The Report - North 24 Parganas

sold in the local market but due to age, neither is able to work like before. Nowjust enough vegetables are grown to feed the family.He has a ‘shelo’ dug in his land but does not have the money to buy themachine to be able to use it. Water for irrigation has to be pumped from theshelo by using a hired pump which has to be paid for by the hour. The family hada small pond which had filled up due to years of accumulation of mud.The pond that Charu Sardar had has been cleaned and is now a clean pondstanding over eight kathas of land. The pond was dug in the Bengali month of‘jaishtha’ and now the Sardars have got some fisher lings in it. Earlier fishing wasnot possible in the then existing pond as there was hardly any water in it. Nowthough not too much but the family has managed to get a small amount of fishin the pond. “When the breeding starts we shall be selling fish but now wecannot afford to buy more fisher lings at present,” Charu explains.The soil dug up from the pond is to be used to plant vegetables once themonsoon rice has been harvested. However it has proved to be a double edgedsword so far. The monsoon has not filled the pond completely and the riceharvest required seven hours of irrigation water from it. The shelo that the Sardarshave does not always have water in it. Now if the water from the pond is to beused for the irrigation then the fish would be left with no water and would die. Onthe other hand the rice fields must be watered. Therefore the only way out is tobuy water for the fields, as of now. Charu’s wife says that as all her five sons donot live in the district, they are mostly not there when the job card work is allottedand are able to do the work if one of them happens to be at home at that time.Charu is unable to work himself at this age and therefore must rely on his sons forthe job card work to be done. The problem is that if thethey wait for the job cardwork to come up then the interim period which could last anything from onemonth to one year, becomes next to impossible to pull through.When asked how he had come to know of the job card first, Cahru Sardar’s wifereplies that Purnima Sardar, the daughter in law of Cahru’s eldest brother is aGram Panchayat member. In spite of the fact that the Sardar family has ninevotes, yet they get no special attention from the political parties. Charu has triedhard to get some sort of old age pension or some other help for every quarterpossible but everyone has turned him down, one of the main reasons being thathe does not have a BPL ration card. Charu’s wife says, “Look, it is all politics.People who have cemented houses get BPL cards and those who are able towork get the card but what about us? Those who have large amount of landsalso get BPL cards but we, who hardly have any land or money or even theability to work, are deprived of the basic necessities of survival.” She howeverdoes agree that after a change in the ruling party, some work has been done by