Hunter, Helper, Leader, Thief?

Unemployed Youth in the Indian Himalayas

A report on some preliminary fieldwork findings

Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey, 7th September 2012

Preamble

Between March and June 2012 we conducted three months of research in Bemni Uttarakhand, India. We completed a socio-economic survey of the village, a follow-up to a similar survey that Jane conducted during a 15-month research stint in 2003-04. We also carried out semi-structured interviews concerning young people’s educational and employment experiences, marriage, views on the state and politics, and political activity. We interviewed about thirty young people (aged 18-30), roughly five Scheduled Castes (SC) men and five SC women and twelve Rajput or “General Caste” (GC) men and eight GC women. We also carried out some participant observation around the village.

Bemni is located in a relatively remote part of Uttarakhand, bordering Tibet, at an altitude of about 2500 metres.1 The district in which Bemni is located – Chamoli district – is overwhelmingly rural and agricultural in character: 90 per cent of people lived in rural areas in 2011 according to the national census (ORG 2011). People typically practice a form of agro-pastoralism. They cultivate crops for subsistence – mainly wheat, millet and barley – while also managing large areas of the surrounding forest for pastoral use. Villagers have adopted a form of small-scale transhumance whereby they move annually between two or three settlements located at different altitudes. These seasonal shifts allow them to coordinate arable and pastoral land use and maximize the potential of agricultural land at different altitudes.i

The village of Bemni – which is actually comprised of three smaller settlements at different heights on the same mountainside – contained 645 people in March 2012, of which 69% were GCs and 31% SCs. To reach Bemni from Delhi it is necessary to first take a bus, train, plane or taxi to Dehra Dun or Rishikesh – two of the main gateways to the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand State. This in itself can take a day. From these cities you travel by road upstream along the River Ganges. An eight-hour journey takes you to the small town of Nandprayag and a rough road leads from there along the

1 For photographs of the village and a general background to our work see: http://himalayantales.tumblr.com/. This blog contains a lot of general material on our life in the village, too. For a general introduction to the village as it was in 2003 and 2004 see Dyson (2008).

1

Nandakini Valley to the even smaller town of Ghat. From Ghat, it is necessary to board a local jeep. In 2003, this jeep took you to a tiny hamlet on the banks of the Nandakini from which you must make a steep 9 kilometre (four hour) trek to the village. From late 2010 it was possible to get a jeep directly to Bemni, but only after negotiating a truly hair-raising road cut into a serious of landslides above a steep thousand-foot precipice.

Bemni looked physically very different in 2012 to how it did in 2003: less green, dustier, more “developed”. A few people had built new houses, several two-storied. Within the GC areas of the village, many people had plastered their stone houses. In 2003 most people regarded a private lavatory as unhygienic; there were just two houses with one at the time. Now there are 42 latrines in the village and another 10 households were building them while we were there. The government greatly increased its development assistance to rural areas between 2003 and 2012 and this was also reflected in Bemni’s built landscape. Two JCBs growled around the hillside while we were in the village, building a new “cricket stadium” and widening the road. A communications tower was constructed in the village in 2009.

Change was manifest, too, at the attitudinal level. Between 2003 and 2012, Bemni was more thoroughly absorbed into wider circuits of knowledge and information, especially as a result of rising phone ownership: 60% of households had at least one mobile in 2012. As it might be expected, people were keener on education in 2012 than in 2003 and the desire to enter service work and leave the village had increased among the young.

Allied to this “transformation” of sorts has been a decline in agriculture. The area being farmed in and around Bemni appears to have halved in the nine years between 2003 and 2012, partly because of sales to the government for the road and other projects and partly because of people’s general disillusionment with farming – villagers reported that extreme weather events have repeatedly destroyed their crops in recent years and the prices in the local town have been low. Younger generations, in particular, have little appetite for agriculture, and children were less involved in agricultural tasks in 2012 than they were in 2003. The population of livestock had also declined markedly with this general retreat from farming and people’s dependence on shop-bought food. At the same time, the road and building construction had taken a heavy toll on the surrounding jungle, a situation greatly exacerbated by the fact that the head of the village council responsible for managing the forest – a notoriously roguish figure – had allowed many households to plunder Bemni’s jungle.

We investigated these changes in village life through reference to the social predicament and struggles of young people in Bemni, especially educated unemployed youth. This report is built around the portraits of four of these young people.

2

Biju: poverty and educational failure

Biju was 29 in May 2012 and belonged to a SC caste. He studied up to 12th class (senior secondary school) in Bemni and a nearby village. He tried to obtain secure salaried work but failed in two different government competitions and then became discouraged. He said that he had withdrawn from formal education after 12th Class because of the expense and he could not see the point of doing a BA. He also said that the standard of his school education had been poor and that education is in an even worse state in Bemni at the moment. “The children don’t learn and the teachers don’t teach”. When we asked about the “benefits of education” (“parhai ka fayda”), Biju was dismissive: “What is the point of education if you cannot get salaried work? Education allows me to read an architect’s plan when I am working as a construction labourer in the village, but that’s about all the benefits.”

Biju worked for five years in Delhi after school. He did manual warehousing work for an Australian logistics company called Linfox. He said that he got the job through a contact in a nearby village. He rose to the position of a shift supervisor and earned Rs. 12,000 a month – a comparatively large salary at the time.

In about 2002 Biju’s father fell seriously ill. As the eldest son, Biju had to return to the village to care for him. He commented that, “An eldest brother’s responsibilities are huge, the same as those of a father.” Biju married at roughly the time he returned to the village and how has five daughters. In May 2012, he was employed as a carpenter in the village, earning on average Rs. 200 a day but only obtaining work for about 15 days in every month. He also did work for government employment scheme for about thirty days in a year. When we asked whether he had any hopes or intentions for the future he replied in an exasperated tone, “What hopes and intentions? What am I ever going to get now?”

Biju said that he had often experienced problems managing both his work and his family, especially when his father was acutely ill. He was increasingly worried about his capacity to educate his daughters. He said that he could not benefit from government development programmes because of widespread malpractice within the district bureaucracy. We asked whether he could complain to officials about corruption:

Biju: To whom would we complain, who will listen? The problem is that individuals cannot speak out. If you speak out alone, there will be trouble. It is a village thing. People do not want to make enemies here. So they just talk and talk about it among themselves and then keep quiet (gup chap gup chap chup rah jate hain).

3

Craig: Have you heard of Anna Hazare [the anti-corruption activist]?

Biju: Yes but he is a very big man. We are just small people, no on will listen.

Craig: Can politicians perhaps help?

Biju (grinning) Oh yes, they come and say that they will do all these things for the village and provide all this money. But they do nothing.

Biju’s case is more broadly indicative of the struggles of poor households in Bemni. Parents want their children to acquire education and are willing to prioritize spending on schooling. But they cannot afford to keep children in school for long periods of time. Agricultural land is shrinking. Land sales allied to the subdivision of landholdings associated with the prevailing system of partible inheritance means that the average landholding per household had declined from 25.8 nalis (the local unit of land) in 2003 to 16.7 nalis in 2012. Most villagers said that an average family required thirty nalis to be self sufficient. Twenty-two of the thirty SC households in Bemni – including Biju’s - owned fewer than 5 nalis. Moreover, local construction, allied perhaps to climate change, had led to a decline in the water table and a decrease in soil fertility.

