role in the decline.

“There are hardly any private primary schools in the villages. There are few at the taluk headquarters but students from distant villages can’t go there and they depend on ZP schools,” said Shendkar. But according to educationist Ramesh Panase,it’s “ridiculous” to link the dwindling rate of students in ZP schools to birth rate.

The inclination of parents towards the private schools as opposed to government schools is a nationwide phenomenon and the major reason for this is parents’ perception that their child will not get good quality education in government schools as compared to private schools.

“Another reason is that parents are preferring English medium schools for their children as they want them to be fluent in the language and very few ZP schools offer English medium education,” said Panase.