100 Homes

Men
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Per day
Home 32
Mandla, Madhya pradesh
Mandla location map

K lived in a household of three with his wife and his daughter. He built his house together with his wife from the wood of Sagon trees from a forest nearby, and although the house was theirs, it was built on someone’s else’s land. The house itself was one of the less well built houses in the village. Like many families in the village, K and his family received a grant from the government under the Swachch Bharat scheme to build an indoor toilet; they contributed some of their own money to the grant to make sure that the toilet was suitable for even their nine-year-old daughter to use unsupervised and for her to be safe at night. Their daughter was very small and thin for her age, but bright and clearly adored by her parents. Her mother told us how hard it was to conceive her - after 13-14 years of endless meetings with doctors and snide comments from people who wished K to marry someone else, their daughter was born. She was unfortunately bitten by a dog a few days ago, making her parents very worried when we met them.

K’s family did not own farmland or cattle, and their kitchen was stocked with wooden tubs for storing food instead of the more expensive metal ones. Instead, they mostly relied on K’s work as a tailor for men and on MNREGA-provided work for his wife, and most recently, she had been employed to water Karanj trees planted along the main avenue in the village.