Food prices have risen sharply, and many of the poor complained that their diets have become highly restricted. The following quotation from an elderly SC man in the village is indicative of the type of statement we heard many times in Bemni:

Things have become so expensive it is impossible. I’ve stopped eating tomatoes since last year. They were Rs. 20 now they are Rs. 40 or Rs. 50. The difference between price of things a few years ago and the price of things now is like the difference between the earth and the sky. Daal now costs Rs. 70. An average person cannot get those things. If a person earns Rs. 120 a day – the government employment guarantee wage – and he goes to buy daal, his whole salary will be used up on the daal. How is he going to buy the other things that he needs?

Corruption compounded these problems. Many of the poorest households in the village were not eligible for government resources because they had not bribed sufficiently the government inspectors, who had falsely registered them as Above the Poverty Line (APL) rather than Below the Poverty Line (BPL). Only BPL families are entitled to subsidies. Even those households labeled

4

BPL - and therefore legally entitled to subsidized wheat, rice, sugar and mustard oil through the Indian Government’s Public Distribution Scheme - found it difficult in practice to acquire these products. Intermediaries embezzle funds, as they do in the case of the midday meals scheme that runs in local schools, the widow’s pension scheme, and various smaller government development projects.

The requirement placed upon parents to buy uniforms, books, and stationary for school therefore comes on top of other pressing calls on meager household finances. The poor sometimes said that they faced a choice between education and eating. In addition, many parents need their children’s help in the home, forest and field. As the example of Biju suggests, these difficulties often manifested themselves at specific “crisis moments” in the lives of rural households. In particular, the illness of a family member often presaged a child abandoning school or a younger person giving up their higher education or a promising early career. Sometimes even a relatively “minor” injury, for example a mother injuring her hand meant that a child, most usually a girl, had to leave school to help in the home. There are no good functioning hospitals locally - the local doctor treats patients in an idiosyncratic manner - and obtaining medical assistance outside the village is expensive and time-consuming.

The Uttarakhand State has failed to invest in educational facilities, curricular reform, and the monitoring of schools. In addition, widespread corruption in the educational bureaucracy means that teachers can bribe to be posted in urban areas. The student/staff ratio in Bemni and surrounding villages is often 100: 1. There are no science teachers in local schools because no one suitably qualified wants to reside so far from the city. A young woman with a 12th class pass told us:

Education now is terrible. After class 5 the children cannot read or write Hindi properly. They can’t even write ‘ab’ (now). But all the classes are so easy, that everyone passes everything.

It is true that the educational levels of those aged 16-25 and 26-35 are considerably higher than those of people aged 36-45. For example, 16 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women in this youngest cohort have at least a BA compared to 7 per cent and 0 per cent in the oldest cohorts, respectively (see Tables 1 and 4 in the appendix). Moreover, even SC girls are seeing an improvement in their educational levels (Table 6). But many young people do not continue in school after Eighth Class. This is especially the case among SCs, who own only a third of the land of GCs per capita, have fewer fixed assets, and poorer social links outside the village.

5

Fifty per cent of SC men and sixty per cent of SC women dropped out of formal education before Eighth Class. The sex-based inequalities in education reflect gender norms surrounding employment - boys are expected to enter paid employment girls much more rarely so - and the greater need for girls’ assistance in the home in the context of prevailing norms around gender and work.

Young people acquire basic skills from education that are important in terms of navigating modern life. They obtain, in the case of those able to remain in schooling, qualifications that are a minimum prerequisite for competing for government jobs. But education does not provide a great deal of confidence or political power (cf Sen 2000). It is still harder to claim that a local education boosts people’s employment prospects to any significant degree. Few villagers spoke about the civilizing or empowering nature of education, as people did in rural western UP in the 2000s (Jeffrey et al. 2008). One poor SC man in his fifties told us that he sent his children to school simply to avoid being disparaged by his neighbours for not doing so. A GC young woman with a 12th Class pass said:

The benefit of education is nothing really. I’ll just end up working in the fields anyway, so it was just something to do when she was young. It was easier than working at home.

The situation of educated unemployed youth must therefore viewed against the backdrop of widespread poverty and the depressing state of the local schooling regime. Many young people – indeed the majority of SCs and girls – do not manage to obtain a 10th class pass. Moreover, many of those who do acquire an education are unable to spend long periods searching for secure employment or developing their careers outside the village.

Rajesh: the everyday work of “being unemployed”

Rajesh Singh, a Rajput (GC), was thirty in 2012 and came from a family that was slightly richer than that of Biju. Rajesh was educated in Bemni primary school and then at a government secondary school close to the village. In the late 1990s Rajesh received a BA (Arts) from Gopeshwar College, the government degree college in the district town a dozen miles from Bemni. He did the degree on a “private” (correspondence) basis because his parents could not afford for him to study as a “regular” student. At the age of about twenty, and at the behest of some friends, he went to Mumbai where he worked for six months in a hotel. Mumbai did not suit him, he said, and so he travelled to Delhi where he had three jobs in succession: an attendant in a shopping mall and two different positions fixing up computers. At the time, Rajesh had

6

imagined remaining in Delhi and establishing a small computer repair business.

In 2003, however, Rajesh’s father fell ill and he had to abandon his work in Delhi to fulfill obligations at home. As in Biju’s case, it usually falls upon the eldest son to assist the family in a time of trouble. Rajesh had a brother, Harpal, who was much older. But Harpal left home when he was just 12. It seems that he absconded from school and then travelled abroad. By the late 1990s, Harpal had become quite rich and sent money to his family; but he could not be relied upon to return to the village to look after his father. As a consequence, Rajesh managed the process of obtaining treatment for his dying father in Bemni. After his father’s death, Rajesh helped to secure a marriage for his sister, and he also oversaw the construction of a new six-room, two-storied brick house for the family.

Once Rajesh’s sister had been married, the family needed a young woman in the home who could milk and feed the cows and buffaloes, which is perceived as “women’s work”. Rajesh’s mother was not very well herself and could not carry out these chores much longer. It fell again to Rajesh to assist the family. He married a woman with an 8th Class pass from a nearby village. In 2012 they had two daughters, aged about 7 and 5, and a younger son, aged 3. Rajesh still considered himself young, a youth (jawaan). But he also felt the burden of “adult” life. “Responsibility” (zimmedaari) was a word he used quite a lot.

Rajesh went back to college but, again, only as a “private” student, doing his degrees by correspondence. He got a BA in Gopeshwar and in 2012 was conducting a MA in English Literature from Garhwal University in Srinagar. Rajesh cannot obtain the original texts that form the backbone of the degree. “The books are only available in Srinagar and I am never there,” he said. Instead, he purchased six “cheat books”, some of them as fat as telephone directories, which he uses to bone up on how to answer possible questions he will face in the exam. The process was fairly mechanical: Rajesh simply learnt how to reproduce critiques of plays like Shakespeare’s Tempest and books like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, without consulting the originals.

Rajesh was employed on a temporary basis in the local secondary school, helping with physical education and doing some occasional teaching. He earned a salary of Rs. 3000 – nowhere near the amount required to keep body and soul together. He also ran private tutorials for many local young people out of which he earned about Rs. 1000 per month for the three months running up to the examinations. He cultivated the family’s medium-sized (30 nali) farm and had a large vegetable garden close to his home. He

7

spent about forty days a year working on government projects in the village through an employment guarantee scheme. He also occasionally went to collect forest products from the jungles and meadows above Bemni, which could be sold to local traders.

