What do people do during the 200-240 days when there is no agriculture in their regions? What do those do who haven't the option of agriculture anyway? Is there a way out for those ignored by development schemes - or, in fact, devastated by them? What are the survival strategies of the poor? What are their coping mechanisms? There are many. Some of them quite ingenious, all of them back-breaking. Yes the resilience of millions of rural Indians is truly astonishing. So is their will to survive - and support their families honourably. Even when they lose out, they try and run their lives with dignity. And lose out, they often do. A look at what they do - and how poorly they are rewarded for it - can be compelling. The brutalizing grind that they go through works towards reducing them to beasts of burden. Yet, their hard work, their dignity in the face of such circumstances, and their quest for self-reliance, begs one question. Is there anything these people cannot achieve if given the right opportunities? If equipped with what quite a few other societies have given their own citizens? That is, among other things - a genuine land reform, education, health, shelter, work opportunities? At the end of many months of recording their strategies, only one answer stood out: with those basics in place, they can and will change their world. And ours.
P Sainath, 'Everybody Loves a Good Drought'
