Most district and some Mandal headquarters in Telangana sport a four-lane arterial road with a divider full of plants, mimicking a typical main street in Hyderabad city. Whatever else may or may not be there, these roads would also have a prominent chowrasta, a crossroad, around which much of the story of Telangana’s ten-year search for identity and survival plays out.
It is around these cross-roads that Jago Telangana would park our decorated bus, set up our banner, and sing our songs about the lives of the poor in Telangana. The songs would invariably draw a crowd of some 100 people, whom our group would address and interact with. Most days we also visited venues early in the morning, where many would come for morning walks.
The Jago Telangana Bus Yatra was initiated by a group of concerned citizens to spread voter awareness across the state. Justice Chandra Kumar, who retired from the united Andhra Pradesh High Court as a judge, Akunuri Murali, retired IAS officer along with several academics, activists, students, initiated the bus yatra. It started on October 27, 2023 from Thirumalagiri in Thungaturti constituency and ended in Mulugu of Gajwel constituency on November 28. The yatra covered 67 constituencies in 29 districts, and conducted 198 street corner and basti meetings. The yatra ended with a press conference on November 28, 2023 in the afternoon.
The one-month long yatra provided several insights into the wide-spread rural distress in Telangana to me and the other yatra members who extensively interacted with men, women and children at these 198 meeting locations.
Number of women voters is high in 74 constituencies of Telangana out of the total 119, including Kamareddy and Gajwel from where the Chief Minister Chandrasekhar Rao is contesting. The VIP constituencies where KT Rama Rao, Harish Rao and Revanth Reddy are contesting too have more women than men. Out of 3,26,02,799 total voters in Telangana, 1,63,02,261 are women.
We came across several single women struggling to bring up their small children, as their husbands either died early or have abandoned them, having become alcohol addicts. On several occasions, drunk men would barge into our midst and try to disrupt our forenoon meetings. At late evening meetings, we would find nearly 70% of the men drunk, and some out of control.
The impact of excise policy and the scaling up of revenue of the state from Rs 10000 crore in 2014 to Rs 30000 crore in 2023 could be read from the distress of these struggling mothers on the streets. The Telangana government is proposing to hand out more licences for vendors in a market saturated with “belt shops” in every street. This single factor is irreparably destroying the social fabric of Telangana state and impoverishing it.
At a busy marketplace we found two endearing little girls near a grocery store, the older one was a student of Class 5 while the younger studied in Class 2. They were left on their own by an elder sister and mother who went away to work in the fields. The little ones were playing on the street as they were told to wait there. They had no idea when their mother would return. Two young lives were left to chance there.
A widowed woman said her 27-year-old married son died of a mysterious illness which could not be diagnosed or treated in the district hospital. Now she has the additional responsibility to care for the widowed daughter-in-law and the grandchildren. Another woman walked up to us and narrated how a private hospital fleeced them when they brought their daughter for childbirth.
As we moved from village to small town, crossroad to crossroad, we got glimpses into the precarious lives of more women. A woman repairing shoes sitting near a fruit stall told us that she lost her three-acre land to a government scheme with barely any compensation. At a crossroad in another town, an educated woman set up a fruit stall at the very spot where her two-story house stood till a few years back. It was demolished for the arterial road expansion. She feels connected to her vanished home and runs her fruit stall from the same spot. Her two educated daughters have written the Group 1, Group 2 exams a couple of times, while she herself attempted the Group 4 exam. The Telangana State Public Service Commission had to scrap the exams when it was discovered that the papers were leaked. The incompetence of the state ensured that dreams of people collapsed under the weight of rampant corruption in the system.
Out of the 67 constituencies we went through, the condition of most government schools and hospitals were deplorable. In anticipation of the election, new boards were installed and exteriors painted with no substantive improvement of facilities. The locals who use these facilities and institutions are aware of this.
At one of the village centres, a mother tearfully described how distressed her son, an engineering graduate, is for having to do manual labour for a pittance just to survive. He and the educated daughter are struggling to find a reasonable livelihood that allows them to get married. Some five years have passed in just trying for employment. What little they earn together is barely enough to pay for the rent and basic needs.
For decades in Telangana, one would see that a perennial river like Godavari flows next to it without touching the lives of its people or benefiting them. Metaphorically, over the last ten years, under the Telangana Rashtra Samithi/Bharat Rashtra Samithi (TRS/BRS) rule, innumerable schemes were announced to benefit sections of the population – Dalit Bandhu, Rythu Bandhu, Gurukul schools … In district centre after mandal centre, it was difficult for us to find beneficiaries of these schemes in good numbers. Women knew about the schemes, but they are not beneficiaries for one reason or the other, nor do they know of people who have benefited. It is much like the life-giving Godavari passing the villages without blessing their lives.
At one of the markets in Boath, an elderly woman who just got off a bus burst into the street-meeting we were holding and told us off thinking we were a political party seeking votes. She narrated how it was her fifth trip to the ration office, and that she was a widow living alone and had no means of survival without ration support. She was not being sanctioned the ration card. There are innumerable single old women who have also applied for pensions but are not yet on the list.
Scores of double-bedroom houses have been built over the years, but many have not been allocated to anyone. The doors and windows of the houses are coming apart and plants have begun to grow on the walls. The homeless in the area can see the houses lying neglected, benefitting no one.
Apart from tales of maladministration were stories of strongmen of local legislators riding roughshod over the villages and communities to amass personal wealth. The district centres and mandal centres surely sport an arterial road with some brand-name stores, but the stagnation, and in some cases deterioration in the living standards of the poor is starkly visible. The women in many cases have lost the fear of local strongmen and openly told us about their utter dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. The election season appears to have unlocked their fears with the sudden opening up of public discourse on things that matter to them.
The female micro-entrepreneurs struggling to make a living at the crossroads of the district centres and small towns tell a big story about the Indian economy and what the development model adopted by successive governments is doing to the lives of ordinary hard-working people.
Political analysts may call this anti-incumbency but when one hears the stories first hand, it feels like a cry for liberation from misgovernance, impunity and greed that have gripped the state of Telangana.
(Padmaja Shaw is member, Jago Telangana Team and a retired Professor of Journalism, Osmania University)
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