Rajesh said that these various forms of employment allow him to “get by”. But he desperately hoped that he would be able to get a government job in the near future. His chances of success seem remote. Rajesh was among 86,000 applicants for 80 low-ranking bureaucratic jobs advertised in March 2012. He said that he would not find out whether he had cleared the first round until December 2012, and even then it would be matter of competing in further examinations, physical tests, and the like. He also applied for the post of tehsildar – administrative chief of a sub-district unit. In Uttarakhand you need to pass a written examination, do a physical test, and also pass a horse riding examination to become a tehsildar (you need to be able to ride between villages). Rajesh does not ride and so his chances are slim.

Rajesh said that his next move would be to apply for a B.Ed degree and then enter the competition for secondary school teaching positions. Here, again, the odds are stacked against him. There are reputed to be 300,000 people studying for B.Eds in Uttarakhand as of August 2012 and there are about 200 new posts being made available every year. So common have B.Ed holders become and so degraded is the B.Ed degree that the State government is having to introduce a new qualification test for teachers; where a B.Ed was once enough to guarantee a secondary school post, there will now be an extra hurdle. And village-based young men like Rajesh without the capacity to buy the latest books or gain the relevant experience of new teaching methods are precisely the type of candidate that the news tests will be designed to weed out. In the meantime of course there are host of private college principals eagerly trying to persuade young people like Rajesh of the benefits of acquiring a B.Ed.

So what can Rajesh do? We talked about the possibility of him migrating again to look for work. He said that his village and family responsibilities precluded that. He said that a pattern has emerged in the village whereby young men go out for a while and then return to Bemni for the majority of their adult lives. Rajesh:

Young men often go to Delhi or Dehra Dun for a while. They might earn Rs. 5000. They spend Rs. 2000 on room rental and Rs. 3000 for their expenses. And once they have children they cannot afford to live in the city. It is too expensive. They return to the village because they do not need to pay rent.

8

Rajesh could buy a couple of mules and probably make another Rs. 3000 per month this way. But this is hardly the type of work that Rajesh has come to expect. Rajesh could channel his efforts into farming, perhaps by borrowing land from other families. During the past few years the potato price has been very low, however. It is not economical to sell barley and wheat. Unseasonal hailstorms have ruined people’s crops twice in the past three years. And, again, Rajesh has not studied for twenty years of his life to weed potatoes.

We asked whether Rajesh had thought about growing medicinal plants as this is an area in which there seems to be some scope, and he has an interest in horticulture. But Rajesh complained about the high start-up costs and his lack of specialist knowledge. Rajesh was more enthusiastic about setting up a private school. His home is large enough to house a small school. He has experience of teaching, and it is the type of job he would like to do. Rajesh’s tutees – including the village head’s daughter – achieved very good results in their secondary school examinations in June 2012. But, again, the start-up costs for a school are high. There is also a shortage of locals prepared to pay for private education; the rich prefer to send their children to urban schools. Rajesh therefore continues to “make do”, balancing farming, study, part-time teaching, and earning opportunities associated with the local environment.

Rajesh’s case adds to our understanding of the educational difficulties faced by young people growing up in Bemni. Higher education, like the school system, is in a dire state. The Government has not invested in improving the curricula in most government institutions where courses continue to reflect colonial educational priorities. There is very little active learning. In addition, government universities have become highly politicized. For example, in May and June 2012 teachers and administrators in the largest university in Garhwal as well as all affiliated universities (including Gopeshwar College) went on a 34-day strike that wholly disrupted students’ capacity to prepare for and sit their examinations.

At the same time, a wide range of private educational entrepreneurs has entered the fray, the majority of which are fraudulent institutions. Corruption is endemic with respect to the issuing of permits to open private colleges, accreditation of colleges, admission of students, enrollment of staff (many university teachers are registered at many different institutions simultaneously), and granting of degrees. In general terms both government and private universities have been reduced to being “degree shops” in which properly qualified lecturers are absent and students rely on cheat books and sample answers to pass exams.

9

Students and their parents – even those living in relatively remote areas – recognize many of these problems. A GC young man with a BA degree said that,

College life is useless. “There are no teachers and there is no good teaching. It is not like the colleges in the richer part of the world and big metros [major Indian cities]. The only actual activity in the colleges is the practicals. And even in the practicals things do not run right. Students fill in their own form.

Young people in Bemni also said that the lack of an atmosphere of learning in university towns and cities had given rise to a spirit of non-seriousness within the student body, as manifest in the rise of “love story” (posturing and flirting).

But critique ran ahead of practice: Most parents villagers with the required resources continued to invest in the pursuit of degrees, especially BAs and MAs. If a government job was not forthcoming, they most commonly opted for a B.Ed. This continued willingness to invest in higher education reflected in part a weary hope that education might pay dividends “in the end” and in part an inability or reluctance to accept the extent to which Uttarakhand degrees have been devalued in employment markets.

Another important point that emerges strongly from the example of Rajesh is that of the difficulty that young people face in acquiring the types of secure, usually government, employment that they have been led to expect. Government jobs provide relatively high salaries: a government secondary school teacher, for example commands a starting salary of Rs. 30,000 (equivalent to about 400 pounds) per month, compared to Rs. 6,000 for someone starting in an urban NGO in Uttarakhand or Rs. 8,000 for someone working as a private manager in a factory. Moreover, people argue that many government jobs do not require a person to work especially hard. In addition, there is a history of young people joining government service (mainly the army) in this region and a sense that government work is high status. School textbooks also make great play of the value of serving the state. There were dissenting views; some young people said that private service is preferable because you are less likely to face pressure from superiors and have more scope for innovating. But the consensus was that a government job was the most desirable form of employment - teaching, army, or the educational bureaucracy were especially favoured.

Very few of these educated young people can acquire government service. The percentage of Bemni men aged 36-45 in government service is higher than that of young men aged 26-35 in spite of the

10

marked increased in education in the younger of these two cohorts. The low-ranking government jobs for which most villagers apply often go to those with bribe money and the right social contacts. This may be changing slowly. We heard several version of the following statement, from a young GC man said:

The atmosphere has changed in the last 3 or 4 years. There is now some flexibility because people have raised their voices against corruption. The Right to Information Act (RTIA) means that people cannot stop you if you are a hard worker. Now we have a chance.

The RTIA allows citizens to request information on any aspect of government functioning and while no one we met in Bemni has employed it, the mere existence of this Act may have been enough to prevent the most open and egregious forms of corruption among recruitment officials. But villagers were adamant that corruption continues “in secret” (“andhar hi andhar”).

The protracted nature of the competition for work exacerbates the hardships that young people experience as candidates for government service. The process is drawn out in a double sense. First, young people can continue to apply for most government jobs until the age of 30, for secondary school teaching jobs 35 and for higher educational positions until forty. This point partly accounts for the pervasiveness of the sense among twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings that they may be “on the road to something better” in Bemni. Second, the process is protracted because it takes so long to pass through each stage in a government recruitment competition. It can take as many as 24 months from initial application to the final result.

Many young people said that they feel deeply anxious about their underemployment. They often referred to the English word “tension”. The following quotation from a GC young man was typical:

There is no service work here. Only the District Magistrate’s relatives get jobs. It all happens via whom you know. This is the land of the panch pandavas [holy scriptures], isn’t it? Kedarnath, Bardinath and the other pilgrimage sites: that is the only service work available, to go and work there. Also there are no masters coming to the schools to teach. The schools are being ruined (bigar jate haim). And only those with money will be successful, whether they have 8th class, 10th class, whatever. My mind has rally gone bad because of this situation (mera dimarck kharab ho gya).

