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Supporting cantonment residents living in poverty in Maharastra
- Living conditions in Dehu Road cantonment
Across India there are 62 cantonments, living areas associated with a military base, and governed by the India Ministry of Defence. Cantonment areas developed as civilians who migrated to areas surrounding military bases in order to find work - such as domestic help, sweepers and manual scavengers (those who clear human excrement) - providing services to the resident military population.
Karuna is working with the Sadhana Institute for Sustainable Development by funding them with a £60,000 grant over 3-years. This will enable them to work with and on behalf of 600,000 impoverished cantonment residents living in 7 cantonments in Maharashtra (western India).
The Sadhana Institute for Sustainable Development’s work includes:
- appealing for access to rights and entitlements as citizens of India, including health, education, livelihoods and civic participation;
- increasing participation and influencing local decision-making which affects all aspects of their way of life.
This will be achieved primarily through community organisation, advocacy and mobilisation. With Sadhana Institute’s support and encouragement, cantonment residents are encouraged to organise community meetings, as well as writing ‘demand’ letters to the military cantonment boards requesting their statutory rights to health and education.
One simple and effective measure used by the Sadhana Institute to engage cantonment inhabitants is to create ‘rangoli’, a traditional and popular form of Indian art commonly used on door-steps. This uses brightly coloured sand to create patterns or messages. For example, this was used to great success in the cantonments during a campaign by Sadhana to encourage parents to sign-up their children for school. By using rangoli there was 100% increase in school sign-up across 5 cantonment slums.
The cantonments as living environments are as impoverished as slums. One survey estimates that 50-60% of cantonment residents suffer from malnutrition. But the government and army do not recognise slums as living areas which adds to the complex range of conditions affecting the people living in cantonments. In addition, as the population increases there is a shortage of land and children in particular suffer.
The administration of cantonments, including the provision of services, is the responsibility of the Indian Ministry of Defence. This means that both national and state services are not provided to the civilian populations that live within cantonment areas. The state says cantonments are not their responsibility and the military want the state to take responsibility for them. Therefore there is no-one responsible for cantonments.
For example, in respect of health care, cantonment hospitals lack a range of basic services. This has resulted in reduced immunizations and inadequate ante-natal and post-natal care for pregnant women, leading to high incidences of death among infants, children and pregnant women most of which go unrecorded.
The education sector also suffers from poor quality provision, including in many cases the total absence of secondary schools, leading to a high proportion of school drop-outs, child labour and juvenile delinquency. Government incentives for school enrolment and attendance are also absent; so are various livelihood schemes and programmes for women’s empowerment.
The children and grandchildren (of the first generation civilian workers) who were born in the cantonments are denied access to a range of national government services to which they are legally entitled. Yet, they are still required to pay tax on land and even homes which they are told they have no legal entitlements. The vast majority of these residents, 90%, come from scheduled castes or are considered Dalits (former ex-untouchables). The remainder are migrant workers and from Tribal communities.
For example, the Dehu Road cantonment (close to the city of Pune, Maharastra) developed in the 1950s from 4-5 villages whose villagers provided services to a nearby British military base. The ‘Dhobi’ caste that provided washing services and the ‘Dawalli’ caste that raised animals.
To this day, the ‘Sonjhari’ caste is given clothes for payment which they wash and sell in markets to raise an income. However, their main source of income is to make copper rings, during the production of which they melt acid. As a result of living in poverty, many suffer from low immunity but through their work they are particularly at risk of developing tuberculosis.