Eighty-five-year-old Radha Charan mops his brows with a towel and escorts the departing visitors to the car. “Please, saab, please ask them to come and construct the bridge for us. It will make our lives so much better,” he says with joined hands and eyes full of hope. “I hope you enjoyed the lassi.”

At a time when the government is on an overdrive to bridge the gulf between the privileged and the oppressed in the country, Takiagaon, a dot of a Dalit village in the vast brackish hinterlands of western Uttar Pradesh, could give policymakers some food for thought. For despite being the so-called object of the government’s benevolence for many years now, the village ? a cluster of 50-odd houses an hour’s drive from Mathura ? struggles to survive.

A mere 150 km separates the village from the ministry of human resource development in New Delhi. But for Radha and his folks to draw level with the rest of India, the distance to be covered happens to be much, much longer. The government stands contented by doing its bit for the villagers ? there are seats reserved in premier Indian institutions for the children of Takiagaon to occupy. It’s just that no child from the village will ever get there ? at least not in the near future.

And Takiagaon, of course, is not the only village of its kind. It is one of the many villages that house about 80 per cent of the entire Dalit population in India, out of whom about 85 per cent are landless and some 60 per cent depend on wage labour, where ? if figures available are an indication ? they earn Rs 23 less than non-scheduled caste labourers. Oppression is at its best in these pockets of rural India, and Takiagaon is but an example.

The village, to begin with, is poverty and negligence personified. Agriculture is the main livelihood of the Jatav settlement ? most villagers till fields owned by Brahmins in the vicinity, in return for a part of the produce. There’s no sanitation in the village, no agricultural assistance to reclaim brackish land for irrigation, no water treatment. The nearest health centre is five kilometers away. In the absence of a cremation ground, the dead get dumped in a swamp to the south of the village.

As the crow flies, Takiagaon is a mere 200 metres from the nearest village backroad. But for all practical purposes, Radha Charan and his fellow villagers have to trudge four kilometres along a dirt track to get to the nearest roadhead. During the monsoons, the trail gets too sludgy to walk on, cutting the village from all human access. “For four months every year, we remain landlocked, and have to make do with whatever we have,” says Radha, a former pradhan of the village.

There is a shorter road, and a far better one, that can potentially connect Takiagaon to other villages in the area. Running over a nullah, it’s barely a few hundred metres from the metalled road that leads on to Mathura. The only glitch is that most of the path on the other side of the nullah cuts through agricultural fields owned by Brahmins. “They do not like the idea of Dalits passing through their fields,” says Radha.

To put an end to the thoroughfare, the Brahmins struck down the concrete bridge that ran over the nullah a few years ago, rendering the people of Takiagaon immobile. “We pleaded with politicians to build us a new bridge, because we were told that the road exists on government survey maps and hence can be used by us,” says villager Ram Prasad. “No one heard us.”

Getting landlocked during the monsoons brings with it its own share of problems for the villagers. Cattle-herding is their secondary occupation, but no sale happens during the monsoons since dairy products can’t be taken to the local market. In case of a medical emergency, villagers carry their patients on a string cot and smuggle them out of the village through the bridgeless route in the dead of night to avoid being spotted by the Brahmins.

And it also means that the village children can’t go to school for some months, though going by the state of the local school they clearly don’t miss much. The primary school in the village exists merely in name. Purni Lal, the solitary teacher, teaches 40 students ? from class I to V ? all together. Purni hails from Pali, a village about 20 km away, and has to skip school during the monsoons. Combined classes are his way for making up for lost time.

But I have no choice,” he sighs, going on to elaborate on the abject conditions that prevail in the school. “No local teacher is willing to join the school, because they belong to higher castes and would not condescend to teach Dalit children,” he says.

Sukhpal Singh, a 23-year-old relative of Radha, attended the school and went on to earn himself a bachelor’s degree in arts from a college in Mathura. “But I didn’t get a job, despite the quotas,” he says. “Wherever I applied, I would be asked to cough up money. I couldn’t, and someone else walked away with the job.”

Jagdish, a 32-year-old first-generation literate, has heard about the ongoing debate on reservations. “But how does it matter to us,” he asks. “Our children are never going to make it to the IITs and the IIMs anyway. The politicians may have equated reservation with benevolence in the past, but someone else invariably taps the favours way before they filter down to the grassroots level. And we get left out in the cold, just like we have always been,” he says.

Radha, however, feels that money is the root of all woes, as it can buy people things irrespective of caste or creed. “And that’s one thing we don’t have,” he says.

