Aradhana Garg, 23, trudges through dense forest, along muddy roads and steep hills, all the while fighting the fear of tigers and poisonous snakes to fetch drinking water for her family
Water and civilisation are miles away from the tribal settlements in Kandivili Aradhana Garg, 23, trudges through dense forest, along muddy roads and steep hills, all the while fighting the fear of tigers and poisonous snakes to fetch drinking water for her family. It is an everyday ordeal for this severely undernourished mother of three, who is a resident of one of the tribal settlements of Patayachapaani in Kandivili (East) that comes within the jurisdiction of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
The 50-minute travail she goes through thrice a day leaves her exhausted. “I feel awful when I scream at my children for asking for more water to drink,” she said.
When state government officials reached this otherwise silent tribal village on Monday and spoke about malnourishment, its settlers listened in astonishment. Recently, a 6-month-old girl Aarti Kaule from nearby tribal settlement Akrachaibhatti died because of hunger and ill-health. However, neither the state nor the civic authorities have labelled it as official as yet.
“Malnutrition is a vicious circle and several socio-economic factors lead to it,” said Dr Manjusa Molwane, deputy commissioner, Integrated Child Development Services. She admitted that the absence of a single anganwadi in the entire area was indeed surprising.
“But, Aarti’s case may not be that of classic malnutrition,” she said. She also promised that in the coming months out of the 8,755 anganwadis sanctioned for state, at least 10 will come up in the adjoining tribal villages.
Not only drinking water, the tribal settlements have no access roads. Paru Sutar, 27, who resides in another tribal village called Karmacha Funda, has to walk for at least two hours to reach civilisation. “There is a constant fear of being attacked by a tiger or bitten by snakes,” she said. So, whenever cases of tiger attacks go up, Sutar and her three daughters have to go without food.
What is worse is that there are no health centres or doctors for the entire tribal belt housing about 56 villages. The closest hospital is the civic-run Bhagwati Hospital that is about 10 kilometres away.
When asked, director general of health services, Maharashtra, Dr Prakash Doke said that it was more of a jurisdictional problem. “Since the tribal populations live on forest land, it involves lot of policy issues. We had some proposals from the corporation, but they are yet to be finalised,” he said.
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