11

Several young people referred to themselves as “unemployed”, either using the English word or the Hindi term “berozgaari”. In other instances, they responded to the question “what do you do” by using the self-derogatory phrase “breaking rocks” (pathar thorna). In still other instances, they used terms that suggest a complete absence of activity “timepass” or “khaali” (which means empty or blank). Several young people said that they “do nothing” all day or just play karem (a board game), watch television, and play cricket or volleyball. In two cases, men referred to heavy drinking. There has been a sharp increase in the number of illegal stills in the village in part as a result of the frustrations faced by young men.

In practice, however, most young men realized that they could not afford to do nothing, especially after marrying and having children. Our overall impression was of the industry of rural youth, even while they continued to imagine themselves as “underemployed” or “unemployed” in some sense of these terms. Indeed, young people themselves commented on their own industriousness and ethic of restless energy. One SC man in his mid-thirties said:

A person cannot just say, ‘I want shahi paneer’ [an elaborate cheese dish]. He has to work at making the shahi paneer. You have to do many things if you want to achieve success. You have to try a lot. You have to do a lot.

Rajesh’s story provides some useful pointers to the work typically conducted by young men. Young men commonly engage in various agricultural tasks (especially ploughing), run small businesses, travel to tourist spots for work, and conduct laboring work for the government or privately. They typically prioritize different forms of work at different times of the year. For example, young men often go to work in Badrinath or Kedarnath during the tourist season (June-August) and collect caterpillar fungus in May. Even while engaging in this array of occupations, they continue to seek college degrees and apply for government jobs. It should be noted here that, in spite of a general determination to avoid working in manual labour, educated young people did not object to conducting tasks such as collecting leaves in the forest or making cow dung cakes.

Small enterprise is common among educated unemployed or underemployed youth but tends to be in a few narrow fields. Several men have responded to their failure to find secure work by engaging in mule work, running shops, or starting small transport businesses. Most of these businesses are forms of self-employment rather than requiring young people to hire others. These businesses are typically self-financed – from personal savings and informal loans from relatives. Young men seem generally averse to taking official loans. They frequently mention the problem of bank

12

officials and other bureaucrats taking a large cut of their loan money. They also speak of high interest rates and the inherent uncertainty of their work in an environment in which corruption, crime and poor infrastructure are abiding concerns. In addition, some young people said that they suffer from a lack of confidence (himmat) and “mind power” or “brain” (dimark). They did not feel that their schooling had given them the problem-solving skills and sense of possibility required to take a risk in the field of business and they were demoralized by their failure to acquire government work.

A central government sponsored micro-credit scheme runs in the village, but the first venture – a mushroom farm – failed in 2011, and interest in micro-credit is low. Likewise, several relatively wealthy and older villagers have begun to experiment with the growth of medicinal plants, and it seems there is scope for people to make large amounts of money in this way. But to date this is not a path that younger villagers – and the educated unemployed among them – have taken.

Young people were also pessimistic about the possibility of acquiring good work through migrating to large cities, such as Haridwar, Dehra Dun and Delhi. Like Rajesh, they said that expenses often swallow up one’s earnings and village responsibilities often mean that they have to return to Bemni after some time. Biju’s short but rather successful career was exceptional in this respect.

Since 2003 two forms of new employment have become prominent in the working lives of educated underemployed youth in the village – young women as well as young men. First, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), plays a role in supporting the efforts of young people to survive economically. Under the MGNREGA scheme, each household is entitled to work for 100 days each year at a rate of RS. 120 per day. In practice, young people typically obtain between 20 and 35 days work a year under MGNREGA. Young people report difficulties in obtaining their wages – many SCs, in particular, have had to wait over a year to get paid. But MGNREGA boosted young people’s earnings.

Some young men, and a few young women, also collect mukku (lichen), which is sold in local markets and used as a dye on the plains (see Dyson 2008). Mukku collection was a major activity for teenage boys and girls in 2003/04. In 2012 some young men and women in their twenties also went to collect mukku, often travelling greater distances. Most villagers said that the supply of mukku has nevertheless dwindled to such a point that trips are

13

often fruitless. Mukku collection is also dangerous: It involves climbing high up trees and spending long periods in the jungle.

More important than MGNREGA and mukku are new opportunities for young people to collect caterpillar fungus – called “kira jali” – which is sold to local traders (see our articles on this in BBC Magazine and the Guardian). It seemed that young men were far more involved in this work than young women, but girls and women did appear to be beginning to collect the fungus. The thin black fungi are about an inch long and can be found extending out of a mummified caterpillar. Apparently, the Chinese consider the caterpillar to an aphrodisiac, and the fungus reputedly forms the basis of a performance-enhancing drug used by Chinese athletes. The kira jali are found at about 15,000 feet, one day’s long and strenuous hike from Ramni.

The significance of kira jali to the local economy should not be exaggerated: probably half of the many people who now go to collect kira jali obtain only trivial quantities of the fungus – for example three or four pieces in ten days. But many others do make good amounts of money, and there are a few kira jali specialists in the village who collect hundreds of the fungi each time they visit the high pastures. One young SC man gathered 500 in a month in 2011, and made Rs. 40,000. Two GC brothers collected the same amount in three weeks in 2012 and expect to collect Rs. 75,000 this year. Five years ago the fungi would fetch Rs. 10 a piece. In 2012 they were trading at Rs. 150 a piece or Rs. 400,000 (5,000 UK pounds) a kilogram. A GC young man from Ramni told us, “Why would I go and live in Delhi when I can earn as much from kira jali in one month as I could earn in two years in the capital?” The newness of such seasonal moves to high altitudes should not be overstated; herders of sheep and goats have long travelled up to the mountain pastures during the summer. But the sheer numbers travelling to the high altitude meadows is unprecedented. At the end of May 2012 there were about 1500 people in “Simbe bugyal”, which is the main hunting ground for kira jali for those from Ramni and surrounding villages. One young man commented wryly that Simbe is “the new Gopeshwar” (Gopeshwar is the district headquarters]).

Almost everyone we spoke to about kira jali emphasized the risks involved in collecting the fungus. The availability of the fungus depends upon the amount of rainfall and other aspects of the local climate. Locals also say that the amount of kira jali available year on year. 2011 was a good year, 2012 turned out to be disappointing. Travelling to collect kira jali has its opportunity costs – you miss out on labour opportunities in the village, for example – and many people were returning from Simbe in May 2012 cursing their luck.

14

The long “chain” of intermediaries through whose hands the kira jali passes on the way to China is another source of frustration for young people, who recognize that the sum they receive for the fungus is miniscule compared to the price at which they are sold in China or the West. One GC young man explained that the low price that they receive reflects the existence of different fiefdoms controlled by various brokers:

One dealer might have power over the area between Ramni and Ghat, the next dealer might have control over the area between Ghat and Nandprayag, and so on. That is why there is such a long “chain” in the sale of kira jali.

