“I stay in the blue one next to the yellow one and my brother stays in the tent diagonal to mine”.
V lived with her youngest son, who is unmarried. Her two other sons, both married and with children, lived nearby in two tents made of blue and yellow tarpaulin. “After marriage and having children of our own it’s better we have privacy to maintain and deal with our family matters,” they said, and some of the tents had been occupied by the same people for as long as 15 years. V’s house was built with help from a government grant which covered half the expenses, but her family finds the bureaucratic requirements of these intimidating. As members of a Scheduled Caste they are eligible for state support, but the barriers to these - documents, filling forms, etc. - are very high for such low-income groups.
Outside V’s house were large packets of laundry detergent which were balanced upon a few motorcycles. The brothers explained that they bought the detergent in bulk from a wholesale outlet and then sold it to people who lived in nearby villages. They were not satisfied with this, however, as unpredictable weather and high overhead costs - maintaining motorcycles and buying petrol - cut their profits very short. Their water was collected in a tank from a river 5 kilometres away, sent to a water plant to be purified, and then supplied to houses from taps. The children attend school irregularly, and V’s sons admit that it is a chore to send their children to school. “We somehow push these monsters to school, but as you can see they are always outside and even we don’t force them [to go] anymore.” The villagers also had health insurance cards which covered upto INR 50,000 in medical expenses.