India’s first UID recipient returns to Rs50-a-day life

On Thursday, after a fortnight of photo-ops and hobnobbing with the most powerful people in the country, the first recipient of the unique ID card, Chhabadibai Sonavane, set out to look for work.

She was elated when she learnt she would be paid Rs50 for eight hours of paddy planting at a farm 5km from her home in Tembhali village in tribal-dominated Nandurbar district.

Only a day ago, prime minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi had presented her with the first of the 1.2 billion UID cards to be distributed across the country. But that was a day ago.

Chhabadibai, though the sarpanch of her village thanks to women’s reservation, cannot even ensure she gets paid the Rs100 that the men in her village earn for the same job.

“They (politicians) will not  come to provide us food through the year. If my husband and I don’t work in the monsoon, when labourers can find work, we will have to go hungry when the dry season begins,” she said pragmatically.

Hence, while the VIP guests have returned to their comfortable homes in Delhi and Mumbai, Chhabadibai, her husband Tanjveer, and four sons have gone back to chasing daily wages.

What about the panchayat, we ask with characteristic urban naivete, and pat comes the reply, “I go to the panchayat office twice a week. Beyond that, it is impossible.”

However, this sustenance struggle has not extinguished her hope that conditions in Tembhali will improve one day.

“I hope that after so much publicity, our people will get some benefit,” Chhabadibai told DNA.

“Instead of being forced to migrate to Madhya Pradesh or Gujarat for daily wages, we should be given work under government schemes in our own district so that we don’t have to lead nomadic lives.”

But the village hasn’t been entirely forgotten. After the siege by mediamen armed with satellite vans, generator sets and bite-hungry scribes is over, villagers are now being called upon by polite officials who seem to be taking great pains to explain government schemes.

Gram panchayat member Subhash Sonawane, the proud owner of Tembhali’s first landline installed in the wake of the visit, said, “Finally, we got a road, the school was painted, and children got new uniforms and books. But now that the programme is over, things have started going back to their normal pace,” he said.

The district administration is, of course, on the defensive. Nandurbar collector AT Kumbhar told DNA, “It is wrong to say government officials visited this village only because of the UID project. Our officers go to Tembhali regularly to implement the various schemes. We have implemented a scheme there under which they get food grains at nominal rates.”