There are legal risks associated with kira jali collection. There is a system in place for villagers to obtain licenses to collect kira jali. An individual pays Rs. 500 to the head of the local forest committee, called the “Sarpanch”, and in return receives a piece of paper that entitles him or her to collect the caterpillar fungus. But this system does not operate in many villages, including Bemni, and it does not prevent the government, in the form of the Forest Department (FD), from harassing collectors. The FD is worried that the villagers will try to harvest the medicinal plants that grow in the alpine meadows. They are worried, too, about the poaching of animals and the harm done by villagers’ fires to the mountain environment. In 2011 FD officials destroyed the tents of villagers collecting kira jali on the pretense that the collectors were also harvesting plants. The villagers each gave the FD representatives one kira jali, an improvised bribe that got the officials of their backs.

The sale of kira jali is not licensed by the state. As several young people told us in Bemni it is – strictly speaking – “thieves business” (chori ka kaam). Villagers typically sell their harvest either to intermediaries (“beechwale”) who come to the village or else to similar brokers who reside in local towns. The price in the local towns is slightly higher than the amount villagers receive in the village and this has encouraged some youth to take their harvest down in the jeep to the local towns of Nandprayag or Chamoli. This is dangerous, as several people found out in 2011. Following an anonymous tip off, the police in the small town of Ghat heard that several villagers were bringing down a sack of kira jali to sell in Chamoli town. The Ghat police phoned the Nandprayag police. When the Bemni men arrived in Nandprayag they were promptly apprehended. The police were bullish, “you are carrying illegal goods”, they said. They confiscated the kira jali, doubtless in order to fill their own pockets. The villagers returned to Bemni empty-handed. Nor is selling kira jali in the village without risk. In 2010 several men sold their kira jali to a trader on trust. The man never

15

returned to Bemni with the money he owed to the villagers, and people could not complain to the police because kira jali sale is illegal – a fact that the unscrupulous broker exploited.

There are health risks with kira jali, too. Those who have been up to collect the fungus often complain of snow blindness, nausea, and exhaustion. Joint problems are also common because people lie still for long periods to look for the fungus. Several villagers have experienced advanced forms of altitude sickness, including a type of paralysis. One man recently died from what was probably High Altitude Cerebral Edema. There are also many accidents – one man famously survived for 13 days in the crevasse of a glacier before he was rescued. Fights over kira jali are becoming more common. In eastern Uttarakhand around the small town of Munsiyari villagers have taken to carrying guns. There was a fistfight recently between villagers in Kanol and Sutol, higher up the level from Bemni, over who had rights to a particular part of the meadow.

And then added to the uncertainties is the lurking question of the environmental sustainability of collecting the fungus. It is likely that the heavy harvesting of the fungus will reduce the crop in subsequent years, this at least is what many commentators have argued based on observations in Nepal, where caterpillar fungus has been collected for a longer period of time.

But in the short and perhaps medium term kira jali is the most important source of income for educated unemployed young men in Bemni after MGNREGA, and young people like Rajesh are willing to take the risks in their stride. Rajesh summarized the situation very well when he said that his farming and his MGNREGA is his “safe” employment and kira jali collection is his “risky” work – people need a “mix”.

Hema: double disadvantage

Bemni villagers do not usually expect young women to enter paid employment. As the Tables in the appendix show, very few young women are in paid work, indeed only two SC women work for money outside the home. But expectations are slowly beginning to change, and this is creating dilemmas as well as some opportunities for young women.

Hema is thirty and unmarried. Between March and June 2012 she was living with her mother, who has no education, in the family home in Bemni. Like Rajesh, Hema has a long history of engagement in formal education. She is not quite the most educated young woman from Bemni – there is a contemporary of Hema’s who is studying for a PhD in Dehra Dun. But Hema is among only seven young women (six GCs and one SC) to have

16

acquired a degree. Hema obtained her primary and secondary schooling in and around Bemni. She then did a BA and MA in Hindi from Gopeshwar college. Next, she acquired a B.Ed. from a college in Haridwar and a Masters of Education degree from Meerut, a city in Uttar Pradesh. Hema did her degrees “regular” rather than “private”: she actually went to study for six months in Hardiwar and six months in Meerut. She said that when she was in ninth class her grandfather and grandmother did not want her to study any further. But her father supported her in carrying on. “He did not differentiate between girls and boys when thinking about education.”

Hema’s situation parallels that of Rajesh’s in key respects. She has found it impossible to acquire a teaching position because of a lack of opportunities. She said that as a woman she could not enter business. The only forms of paid employment that she said a woman could do locally – teaching and NGO work – had little scope. She said that there are no facilities for starting a private school and people locally “spend their money on liquor they are not interested in the education of their children”. NGO jobs are temporary and, as a woman, she could not spend time travelling around the region looking for the more secure posts.

Hema told us that she would continue to apply for government jobs if they appeared, but in another interview she mentioned having resigned herself to not getting permanent paid employment. She said that, when she marries, her mother-in-law and husband are unlikely to countenance her working. She has received offers of “love marriages” from men who would encourage her to work, but that she would not think of marrying behind her parents’ back. The prospects for Hema’s arranged marriage are in some respects rather bleak. Hema is considered “over age”, and her advanced education also counts against her. Prevailing norms around gender and education mean that many men feel threatened by a young woman who has better qualifications than they do.

Hema occupies another type of limbo, too. While she claimed that as an educated person she is able to adjust to any kind of environment and that she feels as at home in the village, she also made rather disparaging remarks about the village. On one occasion she remarked that that there is “no reason to stay here [in Bemni], it has nothing to offer.” Moreover, other young women in the village, including those with degrees, said that Hema had become “out of place” in Bemni. They said that she is arrogant because of all the time that she had spent studying outside the village. One young woman said that Hema has become “bahar-ki” (“of the outside”). This young woman told us, “Hema just stays with her mother and works with her mother when they go to the forest.

17

She does not have much of a relation with other girls in the village.”

This brief portrait of Hema is more broadly indicative. There were some opportunities for young women to obtain paid work in and around Bemni, even in the absence of secure well-paid government employment. A few young women with high school or degree qualifications worked part-time in local schools. Three of the young women with degrees in the village worked in one of the village government anganwadis (nurseries). These provided young women with a sense of being on the path to remunerative government work – as nursery teachers they can apply for promotion to become quite well-paid nursery “supervisors”. All three of these women were married and had children, and they came from relatively wealthy families.

Three young women with high school qualifications had part-time jobs caring for physically challenged young people in the village. For example, Meena had just completed 11th class and was married late in 2011. She was planning to enroll in 12th class later in 2012. In the meantime, Meena had taken on the work of looking after a disabled SC young man in the village. She taught him to walk and assisted him with his studies. Meena had completed five days of training in Gopeshwar before undertaking this work, which she seemed to think would help to prepare her for her future employment. She hoped that she might work in a government school but otherwise in a nursery (anganwaadi). In addition, Meena earned Rs. 800 a month for the caring work – a small sum but important in marking her out as someone on the road to paid employment outside the home.

Yet Meena’s prospects are poor. Most of the high school or degree-educated young women in Bemni found it difficult to acquire permanent salaried work. There was less pressure on them, as compared to men, to acquire such work. But by equal measure it was harder for them to do so because they had to battle both the scarce job market and prevailing gender norms. In addition, the great uncertainty about whether future in-laws would support their daughter-in-law in the search for paid work discouraged single women with high school qualification or degrees from planning careers.

