My mother Sulekha and I visited Baikunthapur on 12th June, 2001. We took a local train from Kolkata (Sealdah South) to reach Mathurapur station on the Lakshmikantapur line. From there we took a shared auto rickshaw to Raidighi (1 hour), which is the place from where the boats going to the Sunderbans leave. We took the boat going towards Moipith. It was about a 2 and 1/2 hour jouney. The country boat with a small motor moved slowly. It was quite crowded and it stopped to pick up or drop off passengers whenever someone on the banks of the river or on the boat signaled for a stop. There were quite a few people on the boat carrying fresh-water fish-seed (live baby fish) in large utensils and it was an interesting sight to see them constantly agitating the water in the utensils by beating it with their hands to aerate it. We reached our destination bank and from there walked to Baikunthapur (about 1 hour).
The road from the riverbank to Baikunthapur village is laid with bricks and has been washed away at several places. There are no pucca roads or motorized vehicles on the island. We saw couple of bicycles but majority of the people were on foot. We saw only two concrete houses on our 5 to 6 km walk to Baikanthapur. Most houses are made up of mud and have sloping thatched roofs. There is no electricity or telephone/telegraph facility anywhere on the island. Very few houses have sanitation facilities. There are few tubewells with hand pumps for drinking water. It is extremely green and damp all around with several ponds. Lot of the land is waterlogged.
The BTS club building seemed to be somewhere in the middle of Baikunthapur village. There are houses all around. The club building itself is a two storeyed pucca building. It seemed like it was the only pucca building around. The rest of the houses were made of mud. The name of the building is displayed in bold letters, which translates from Bengali as "Baikunthapur Tarun Sangha, A rural development endeavor". There are two small rooms (about 20ft X 15ft each) on the first floor. There is a big verandah and then a flat piece of open land on the front side. There is a toilet next to the club and a hand pump about 50 meters away. The rooms have one electric light each, which run on solar cells. There is an inscription on the verandah wall which says that the building has been built by an endowment from Lutheran World Service. One of the rooms of the club is used as an Agricultural Service Center, which is a resource center for sustainable agriculture (without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) supported by the government. The wall of this room has various charts and posters containing information about seeds, agricultural practices, time of the year when a certain crop variety should be cultivated and a list of medicinal plants which grow in this area and are used as the source of ayurvedic medicines for treating common ailments. (The villagers depend a lot on these traditional auyurvedic medicines because there is no qualified doctor in the village. For any serious medical condition including snake bites, which is quite common, the patients have to be taken to Raidighi. Lot of these patients die on the way to the hospital). There is also a list of plants grown in the nutrition gardens maintained by the ladies. The second room is used for various club activities. There is a cupboard, which contains lot of papers and some common medicines for fever, stomach-upset etc. The second floor of the club is used for holding classes for girls of standard 7 and 8 under a government scheme where these girls are given supplementary help and some vocational training. These girls are mostly the dropouts willing to get back to the normal school. Next to the club, the construction of 3 classrooms is in progress with aid received from a funding agency in Ireland following the devastating cyclone in the Sunderbans in June 1999.
The most notable thing about the location of Baikunthapur village is the very limited communication it has with the outside world. The nearest telephone/telegraph office, college, market and health center is in Raidighi, which is at least 3 and 1/2 hours away (1hr walk to the riverbank and then 2 and 1/2 hours by boat). Because of the lack of information, the people of the island villages are having to reinvent the wheel on various occasions and though the place is extremely rich in natural resources, these have not been sufficiently developed to provide enough income to the people. The villagers are extremely poor. Any education/development related activity should have as its focus, generation of employment for the people by using the abundant local agro-based resources in a sustainable way. This improved local resource utilization then can be used by the people for living better (for example eating a more nutritious diet by growing certain vegetable varieties or by cultivating medicinal plants for ayurvedic medicine) and later for exchanging them for other commodities by finding suitable markets for these products. Some of our observations/suggestions regarding this are given later.
After going to Path Bhavan, the children are ready for mainstream school in the 5th grade. In 2000-2001, 15 out of the 21 children who were in the 4th grade in Path Bhavan entered 5th grade in regular school. In 1999-2000, the number was 15 out of 22. This year, a boy Sandeep Sahu from Path Bhavan stood 1st out of 400 students in the admission test to standard 5 of mainstream school.
The mothers of the students going to Path Bhavan have parent-teacher meetings every two weeks. At these meetings, a mother said that they discuss the progress of their children with the teachers, talk about hygiene and nutrition and other concerns about the children. Information about infant food and nutrition for the growing children is given. Both parents come to the school once every three months to talk to the teachers.
BTS is trying to reach out to the community through the mothers of the children attending the school and also other women. The men involved with working of BTS seem convinced that educating and empowering women is key for community building. The president of BTS (who is also the headmaster of the nearby government primary school) said that the men learn from the women about agricultural practices like nutrition gardening. The women are divided into groups and are asked to grow certain vegetables in small plots of lands. Experiences are shared at meetings and then if a particular vegetable is successful, the men will cultivate it on a larger scale. The women seemed much more confident than in other villages we have seen in West Bengal. For one, it was a pleasant surprise to see that most of them did not feel the need to cover their heads with the sari, which is an age old custom to show 'respect' for the men.
Sushanta's story about getting FCRA clearance for the organization is interesting. After he applied for FCRA clearance, he did not get any response for a month. He had heard before that unless he bribed the concerned parties, his clearance would not be granted and there would be no response. Sushanta was very clear about the fact that his organization was doing good work and that he was not going to pay any bribe to get FCRA clearance. So he sent a reminder to the FCRA office with a photocopy of the earlier application. He did this every month for the next six months, each time attaching photocopies of the earlier letters. After this an inspector came down for a site visit. However no action was taken even after the visit of the inspector. Then again Sushanta continued sending reminders every month and when 12 such reminders went unnoticed, he sent copies of all his earlier letters with another reminder indicating that he was sending all these to the home minister as well. He got his FCRA clearance within the next couple of weeks. Thus (yet again) perseverance backed by truth won in the end.