Chronic hunger killed 50 in Balangir Dist. due to Criminal Negligence by Orissa State Govt.

Read below the chilling facts about the gross human rights violation happening in Balangir dist of Kosal region...Can you imagine 50 hunger deaths in last two years...Yes it is true...The m****** F****** Orissa state govt. is in a denial mood from the last many years where as people are dying of hunger, selling their child for two time of meals, migrating to other state in search of livelihood...And what to say about our elected representatives ? licking their master's boot in BBSR ...60 years of criminal negligence towards KOSAL region has created todays situation where our people are being forcefully displaced to give land to the multinationals like Vedanta, our farmers share of water from the Hirakud Dam is being diverted for the Industries...Our people have given the greatest sacrifice when 40,000 families were displaced to build Hirakud Dam to save coastal orissa from Flooding....and now those people are back stabbing us....Now time has come to take the destiny in our own hand a create a separate state of Kosal full of prosperiety and impartiallity......JAI KOSAL....MAY MAA SAMALEI GIVE ENOUGH STRENGHT TO THE POOR PEOPLE OF BALANGIR AND KOSAL SO THAT THEY CAN FIGHT AGAINST THE CORRUPT AND IMPOTENT STATE ADMIN.......

Written by Priya Ranjan Sahu for Hindustan Times (publish dt. 24th Feb 2010)

Nine-year-old Ram Prasad Bariha saw his brother, sister and mother die within a month — September 2009. His father, Jhintu Bariha (42), followed a month later. The dreaded Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput (KBK) belt of Orissa is yet to come out of the starvation-migration-death cycle. It accounts for 71 per cent of the state’s families below poverty line (BPL).The Bariha family of Chabrapali village of Balangir district’s Khaprakhol block is no exception. In the last two years, 50 people in the 30-45 age group died of chronic hunger and prolonged malnourishment in Balangir, according to members of affected families and social organisations active in the area.
HT visited five blocks of Balangir — Khaprakhol, Belpada, Tureikela, Bangomunda and Muribahal — where the deaths have orphaned 300 children. Balangir is 340 km west of Bhubaneswar.
The dreaded Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput (KBK) belt of Orissa is yet to come out of the starvation-migration-death cycle. It accounts for 71 per cent of the state’s families below poverty line (BPL). The region spanning the southwestern tribal tract of Orissa came under the spotlight in 1986, when news of starvation deaths and distress sale of children in Kalahandi drew the attention of then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Tens of thousands of crores have since been spent on development of the region. Some areas, such as Kalahandi, have turned around.
But several pockets in the KBK belt remain trapped in abject poverty. In Balangir alone, about 62 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, official estimates say.
But data available with the Union Rural Development Ministry says only 476 (0.2 per cent) of the district’s 240,001 households covered by the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) have BPL cards that give them access to subsidised foodgrains.
The district administration is still in denial, so is state revenue minister Surya Narayan Patra. He said, “I have received a report from the Balangir collector on Jhintu Bariha’s family. It says starvation is not the cause of the deaths.”
Dr Purnachandra Sahu, chief district medical officer, said: “Most patients here suffer from malnutrition and anaemia.”
Patra said he had no information on the 50 deaths but would initiate a fresh enquiry into the Bariha case. “My whole family died due to lack of food,” said Jhintu’s father Champe (79). But Balangir collector Aswathy S said: “Jhintu Bariha was paid Rs 10,000 before his death.”
The state advisor to the Supreme Court-appointed Commission on Right to Food, said in its September 2009 report: “Inadequate food intake was taking a heavy toll on the health of the whole family.”
But Aswathy claimed, “We did everything possible for the family under the government’s social security programmes.”These programmes never really took off in Balangir. The Western Orissa consortium for implementing NREGS admitted in 2008 that the scheme had failed to deliver in Balangir.
The public distribution system also has holes. Distribution is done according to the 1997 BPL survey even though another survey was done in 2002.
Also, in the last 13 years, many have branched out of their original families after marriage, like Jhintu. But they aren’t entitled to PDS facilities. Besides, many migrated to other states in 1997 and were left out of the BPL list.
Food, Supply and Consumer Welfare Minister Sarada P Nayak blamed the Centre: “The 1997 list left out many.”

JAI KOSAL - KOSAL STATE INDEPENDENCE SLOGAN "Kosal Maa ra Dakra"

READ THE HISTORIC KOSLI SAMBALPURI RAMAYAN "RAM RAHA" ONLINE

We are happy to inform you that "Ram Raha" the one and only RAMAYAN book in our own Mother tongue KOSLI SAMBALPURI Language Written by Kosli Balmiki Late Sri HEMACHANDRA ACHARYA has been digitized and is available in the public domain ....
Please click the link below to read the HISTORIC book RAM-RAHA
http://oaob.nitrkl.ac.in/61/1/RamRaha-I.pdf
Special Thanks to :-
Dr. Pritish Acharya (Late Hemachandra Acharya's son), Sambalpur University, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Srujanika and everyone involved in this historic task....
About The Author :-
Noted litterateur, translator and scholar, popularly known as the Balmiki of Koshali literature for his translation of The Ramayana into Koshali, Hemachandra Acharya was born on April 20 in 1926 in Garbhana village of Bargarh. A people’s poet, his milestone work of writing The Koshali Ramayana – Ram Raha, published by the Sambalpur University in 2001 - made him dearer to the masses in Western Orissa region where people speak Koshali (Sambalpuri) language. Even today, people in villages in the region religiously preserve and recite his translated version. He was also engaged in translation of the Upanishad into Koshali. His other major literary works include several plays, Sanchar geets and the traditional Keertan Geet. He was honoured by the Sambalpur University and the Western Orissa Cultural Forum, besides scores of literary organisations. He breathed his last on the 26th of August 2009.

She was sold for Rs 40 two decades back; today she might have to sell her daughter

Written by Vibhuti Mishra for "The Tribune"

"I walk eight kilometres every day to earn Rs 260 a month. On some days we eat and on some days we don’t. We sleep on empty stomachs. I became a showpiece. They published my photographs and forgot I needed food to live." This comes from Banita (32) who was sold for Rs 40 in 1985. Her name along with that of her native place Kalahandi made it to the headlines, causing the then Prime Minister to rush to Orissa.

Driven by hunger and starvation, her sister-in-law Phanus Punji sold off 14-year-old Banita to one Pati Boda for just Rs 40 almost two decades back. The then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia rushed to the remote village of Anlapali in the Khariar block of Kalahandi, where she lived. There was a beeline of politicians, officers and journalists to the place. The heart-rending story of Banita formed the staple of sensational stories in glossies and Kalahandi became synonymous with poverty, starvation and sale of children.

Eighteen years later the world has forgotten Banita who is still caught in the vortex of poverty and misery. She has become cynical. "Why do you all come? To take my pictures and print them? What do you come to see? My hunger, poverty, my blind husband, my famished children?" she cries out. Worn out and withered, Banita looks like an old woman. A mother of five and with a blind, ailing husband to look after, she is neck deep in loans and ever-increasing interest. None of her kids go to school and dreadful poverty stares her in the face. To stave off starvation, she perhaps has no other option but to sell her youngest child, a daughter who is barely three.

Pati Poda who bought her got her married to his blind, elderly son Bidyadhar Poda and she bore him five children. "My husband forbade me to have the operation. He said he would abandoned me if I got it done," she says explaining why she did not go for a family planning operation. To make matters worse she faced social boycott as she was not the legally wedded wife of Bidyadhar. The marriage did not get social sanction as they did not have the money to host a wedding feast.

"There was no marriage. I had no choice," she reveals calmly. However, 15 years later on October 21, 2000, her marriage was conducted according to Vedic rites, thanks to former union minister of state for railways Bhakta Charan Das who funded the wedding and the feast.

The villagers accepted her but life remained grim. She was engaged as a cook in an Anganwadi centre 8 km away. At first she earned Rs 3.50 a day; an amount that was hiked to Rs 7. Today she gets a monthly salary of Rs 260 which is not paid to her regularly and at times, if she buys leftover food from the center for her starving children, the supervisor deducts her salary.

She is the only earning member of her family. None of her children go to school and her blind husband cannot work. Sometimes her elder daughter tends cattle and gets some rice in as payment for the work. To ward off starvation, Banita has taken loans from local people at an interest of 5 per cent per month. She now lives in Khatimunda village. The other villagers are too poor to give any help to her. And Banita’s is perhaps the poorest family.

Banita’s case has been extensively reported but she has got little benefit. Says B. Behera, a social activist working in the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region, "It’s all because of the lack of political will and failure of administrative machinery. There are hundreds of such cases and poverty continues to stalk these poor souls. They are forced to sell everything, including their children, to eke out a living." But the government officials do not agree that any child has been sold. The much touted KBK (Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput) project launched by the government of India in 1996 has failed to take off and bring about the all-round progress envisaged for the poor and poverty stricken people of the region. Says an official of the Bongomunda block, "Actually the funds for KBK were released almost four years after the programme was announced and then the administrative set up was not there. So it will take time. " However there have been constant allegations of corruption and siphoning off of funds which politicians like Bishwabhushan Harichandan, revenue minister of Orissa and B. K. Deo, MP from Kalahandi, deny.

Some years back Banita had to support her parents-in-law, too. But now they have died and along with them have died her hopes. All household things have been sold off and her life is a daily struggle against poverty and privation. Life has nothing much to offer her. Much like the promises of the district administration. Poverty alleviation is a topic that figures only in government meetings.

Banita is worse off than her sister-in-law Phanus who still lives in Anlapali. She has at least got an Indira Awas Yojana house to find shelter in. Even that has not come to Banita who in her search for food has unwittingly become food for publicity.

February edition of Firstever Kosli Sambalpuri e-Magazine BENI launched

Read the Second edition of firstever Koshli E-magazine “BENI”  for the month of February. Thanks to Saket Sahu, Editor of “ BENI” for this initiative and hard work. Also, we would like to express our deep thanks to the members of the Editorial Board for their enthusiastic support and valuable suggestions for the development of the journal, to the contributors, the supporters, and wise citizens of “Koshalanchal”.

Please click the link below to read the Kosali e-magazine BENI.......

http://koslisahitya.wordpress.com/benimasik-patrika/

Jai Kosal

Jai Kosli

Sambalpuri Bastralaya moves for patenting

Sambalpuri Bastralaya Handloom Co-operative Society Limited has filed a patent application on textile weaving technology and design application on wall hanging made by it using the new technology.

Sambalpuri Bastralaya, Bargarh, in association with Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property (IP) Law, IIT Kharagpur, with the support of the Department of Textiles and Boyanika has filed its first patent on a process for making a woven article and more particularly, involving appealing designer areas and its processes for manufacturing without warp in the Kolkata Patent Office.

The patenting would avoid the complexity in weaving pattern to generate the designs and also prevent problems of colour variation and product characteristics from one manufacturing lot to another. It also filed four design registration applications for wall hanging made using this new technology.

The pattern and design registration will ensure Sambalpuri Bastralaya exclusive rights over the manufacturing technology for 20 years.

The technology has been invented by Bhikhari Meher of Bargarh and handed over to Sambalpuri Bastralaya.

Boyanika and the Department of Textiles have entrusted registration of Geographical Indications in traditional textile items in Orissa with the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur, for legal processing.

Source :- Indian Express