With the exception of temporary teaching work and involvement in local development projects, for example through MGNREGA, young women found it tough to obtain paid work while waiting for a government job to materialize. It is much more difficult for them than it is for men to spend long periods outside the village, and young women were much more involved than were men in unpaid household and farm work: conducting daily chores around the

18

home, looking after livestock, collecting firewood and grass for fodder, and undertaking numerous tasks in the fields. Jane carried out a lot of participant observation in these areas, especially in 2003/04 but also in 2012. This suggested that young women’s work was slightly less intense in 2012 than in the earlier period, as a result of a decline in the amount of land under cultivation and reduction in the number of livestock. But women’s responsibilities remained extremely burdensome, especially during peak periods of agricultural activity such as June and November. Young women used the time they spent together undertaking household tasks to exchange ideas, joke, and discuss village matters – and these social experiences are probably important in allowing many women to cope with the disappointments of local educational regimes, absence of paid employment opportunities, and continued diminished agency with respect to work and their “futures” more broadly.

Uncertainties over marriage often exacerbate young women’s difficulties still further. Under a brideprice system prevalent in the Bemni region in the 1970s and 1980s young women were often married within their own village and could break a relationship if they were unhappy. Under the dowry system that has become more prevalent over the past twenty years it is no longer possible for young women to negotiate a separation and they more commonly married outside the village, sometimes at a considerable distance from Bemni. Marriages have also rapidly become more expensive in Bemni. The typical cost of arranging the marriage of a daughter in Bemni is Rs. 300,000 and Rs. 250,000 for a son – and relatives often have to spend Rs. 20,000 per marriage on gifts. The emergence of this dowry system may be adversely affecting young people in general, and especially young women, in three linked ways. First, it may exacerbate a tendency for young people, particularly perhaps young women, to assess their own appearance, education, and employment in narrowly instrumental, even monetized terms. In western UP, where the dowry system is more advanced, it is has become common for parents to construct pricelists for grooms with particular occupations and educational qualifications. Likewise, parents sometimes refer to a need to pay a high dowry to compensate for a perceived shortcoming in a bride. Second, and as the Hema example suggests, the dowry system often compels young people to make quite direct comparisons between their own position and that of more purportedly successful youth. Young women may reflect negatively on their schooling, employment status and appearance, for example, and men often become especially conscious of their insecure work, poor education, and inability to fulfill norms of successful adult masculinity. For example, a friend of Hema’s who had a Masters degree recently got married in Bemni said that her choice of partner was highly constrained because young men were

19

concerned about marrying someone so educated and also a little worried about her advanced age. One of her prospective marriage partners complained after meeting her of her being too “tez”, a double-edged word which means both “bright” and “headstrong”, or “sharp”. Third, the dowry system may lead to intra- and trans-generational social conflict. Conflicts may occur over parents and young people’s interpretation of the success or failure of past social “strategies” as these become evident at the time of negotiating a marriage. This may indeed be the case in Hema’s instance; her parents are certainly intensely worried about how to negotiate a good match for their daughter. (Intra-household politics is an area we would like to investigate in our next round of research in Bemni).

“Love marriages” - in the sense of unions that are not “arranged” and do not involve the elaborate celebrations associated with “traditional” unions - have become more common. This partly reflects the rise of notions of romantic love, for example in higher educational contexts, and increased opportunities for young people to meet one another away from the prying eyes of their parents, again most notably in school or college. It also reflects the extension in the age of marriage and the rising cost of arranged marriages. But a love marriage is not a solution for most young women, because they do not want to risk the approbation of their family and village community and because they have few opportunities in practice to seek out life companions.

Young women therefore experienced a type of “double disadvantage” as educated unemployed youth: they were excluded from the labour market and also partially excluded from the “work” of unemployment that we have described for young men like Rajesh. Moreover, a string of qualifications can become a positive disadvantage unemployed young women at the time of marriage.

Jaipal: social and political practices

The example of Jaipal gives a strong sense of what young people were doing in public “political” spheres in the context of unemployment. Jaipal obtained his primary education from Bemni, went to junior high school at a school close to Bemni and spent 11th

Class and 12th Class in Ghat. He said that the schools were excellent at that time. The teachers were very good, and they took their responsibilities seriously. He went on to do a BA degree at Gopeshwar College and then an MA from the same institution. Between 2004 and 2008 he lived in Dehra Dun. There he did a B.Ed, competed in competitions, and taught in a CBSE private school. He spent the next three years, he said, “khaali” (“free”) in the village. During this period, he served as vice-head of the block (sub-district) government council and a member of multi-village

20

area council also charged with local government work. He did not earn money from these positions and sustained himself through doing occasional tutorials on a paid basis and farming in the village.

Jaiapl was not very interested in discussing party politics. He said that he did not like this level of “politics” (rajniti). Much of Jaipal’s work as a politician entailed instead circulating discourses critical of the state within his village and the surrounding rural area. He spent a lot of time discussing the failings of the school system. Jaipal was also critical of the manner in MGNREGA projects run in the village. He said that the projects should be oriented towards improving the local environment. “MGNREGA was set up to promote projects for soil moisture retention, tree planting, and that sort of thing”, he said. “But the local village council has only focused on building paths and walls in the village. It is as if something that has to be concrete to qualify as development”.

As an educated but underemployed young man, Jaipal had the time, energy and skills required to act on his sense of frustration. As vice-head of the Block, Jaipal he chaired the education committee. He emphasized the issue of teacher/student ratios while holding this post and paid close attention to the norms for appointing teachers. When he got elected to the area council in 2008, Jaipal made electricity his other priority. He set up an information committee on the issue of rural electrification. He met the Chief Minister and went to seminars attended by all the District Magistrates. He brought the executive engineers responsible for the rural distribution of electricity to Bemni. Jaipal: “I had them walking around grass that was waist high in the rainy season, and we discussed where the low tension wires should be placed and where the high tension wires should be placed.” Officials only came up with only temporary solutions to the electricity problem, and so Jaipal kept the pressure on them through writing scores of letters of complaint. He said that every newspaper carried 10 or 15 stories about his activities – he has the cuttings in Ghat and he indicated a stack over a foot high. When we asked why electricity was such a pressing concern, he said that it is because the young need computers and other modern technology.

Jaipal also engaged in direct protests. In 2005 Jaipal was the brains behind an extraordinary demonstration related to road construction to the village. Frustrated that the Government had not extended an existing road from the nearby village of Sung to Bemni, Jaipal organized villagers to construct a road themselves. They borrowed equipment for Ghat shopkeepers and spent ten days with picks and shovels carving an improvised road out of the side of the mountain. This publicity stunt worked. The story of villagers building their

21

own road travelled as far as Delhi and embarrassed the district administration into action.

In addition, Jaipal acted as a mediator between rural people requiring assistance from the state and different sections of the government administration. For example, he was often able to help villagers bypass the local head of the village council (pradhan) and instead directly appeal to the Block Development Officer (BDO) on issues such as the non-receipt of a widow’s pension or inability to obtain registration as Below the Poverty Line. Jaipal could also help poor people in negotiations with school principals, government doctors, and lawyers. Jaipal participated in other forms of community service: running microcredit schemes, rural heath camps, and training schemes for SCs in artisanal work. Jaipal imagines himself as a type of social “motivator” (he used the English word). In 2012 alone, Jaipal had persuaded a young man to take a loan in order to seat up a small business supplying recorded music at local weddings. He had also persuaded two other young men to try to enter the business of medicinal plants. Jaipal also tried to politicize the population by talking about the importance of voting in elections (although he was not affiliated to any political party). In 2009, Jaipal landed a government job as a secondary school teacher in a town about 100 miles from Bemni. But Jaipal often returns to the village to engage in social and political work.

Jaipal’s case draws attention to young people’s work as social helpers. This assistance took a variety of forms. Educated unemployed youth – women as well as men - often advised younger youth and parents on schooling opportunities and courses. They helped sometimes with homework or provided tuition free of charge. They also provided advice on employment opportunities and business. Especially charismatic leaders among these youth acted as “motivators”, for example persuading young people to join rotating credit schemes. The most important social role that educated unemployed young people played was helping rural people obtain medical treatment. Seeking help from a doctor or hospital administrator and maintaining this assistance entails having to bribe, cajole and negotiate with various higher ups. It also entails making frequent trips to urban areas and organizing priests to perform relevant religious ceremonies. Educated unemployed young people had the time, confidence and skills required to manage these varied tasks.

Educated unemployed youth also manage interpersonal conflict in the village, a task that was formerly performed by older members of the village. This became especially evident in June 2012 when conflict threatened to erupt in one of Bemni’s GC households. A young man named Trilok Singh had returned from working in a factory in Gujarat to Bemni. Trilok was married with three children.

22

One evening his lover, Kriti - who had no previous knowledge of Trilok’s marriage and had indeed been expecting to marry Trilok herself- arrived from the Uttar Pradesh plains and stumbled across Trilok and his wife in their home. The instant reaction of four or five of the educated underemployed young men in the village best known for their social service was to go to Trilok’s house and prevent any violent confrontation, smoothing things over as far as possible and especially making sure that Trilok’s elderly parents were not too upset. The next day they accompanied Trilok and Kriti to Ghat, where they saw her off – with the promise that Trilok would soon make a decision about how he wanted to proceed. The young men accompanied Trilok because they had heard that Kriti might have called upon her own friends and family in the plains to come up and “sort out” Trilok. Another rumour had circulated that the lover’s family might be issuing a First Information Report with the police on the basis that Trilok might have kidnapped his lover. The young men were also there to make sure that Trilok received far treatment at the hands of the law. As it happened, these rumours were unfounded and Trilok was able to say goodbye to Kriti in Ghat who then travelled, without incident, back to the plains.

As the example of Jaipal primes us to expect, young people were also important in communicating political critiques in the village. They complained vociferously during everyday conversations about corruption in the process of granting contracts for MGNREGA projects and disbursement of development monies in the village. They also complained about malpractice and neglect within schools, hospitals, the electricity department, and among officers responsible for maintaining a clean and regular water supply in the village. They said that the land revenue officer is corrupt and that the police in local towns are venal and unreliable. In addition to criticizing corruption, a few young people spoke more generally about the need for fairness in the village. They spoke, too about the issue of equality. One SC young man said, “The ethic (niti) of this country is that rich eat the money meant for poor people. This happens everywhere.” One GC young man expanded on this theme:

It used to be the case that trade was simple. You had a kilo of salt and I had a kilo of sugar. You would give me some of the salt and I would give you some of the sugar – a swap. Now we have entered an age in which money is king. People with money can do anything they like. Those with agricultural goods – like potatoes or millet – cannot swap these things for the other things they require in life. They do not get any money for their agricultural produce. Those with money just hoard it up. They do not know anything about farming.

23

Youth also circulated environmental critiques, criticizing the government for not repairing the trekking route that runs through the village, lamenting the environmental degradation wrought by the road, and – in particular - bemoaning the failure of the village forest committee to manage the jungle properly. For example, a SC young man said:

This [village forest] committee should be saving the trees. Fifty people will come here and strip an area of forest to get wood for their houses and such like. I am part of a set of people who are trying to solve this problem. We are telling people not to cut down small live trees. But we may have an accident trying to save the forest. We have to tell people, ‘What will happen to the next generation, our children, if we cut down all the trees? Only be saving the forest will we be able to save them.’

Educated unemployed young people in Bemni also worked as mediators or “link people” between households and the state in its various local guises. They petitioned the village council head and block officers when development monies meant for specific family members did not arrive, for example. They also sometimes worked as intermediaries in the educational sphere, helping to get children enrolled in school or to obtain high school or degree certificates. In UP such intermediaries also linked the rural population and the police, but young people said that in Bemni an informal council of respected elders manage this work.

There were a few educated unemployed young men who had turned their capacity to mediate between the public and officials to their own financial advantage. The principle route through which they made money from their local political know-how was through acting as intermediaries between the State at the district level and the rural population through taking on responsibility for construction projects, for example through MGNREGA. These young people could usually make reasonable sums of money from this work, although three powerful families tended to monopolize the larger contracts in the region. The contractor (tikedaar) was a figure of hate among most villagers, and especially the poor and SCs, because they tended to gave work only to their “own people”, often refused to pay wages, and embezzled large sums. Contractors defended themselves: they said that one has no choice but to be corrupt as a “tikedaar”. They cited the pressures associated with working among numerous corrupt officials and the need to make their own cut on development projects to feed their families.

Young people also sometimes become involved in open protests. Most young men and women said that they had participated in demonstrations in Gopeshwar on the subject of local schooling. Roughly half said they had been involved in the road protests close

24

to Bemni. And about a third mentioned having participated in demonstrations on the topic of the electricity supply to Bemni and construction of a communications tower. But the main way in which young people tried to place pressure on the state was through more individualistic interactions with government servants, chiefly the local village head and local teachers and doctors but also block officials and sometimes even the District Magistrate.

In sum, “educated unemployed” youth were involved in various forms of social and political mobilization, and they were engaged in these practices to a greater extent than uneducated youth and also educated employed young people. They worked as conduits for critical discourse with respect to the state, mediators in village disputes, and lobbyists in the world of everyday state-society interactions. Too much should not be made of this trend: only a small proportion – perhaps a fifth – of men and a still smaller fraction of young women were nearly as active as Jaipal. Indeed, the atmosphere of demoralization in the village combined with the pressure to earn money discouraged young people from social and political action, which was less in evidence than it was for example in Craig’s work in rural western UP in 2000-2002. But educated unemployed youth were involved in some forms of everyday politicking and occasional protests aimed at helping their families and communities.

25

Appendix to notes on field research by Jane Dyson and Craig Jeffrey

Table 1: Percentage of men by educational qualification in 2012 in Bemni (N in brackets)

Educ.

Age

None 5th-7th 8th-9th 10th-11th

12th BA or above

Total(N)

16-25 4(3)

6(5)

27(22)

30 (25)

17(14)

16(13)

100(82)

26-35 16(12)

12(9)

16(12)

24(18)

22(16)

9(7)

99(74)

36-45 31(12)

5(2)

13(5)

41(16)

3(1)

7(3)

100(39)

Total 14(27)

8(16)

20(39)

30(59)

16(31)

12(23)

100(195)

Source: Household survey conducted by Jane Dyson, March 2012.

Note 1: The percentage figures should be treated with caution given the small N size.Note 2: Percentages do not always add up to 100 due to rounding.

These notes hold for the remaining tables.

Table 2: Percentage of GC men by educational qualification in 2012 in Bemni (N in brackets)

Educ.

Age

None 5th-7th 8th-9th 10th-11th

12th BA or above

Total(N)

16-25 5(3)

2(1)

24(14)

31 (18)

19(11)

20(12)

101(59)

26-35 16(9)

5(3)

16(9)

27(15)

25(14)

11(6)

100(56)

36-45 23(7)

0(0)

10(3)

53(16)

3(1)

10(3)

99(30)

Total 13(19)

3(4)

18(26)

34(49)

18(26)

14(21)

100(145)

26

Table 3: Percentage of SC men by educational qualification in 2012 in Bemni (N in brackets)

Educ.