Nevertheless, he hasn’t given up hope. Ajay, his grandson, is too young to go to school, and Radha hopes he will grow up to become a government servant some day. “But will he,” Radha Charan asks with a smile.

‘Brahmins are untouchables here’

MARGINALISED: R. Vishwanatha Iyer and his wife

Like many other Brahmins at Dalapathi Samudram village, R. Vishwanatha Iyer, 62, left the village after passing high school. “My father was wise, he foresaw the future of Tamil Nadu and told me that I would be destroyed if I stayed back in Tamil Nadu. And so I went to Mumbai.” He worked at Air India, in Mumbai, Bahrain and other cities and then at the now defunct NEPC airlines at Madurai. He now shuttles between Madurai and Dalapathi Samudram. Iyer thinks he’s been fortunate — had he stayed back at his village, he’d have ended up like his cousin Yeganarayan Iyer, a retired headmaster whose children couldn’t study beyond high school because he couldn’t afford to pay the fees charged by private colleges.

Dalapathi Samudram village falls in Tirunelveli district, in the far south of Tamil Nadu, some 130 kilometres from Kanyakumari and close to the Kerala border. In the district’s Nanguneri Taluka, two villages stand out. One is Tiruvengdanadapuram where many Brahmins settled down because of a nearby river, and Dalapathi Samudram, four km away where a handful of Brahmins are holding on to their vanishing culture.

The Brahmins have long gone from Tiruvengdanadapuram. The only reminder of them is a Shiva temple they constructed. Dalapathi Samudram once had 80 Brahmin households. The number is down to just 12 households today. “We are the untouchables in Tamil Nadu,” Vishwanatha Iyer exclaims.

The mass exodus of Brahmins from the village began after M. Karunanidhi reserved 50 per cent of seats in colleges and jobs for the scheduled castes and the backward castes. Not to be outdone, chief minister J. Jayalalitha increased the quota to 69 per cent (the Supreme Court has capped reservations for the underprivileged at 69 per cent). Today in Tamil Nadu 18 per cent of seats in government jobs and education are earmarked for the scheduled castes, one per cent for the scheduled tribes, 20 per cent for other backward castes (called most backward castes in Tamil Nadu) and 22 per cent for backward castes. Brahmins are left out in the cold.

Vishwanatha Iyer’s children did face discrimination. They came of college age in Madurai. His daughter Meenakshi wanted to study at a government engineering college in Madurai. “She got 96 per cent but she never got admission. She went to the Birla Institute of Technology at Pilani in Rajasthan.” His other two daughters also studied computers at private institutions. “I took huge loans for their education. Government colleges would have been cheaper. But in Tamil Nadu merit doesn’t work,” he sighs.

To be sure, the other side of the story is that Dalits were treated badly in pre-Independence Tamil Nadu. Reservations and government subsidies to build homes and other aid have helped them out of their poverty and misery.

Dalit children are much better off than the children of other communities because they now have a tradition of going to school. Dalits here don’t suffer from backbreaking poverty.

When it comes to college admissions, sometimes college managements select Dalit students but don’t always put up their names on the notice board. The student then seeks admission elsewhere and the college puts the seat in the open category. Says Ponraj (who has no first name), general secretary of the Madurai-Kamarajar Manomani Sundernar University Teachers Association of Tirunelveli, “We have started a Save Education Campaign with the help of students and found so many irregularities in admissions.” But Ponraj admits that such admission irregularities could be pegged at 20 per cent.

As far as reservations in government jobs are concerned, for the last five years, the Tamil Nadu government has stopped fresh recruitment owing to budget constraints. As a result, the state’s aided and government colleges have some 3,500 vacancies for teachers. This despite a government order that while the ban on recruitment may apply to other departments, education, medical services and the police department are exempt from the ban. So have reservations worked in Tamil Nadu? Ask 75-year-old farm labourer Kandaswamy that question and he sniggers. “Yes, I know there is a scheme for building homes for the poor where the government chips in Rs 30,000 if you are willing to put Rs 20,000 in the initial foundation laying costs. But who has Rs 20,000,” he asks. He darkly suggests that reservations have only helped certain people in his colony (the village is segregated on caste lines). Kandaswamy, a Dalit, lives in a thatched hut at Thiruvengdanadapuram village. The only luxury in his home is a black and white television set. He came to Thiruvengdanadapuram 25 years ago after he retired from his Rs 1,000 a month job as a farm hand on the tea estates in Munnar in Kerala. He has 12 children and only one managed to study till the 12th standard. He is hopeful that his grandchildren will do better than his children.