Helping People Help Myself

Where is Orissa? It's one of the east coast states and on the middle belt facing Bay of Bengal. For its pupulation size, it ranks in the 11th among 28 states in India in spite of 36 million people.






Why in Orissa? They have good beaches (such as Puri), many historical places and beautiful Oriya dancers?
None of them, at least for this time.


In other aspects, Orissa is on the top 5 from the bottom of Human Development Indicators. So, I wanted to see the barriers and challenges of the people in villages. I went to one of the districts, Mayurbhanj, 5 hours drive from the state capital, Bhubaneshwar.


It's concentrated with some tribal groups and their livelihoods depend on primary economic activities - crop cultivation, animal husbandary, oil seeds etc. Their residents are made of mud and dried rice straw that looked very poor but actually a kind of airy and cool. Their fashion is very colorful and their smiles are really peaceful although I was sweating under the sun and fighting against the heat...





I, Orissa office staff and some NGO people went together. Even among India local staff, the language, Oriya (official state language) was a hardle. We waited translations by Orissa office staff or NGO staff. We found that some government projects are reaching this area; however, productive equipments, access to market, basic infrastructures (electronics, water and telephone) are very limited.




PRIs (Panchayat Raj Institutions) where elected villagers are working to, ideally raise villagers' voices to block and district level, are still not capable enough. We found a lack of incentives for those elected people, little payment, unclear roles and almost confusion - how to link with block officers to improve their villages, how claim their needs to line ministries which run some national/state welfare programs.


In these rural areas, even availability of NGOs are not sufficient. Who can build capacity of villages and promote their livelihoods? Not an easy answer but we will try.