Exploring the heart of the Subcontinent - Part I

My trip to Chandrapur district in Eastern Maharashtra, in the centre of the subcontinent, started with an auto ride through a beautifully quiet, pre-dawn Ahmedabad. From Kalupur station a colleague and I caught the 6.30am Navajeevan (‘New life’) Express. The 20-coach train pulled in just as we came down the stairs from the footbridge to the crowded platform and we found our AC coach easily. I clambered up to one of the top bunks as soon as the train started off and as it picked up speed I dozed off, gently being shaken by the rolling motion of the carriage.

The Navajeevan Express goes to Chennai in Tamil Nadu: a grueling two day, non-stop journey. We were only having to endure eighteen hours and managed well enough. In that time I devoured two hundred pages of M.K. Gandhi’s autobiography and two rounds of dal, subzi, rice and rotis, eaten from plastic trays. I also drank umpteen small cups of very sweet chai. As usual on trains in India there were crying babies around and one or two of our neighbours became interested in who I was, where I was from and what I was doing in India. Where this train was unusual was the number of cockroaches it supported: I counted five in total and, worst of all, two on my bunk. We also spotted a mouse, although this was not the first time I’d seen one on an Indian Railways train. I managed five or six hours sleep in all and the other twelve hours flew by thanks to the Mahatma. The train pulled into Chandrapur twenty minutes late at half past midnight.

Chandrapur feels more like a town than a city, though it has a population of 250,000 people (making it approximately the same size as Leeds). It was at one point a walled city and a few imposing gateways, sections of wall and an Indo-Islamic styled fort remain intact, but the current urban sprawl is not confined to the medieval town limits that these remains mark. There is generally a provincial feel to Chandrapur: the roads are pitted and broken in places, the autos are old, spluttering diesels, and donkeys and goats wander the streets along with the ubiquitous cows. However, the hotel we stayed in was the nicest I’ve seen in India, apart from the Oriental Guest House, and for just Rs.300 my room had air conditioning and satellite TV.

As my colleague Nandita was fasting, our first day in the district started with chai for both of us and powhar just for me. The fried potato and rice-like pulse was a filling breakfast, which was lucky because that was all that was on offer. After this nourishment and some time spent planning the week ahead, we headed out to find some government officials to interview. We had come to Chandrapur to investigate the local education system and the conditions in government primary schools, with the intention of making the district the third location for our leadership training programme for Headmasters. A major industrialist has a paper factory in one of the large towns in the district and the plan was to secure programme funding by emphasizing his long-established connection with the area. We had a very successful first day. We met with five officials from the central government’s flagship education improvement programme (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan), a lecturer at the teacher training institute and an officer in the District Council (Zilla Parishad). Although most of these meetings were in Hindi, at the teacher training institute we spoke in English and after the other meetings Nandita was able to translate the gist of the conversation for me. We had a fiery lunch of Tadka dal and paneer subzi, which I topped off with a huge, and delicious, mutton biriyani in my hotel room for dinner.

On our second day we caught a rickety state transport bus to Ballarpur block where we planned to meet more officials and see a tribal area. Chandrapur district borders northern Andhra Pradesh, an area largely inhabited by tribal groups (and the odd Naxalite group, more about them later), which for the most part exist outside of the already greatly segmented mainstream of Indian society. The bus journey cost almost nothing and gave us a chance to see the countryside. This part of Maharashtra is supposedly forest, but in India this is a bureaucratic term that has little to do with tree cover. Although there were trees, they were primarily clumped into small woods or formed small, forlorn islands in undulating scrubland soaked by heavy rain.

We arrived in Ballarshah, the block’s principal town, within an hour and as soon as we entered were sent reeling by a noxious smell akin to a combination of the fumes given off by bleach and the smell of boiling cauliflower. This repugnant stench was coming from the imposing BILT paper factory, whose smoke stacks rose into the sky to belch forth clouds of steam and who knows what else. I cannot understand how people live near this place: the smell was unbearable. As we passed the high walls surrounding the yellow buildings of the factory, we saw truck after truck lined up and loaded with timber ready for the mill.

Meeting local government officials in the town didn’t prove difficult: within only forty minutes of being in Ballarshah we had met one official and the chief officer of the town council (Nagar Samiti) and been swept up by Elizabeth (“Everyone calls me busy Lizzie”, She said.), the chairman of the block level education committee. Elizabeth showed us her house and gave us glasses of cold coke, before taking us to see two primary schools where the children stared open-mouthed or giggled at my height and skin colour. Neither school was in a good condition: in one the classrooms were situated around a sandy and dank sunken courtyard where the stench of urine hung in the air; in the other the classrooms were dark and sparse, which is what most, if not all, classrooms in government primary schools are like. After these visits we were taken to the Panchayat Samiti (Panchayats are village councils and form the lowest rung of decentralized local government in India) and met with a Block Education Officer and some other officials (including some Cluster Resource Coordinators). All of these public servants were welcoming, even giving us tea or coffee, and were very happy to discuss the education system and their own roles in it in detail.

At abut 3.00 in the afternoon the Block Education Officer organized an official jeep to take us on a trip into a rural, tribal area of the block, near the border with the impressively named Gondpimpari, an even more rural and tribal block further to the South. As we left the sprawl of Ballarshah and entered the countryside, which seemed to start all of a sudden after the last concrete house we passed, there were suddenly more cattle in the road along with groups of black buffalo driven by thin men wearing turbans, dhotties and shirts.

To the left and right of the road green fields stretched into the distance, with clumps of trees dotted here and there. The fields were separated from each other by low banks of earth and sometimes separated from the road by shrubs or a fence made from sticks. In the fields were either soyabean crops or wet rice paddies. In many of the latter women were stooped; their heads and backs covered with bright plastic sheeting to keep off the intermittent rain; their hands full of rice plants waiting to be submerged in the water. Every so often we passed a farmer or labourer driving two oxen before a wooden plough they were guiding though the sodden mud of a paddy. If the rain had let up, on a nearby bank would be the man’s black umbrella stuck point first into the mud. Across the plain these small upright shapes were stuck here and there, signaling from afar that in this field and that a man was at work. In the paddies, amongst the rice plants, the occasional bright white Stalk strutted, looking for food. In the villages we passed these long-legged birds could sometimes be seen perched on the wattle walls of farmyards. In these small settlements we also saw handmade carts constructed from timber that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an eighteenth century English rural setting.

Having seen three schools and missed lunch we headed back to Ballarshah in the rain, where Nandita and I went to catch a bus after thanking our hosts for the tour. Nandita was still fasting but I needed food. While we waited for the bus to Chandrapur I bought a samosa from one of the snack shops that are found at every bus and train station. It cost a few rupees and was handed across to me wrapped in a half sheet of inky newspaper. Eaten on an empty stomach it was heavenly: the pastry shell greasily crunchy; the potato filling soft and spicy.