Age

None 5th-7th 8th-9th 10th-11th

12th BA or above

Total(N)

16-25 0(0)

17(4)

35(8)

30(7)

13(3)

4(1)

99(23)

26-35 17(3)

33(6)

17(3)

17(3)

11(2)

6(1)

101(18)

36-45 56(5)

22(2)

22(2)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(9)

Total 16(8)

24(12)

26(13)

20(10)

10(5)

4(2)

101(50)

Table 4: Percentage of women by educational qualification in 2012 in Bemni (N in brackets)

Educ.

Age

None 5th-7th 8th-9th 10th-11th

12th BA or above

Total(N)

16-25 12(13)

19 (21)

42(46)

10 (11)

9(10)

7(8)

102(109)

26-35 47(42)

21(19)

15(13)

6(5)

4(4)

7(6)

99(89)

36-45 88(36)

2(1)

7(3)

0(0)

2(1)

0(0)

99(41)

Total 28(91)

17(41)

26(62)

7(16)

7(15)

6(14)

99(239)

Source: Household survey conducted by Jane Dyson, March 2012.

Note 1: This table includes women married into the village and women born in Bemni and living outside the village. This note holds for the remaining tables of women, too.Note 3: Too much should not be read into the fact that seven of those aged 26-25 have Bachelors degrees – this includes three young women whose families “bought” them B.Ed degrees – courses that did not require young women to attend classes.

27

Table 5: Percentage of GC women by educational qualification in 2012 in Bemni (N in brackets)

Educ.

Age

None 5th-7th 8th-9th 10th-11th

12th BA or above

Total(N)

16-25 9(7)

13 (10)

46(37)

13 (10)

12(9)

9(7)

102(80)

26-35 42(30)

18(13)

18(13)

7(5)

6(4)

8(6)

99(71)

36-45 83(25)

3(1)

10(3)

0(0)

3(1)

0(0)

99(30)

Total 34(62)

13(24)

29(53)

8(15)

8(14)

7(13)

99(181)

Table 6: Percentage of SC women by educational qualification in 2012 in Bemni (N in brackets)

Educ.

Age

None 5th-7th 8th-9th 10th-11th

12th BA or above

Total(N)

16-25 21(6)

38 (11)

31(9)

3(1)

3(1)

3(1)

99(29)

26-35 67(12)

33(6)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(18)

36-45 100(11)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(11)

Total 50(29)

29(17)

16(9)

2(1)

2(1)

2(1)

101(58)

28

Table 7: Percentage of Bemni men in different forms of primary employment by age group (N in brackets)

Farming Study Business Private service

Contractor

Artisanal work

Mules/Goats

Army/ITBP

Other Govt work

Total

16-25 16(13)

52(43)

0(0)

22(18)

0(0)

1(1)

4(3)

2(2)

2(2)

99(82)

26-35 36(27)

0(0)

16(12)

18(13)

3(2)

5(4)

9(7)

9(7)

3(2)

99(74)

36-45 49(19)

3(1)

3(1)

8(3)

5(2)

5(2)

10(4)

13(5)

5(2)

101(39)

Total 30(59)

23(44)

7(13)

17(34)

2(4)

4(7)

7(14)

7(14)

3(6)

100(195)

Table 8: Percentage of GC Bemni men in different forms of primary employment by age group (N in brackets)

Farming Study Business Private service

Contractor

Artisanal work

Mules/Goats

Army/ITBP

Other Govt work

Total

16-25 15(9)

56(33)

0(0)

22(13)

0(0)

2(1)

3(2)

0(0)

2(1)

100(59)

26-35 32(18)

0(0)

18(10)

23(13)

4(2)

0(0)

9(5)

13(7)

2(1)

101(56)

36-45 43(13)

0(0)

3(1)

10(3)

7(2)

0(0)

13(4)

17(5)

7(2)

100(30)

Total 27(39)

23(33)

6(9)

20(29)

3(4)

1(1)

8(11)

8(12)

3(4)

99(142)

29

Table 9: Percentage of SC Bemni men in different forms of primary employment by age group (N in brackets)

Farmingand household

Study Business Private service

Contractor

Artisanal work

Mules/Goats

Army/ITBP

Other Govt work

Total

16-25 17(4)

43(10)

0(0)

22(5)

0(0)

0(0)

4(1)

9(2)

4(1)

99(23)

26-35 50(9)

0(0)

11(2)

0(0)

0(0)

22(4)

11(2)

0(0)

6(1)

100(18)

36-45 67(6)

11(1)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

22(2)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(9)

Total 38(19)

22(11)

4(2)

10(5)

0(0)

12(6)

6(3)

4(2)

4(2)

99(50)

Table 10: Percentage of Bemni women in different forms of primary employment by age group (N in brackets)

Farmingand household

Study Business Private service

Contractor

Artisanal work

Mules/Goats

Army/ITBP

Other Govt work

Total

16-25 60(72)

34(31)

1(1)

3(2)

0(0)

0(1)

0(0)

1(1)

1(1)

100(109)

26-35 86(78)

3(2)

0(0)

4(4)

3(2)

0(0)

3(2)

1(1)

0(0)

101(89)

36-45 98(40)

0(0)

0(0)

2(1)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(41)

Total 76(190)

16(33)

1(1)

3(7)

1(2)

0(1)

1(2)

1(2)

1(1)

101(239)

30

Table 11: Percentage of GC Bemni women in different forms of primary employment by age group (N in brackets)

Farming and household

Study Business Private service

Contractor

Artisanal work

Mules/Goats

Army/ITBP

Other Govt work

Total

16-25 60(48)

34(27)

1(1)

3(2)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

1(1)

1(1)

100(80)

26-35 86(61)

3(2)

0(0)

4(3)

3(2)

0(0)

3(2)

1(1)

0(0)

101(71)

36-45 97(29)

0(0)

0(0)

3(1)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(30)

Total 76(138)

16(29)

1(1)

3(6)

1(2)

0(0)

1(2)

1(2)

1(1)

101(181)

Table 12: Percentage of SC Bemni women in different forms of primary employment by age group (N in brackets)

Farming Study Business Private service

Contractor

Artisanal work

Mules/Goats

Army/ITBP

Other Govt work

Total

16-25 83(24)

14(4)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

3(1)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(29)

26-35 94(17)

0(0)

0(0)

6(1)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(18)

36-45 100(11)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

100(11)

Total 90(52)

7(4)

0(0)

2(1)

0(0)

2(1)

0(0)

0(0)

0(0)

101(58)

31

Table 13: Landownership of Bemni households in 2003 and 2012 (N in brackets)

GCs 2003% of total GC households

SCs 2003% of total SC households

Total 2003% of total households

GCs2012% of total GC households

SCs 2012% of total GC households

Total 2012

0-5nalis

11(14)

48(24)

21(38)

26(26)

72(28)

39(54)

5.01-20 nalis

36(47)

448(22)

58(105)

43(43)

21(8)

37(51)

More than 20 nalis

53(69)

8(4)

41(73)

31(31)

8(3)

24(34)

Total land owned(nalis)

4237 400 4637 2084 231 2315

Mean landholding(nalis)

32.6 8.0 25.8 20.8 6.1 16.7

Source: Village surveys conducted by Jane Dyson in 2003 and 2012

32

i