The Report - North 24 Parganas

4. SANTOSH SARDARNREGA is yet to reach out to ST and other minority communities withspecial benefitsSantosh Sardar is a 61 years old farmer and lives with two sons, a daughter in law,a grand-daughter and his wife. His younger son started working as a factorylabourer in Tamil Nadu since the past four years at the young age of thirteen orfourteen. “I was finding it extremely difficult to run the family alone and I had tosend the younger son there with a person we know from the village. The olderson works at odd jobs,” says Santosh Sardar. His younger son had studied up toclass five only before he went to work in Tamil Nadu. Santosh had a daughterwho was married and she died while giving birth to her second child. Thattragedy took place five years ago. The daughter had studied till class six and theolder son up to class six. “I was unable to educate them further due to an acuteshortage of funds,” regrets Santosh. He used to work at making ‘biri’ as what wasgot from the one and a half bigha of land was never enough for the family. Now,due to old age he is unable to make biris any more and does some farminginstead. He has rice, pulses and sometimes jute. Santosh says that he is not toobadly off.However he does recall the time when he went into business with a partner andearned about sixty thousand rupees and kept the cash in the house as keepingmoney in the bank was not the trend in those times. Later it was discovered thatthe notes had all been destroyed by worms and as the numbers of the currencynotes had not been noted down, the entire sixty thousand rupees was lost.Santosh’s father was unable to cope with the shock and passed away after ashort illness and the two brothers were left with nothing more than the threebighas of land which they divided equally amongst themselves. Santosh recallsthe hard times and the plans the family had made to buy more land with thesixty thousand rupees and the disappointment and shock at the way the moneyand their father were lost.Santosh’s younger brother separated from the family as he married after thatand as the land they had left behind in Tongtola had been occupied by otherpeople by then, they were unable to go back there. Santosh says that hestruggled a lot to bring up his children. He also says that as his brother waseighteen years younger to him he had brought him up like his own son and hadto bear the pain of separation. Then Santosh suffered the loss of his onlydaughter at child birth which was another shock to him. His wife too was neardeath once and then his in laws helped him a little and as by then both his sonswere working a little, he managed to pull through somehow.