During an unusually cold week in January 2024, Dhanpatiya Devi’s family of five ate a wild-growing tuber twice a day, every day.

“There was nothing else but gethi,” she said of the dark and hairy potato-like root vegetable that Adivasi communities dig out from the ground in the remote forests of India's poorest state.

“It had been nearly four months since we received rations,” said Dhanpatiya Devi, a frail woman in her late forties.

The gethi offers a starch that is difficult to render edible. