How the uncharted hills of Chhattisgarh are navigating the pandemic

Tucked in one of the remotest corners of Chhattisgarh, Abujhmad—a vast swathe of forests—literally means inexplicable hills in local Gondi language. True to its name, this vast 4,000 sq km area—larger than Goa—is largely insulated from the tapestry of modernity even after 73 years of India’s independence.

And it is this isolation, policymakers in Chhattisgarh now believe, that proved to be a blessing during the pandemic for some of India’s oldest aboriginal tribes—Gond, Muria, Abuj Maria, and Halbaas—who inhabit this vast landscape masked by thick impenetrable forests covering mineral-rich Narayanpur, Bijapur and Dantewada districts.

“No native tribe has been infected by COVID-19 so far, thanks to their self-isolation,” claims Narayanpur deputy collector Fagesh Sinha.

But Sinha as well as others in the region are well aware that this isolation could be a mixed blessing as experts around the world have warned that arrival of an alien virus amid them could be devastating for the aborigines.

“Indigenous people’s traditional lifestyles are a source of their resilience, and can also pose a threat at this time in preventing the spread of the virus,” Anne Nuorgam, the Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, earlier pointed out.

“The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic poses a grave health threat to the indigenous people around the world. Indigenous communities already experience poor access to healthcare, significantly higher rates of communicable and non-communicable diseases, lack of access to essential services, sanitation, and other key preventive measures, such as clean water, soap, disinfectant, etc. Likewise, most nearby local medical facilities, if and when there are any, are often under-equipped and under-staffed,” she added.

The uncharted lands

Her warning could not have been truer for any other region than Abujhmad, which is yet to be mapped or surveyed by the government. So much so that there is no exact head count of people living in the sparse villages tucked away in forest clearings on the south of Orchha, a small town in Narayanpur district that serves as the only portal for these villagers to the outside world.

“We need to come to Orcha for medical facilities, education and any other needs that can’t be availed from the forests,” Jailal Ureti tells The Federal. The villager had come to the Orcha weekly market to sell two of his fowls and buy salt and edible oil with that money.

Even for such “simple errands”, Ureti says he had to walk for two days through a dusty-forest path, crossing rivulets and hills to reach the market. “Yes, at times we encounter wild animals. So, we move in groups.”

The villagers in Abujhmad largely live on food gathering, hunting and shifting cultivation.

“But neither was there hunger, starvation, beggary nor lingering disease. Whereas an average village consisted of three-four scattered huts, an average family had four-five members. Amid the primeval silence of dense wilds, the Abujhmadias continued to live in their tiny bamboo-and-thatch huts,” wrote Narendra, a sociologist, in his book Bastar Dispatches: A Passage Through the Wilds published by HarperCollins India.

This remoteness is posing a serious challenge for the administration to reach out to villagers to monitor their health condition and create awareness about the deadly virus.

Taking advantage of this isolation, the region has been almost a Maoist “liberated zone” since the 2000s.

The only outsiders who occasionally venture into these inaccessible villages are the CRPF jawans on area-domination patrol. Persistent operations by the security forces had brought the militancy under control in the area to a large extent, claims Prakash D, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) CRPF Bastar Battalion.

In fact, he adds, this Independence Day, for the first time since the inception of the state in 2000, the red guerrillas did not raise a single black flag.

It was again during this pandemic that the CRPF had reached out to about 60 villages spread across Abujhmad with the help of its Bastariya units, raised in 2018, mainly with personnel drawn from local tribes.

To create awareness about COVID-19, the CRPF is taking a leaf out of the Maoist book. “Like Maoists, we teach tribals (about Covid-19 protocols) through Natya Mandali shows,” commandant of the 195 battalion of the CRPF Rakesh Kumar Singh earlier told local media.

Time to come out of the ‘woods’

Even though the state government so far appears to have succeeded in keeping Covid-19 at bay from Abujhmad, the question remains what if the virus manages to impregnate this virgin territory.

“It’s high-time the area is brought to the mainstream of development,” insists Vikram Vais, who has relocated from his native village Akabeda to run a small grocery shop at Orcha. “There is no road connectivity, mobile phone, electricity or any other sign of modernity beyond Orcha.”

The administration, however, often blames the Maoists for Abujhmad’s lack of development. “The Maoists have gutted over 50 schools, prevented road construction works and still run their parallel administration in many of these tribal villages,” says a government official.

But the Maoist impediment is just one part of the story. Even during British rule, very little efforts were made to bring the tribals of this region into the mainstream, unlike in the Northeast to where Britishers had made several expeditions.

This didn’t change even after Independence. Locals claim very little was done to mainstream these primitive tribes in the pretext of protecting and preserving their unique customs, traditions and heritages.

However, the area was not totally out of bounds for outsiders until the 1980s.

A restriction was imposed on outsiders in the early 1980s after a foreign television channel in a documentary about the lives of Abujhmad tribes depicted the community in poor light. The locals were particularly angry with the “wrong portrayal” of the traditional Ghotul system of marriage among Muria and Gond tribes. (The Ghotul is a village dormitory for unmarried men and women of these tribes where they can get acquainted with their prospective future partners.)

This restriction was lifted in 2009, nine years after Chhattisgarh became a state. But the statehood, too, failed to bring about much change in the area.

Decades on, the people of Abujhmad are craving for development.

“Assimilating them with the outside world without disturbing their ethnicity and tradition is the need of today,” admits Congress MLA Chandan Kashyap. He claims the current Congress government is committed to fulfil the aspirations of these people.

However, on the ground Abujhmad appears to be eons away from development. The survey undertaken in 2017 to create a revenue map of the area is nowhere near completion, which means the villagers are yet to get title deeds for their land.

“Even to cast our votes we have to walk miles through forests, braving Maoist threats and landmines,” says Ureti.

“We do hope we will be heard.”