fieldnotes: Jaising Baiga of Tilaidabra

I met Jaising Baiga of Tilaidabra village in Chhattisgarh on a hot, humid afternoon earlier this week. I had gone to his house to see his daughter Jyothi, who the health worker in the village described as "kamzor", or weak.

Jaisingh Baiga with his wife and daughter in their hut

Jaising Baiga and his family in their hut

Jaising works in Pratapgarh in a brick factory and had just returned after seven months of work there. He was asleep under a thick blanket when we reached his hut, but his wife insisted on waking him up. I asked him about his job. He works in a brick factory there for 12 hours each day, he said, cleaning out the ash from the kilns after the bricks are baked. The bricks themselves are made by labourers from Bihar. For his labours he earns Rs.9000 per month, and he supplements this with headloading for trucks, which earns him an additional Rs. 3000. He spends Rs. 2200 on food for himself, he said. So does he send the rest home, I asked him. He said he was paying off the advance given by the contractor to the family when taking him to Pratapgarh, as well as the interest. So he has now returned only with a small amount of money. No, he did not have to return during the lockdown in 2020 as it is a very large brick factory and work continued even during the lockdown.

Two other Baiga men from his village also work there.

Their mud and tile hut is falling to pieces, some of the tiles on the roof missing in one corner. In another corner the broken tiles had let in the rain resulting in the corner being washed away and leaving two walls in danger of collapsing any moment. He will be here for four months now during the agricultural season before returning to Pratapgarh later in the year, he said.

Jaising is extremely thin, as is his wife Meena who works as an agricultural labourer in Tilaidabra and nearby villages. And their daughter Jyothi is severely underweight for her age.

The Anganwadi building in the village is dilapidated and a hazard to enter, and the anganwadi worker lives far away and comes to the village once a month to distribute the month's allocation of dry rations to the children enrolled at the centre.

I had gone to enquire about the young child, to visit the family, to ask about her diet and health, and to advise the mother if necessary, on what she needed to do to improve the child's nutritional status.

After meeting the family and talking to Jaising, I left without offering any solutions. I found I lacked the courage to do so.