Deepening Crisis in Sagarhawa

Mansabdar Khan moved to Sagarhawa as a "development refugee". Today, his village faces many crises, of population, fuelwood, irrigation, unemployment, et cetera.

If one asks whether the village of Sagarhawa has a school, a health post, irrigation canals, a community forest, or an Agriculture Development Bank, the answer is, "Yes." But if the question is whether the villagers are educated, healthy, have clean drinking water, irrigation for the fields, fuelwood or gobar gas for the stoves, and collateral for bank loans, the answer is, "No."

Sagarhawa is a village of 70 households in Rupandehi District of Lumbini Zone. One of the many villages of the Nepali tarai, it is coming face to face with the demographic, economic and environment problems common in the region.

Sagarhawa is Mansabdar Khan's village." Demography" or "environmental crises" are terms that are alien to Mansabdar's ears, but he clearly understands the process that is overtaking his village. He is a Muslim family man who moved to Sagarhawa 12 years ago as a "development refugee", when his old property came under the Lumbini Master Plan Area, a multi-million rupee project designed to develop the environs of the Mayadevi Temple, the Sakyamuni Buddha's birthplace.

CRISIS OF FUEL

The growing concern among Sagarhawa's residents is one of fuel. The law and armed guards prevent Mansabdar and his village companions from entering the nearby forest and collecting firewood. Each morning, his wife now has the added chore of making bundles of kanda, which are foot-long cowdung fuel cakes used as firewood substitutes. She mixes the cowdung from Mansabdar's pair of bail bullocks with rice husk and straw and pats it all into place around a stick of bihaya, a local shrub.

'This land is drying up; it is not as fertile as when I arrived," says Mansabdar. The decline in productivity is most probably related to the fact that the cowdung goes up in cooking smoke rather than into the fields as fertiliser.

Even the supply of cowdung is not unlimited. The heads of cattle are decreasing with the disappearance of grazing land. Bullocks need "habitat" just as do the rhino and the sambar deer. But Masabdar cannot imagine plains living without the trusty bails, the backbone of the tarai economy. With the supply of grass dwindling, and the cost of gram and animal feed high, Mansabdar is hoping for the day when he will have to sell his oxen, which fetch between NRs3,000 and NRs5,000.

Mansabdar says he will soon shift to kerosene, even though this will further deplete his meagre savings. He takes a visitor to the outskirts of Sagarhawa and points out the fourteen different parcels which make up his three bighas of land. In an adjacent plot, several men are digging what appears to be a hole in the dry ground. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that they are hacking at the roots of a tree that stood here as part of the jungle before the land was cleared decades ago. In their growing desperation, the villagers of Sagarhawa are even prepared to go underground.

MIGRANTS

One reason for the fuel crisis is that Sagarhawa and its surrounding villages are bursting at the seams with people. Migrants arrive constantly from the hill districts of Gulmi and Arghakhanchi, from the Lumbini development area and from across the border in India. There is less and less in Rupandehi to attract the migrants and yet they come. At the same time, others are leaving. In the southern parts of the district, such as Asuraine and Semra, where irrigation canals have long since dried up, people are selling land and seeking menial jobs in urban centers like Bhairahawa and Butwal. There, they pull rickshaws, hawk fruit and work at construction sites.

It is conceivable that Sagarhawa residents can organise and try to better their living standards, even if marginally. But this is easier said than done. In a region which is today riven by divisions of caste, class, property rights and religion, there is little opportunity for the possibilities of common purpose. Sagarhawa, while not strife-ridden, lives on the edge of cultural disharmony. It has within its 70 households Muslims, Hindus, migrants from the hills, indigenous Tharus, migrants from India, the landlords, and officials from development agencies and government.

Asked why his people cannot pull together as they do sometimes elsewhere in Nepal, Mansabdar shrugs his shoulders: a gesture embodying at once wisdom, puzzlement and despair. The people of Sagarhawa try to concentrate on surviving from one day to the next and leave initiative and progressive thoughts to others. Propose a bold, new idea and they will immediately come up with 20 reasons why it cannot be done.

Chitrakar is an engineer interested in rural technology.