JAAGO GUJARAT

No more Satyagraha:
Salt makers use RTI to save livelihood
RAHUL MANGAONKAR

When Mahatma Gandhi broke the salt law at Dandi in 1930, it was a momentous chapter in India’s freedom movement. In the 60th year of Independence though, the original salt makers of Gujarat have been given marching orders. These inhabitants of ‘Survey Number Zero’ now face eviction, with the forest department serving notices to them.

The Agariyas, who are the traditional salt makers, are nobody’s people. How else can one explain their absence from the survey carried out by the revenue department of the Gujarat government, years ago? Ironically, the area inhabited by these people was numbered not for its human inhabitants, but due to the wildlife there.
The Agariyas as a community have been traditionally making salt in pockets of the 5,000 sq km spread of Little Rann of Kutch, for centuries. Little Rann is also home to the wild ass. For years, both man and animal have peacefully co-existed in this area, with hardly any conflict.

Only when foresters wanted to declare the area as a wild ass sanctuary that it dawned upon babus that this area had never been accounted for. For all these years, nobody cared for the condition of people living here. It required the presence of wild asses to draw attention to the Agariyas. When the need to name this stretch arose, so as to notify it as a sanctuary, the powers-that-be declared the area as ‘Survey Number Zero’!
The Agariya Heet Rakshak Manch (AHRM) has been championing the cause of the community by making them aware about their fundamental rights. AHRM has been relentlessly lobbying with the government at various levels. AHRM, supported by Janpath, also created awareness amongst Agariyas about their Right to Information (RTI).

Several members of the community have now used the RTI Act to ensure effective deployment of mobile health vans and setting up schools for the community’s benefit.
Now faced with eviction notices, residents of Survey Number Zero are using the RTI Act to demand accountability on the question of their very existence and basic fundamental right to pursue their livelihood, employment and sustenance.

Additional collector, settlement, appointed to rehabilitate those who stand to be displaced, was supposed to give an opportunity to the affected people to argue why they shouldn’t be displaced. In this case, the Agariyas had to prove that traditionally, they have been dependent upon the Little Rann of Kutch for making salt, which was their sustenance. They would not be able to sustain themselves anywhere else, bereft of their salt pans.

How many Agariyas make salt on Survey Number Zero? Responding to a RTI query, the salt department stated that approximately 15,000 Agariyas depend on their traditional occupation of salt making. Whereas another RTI query revealed that 1,776 applications were received for verification of rights. Moreover, the Agariyas had no idea for long that they had been served eviction notices.

Now they have filed RTI applications demanding to know how and when eviction notices were sent and how awareness, if at all, was created about the verification of rights process.

jaago.gujarat@indiatimes.com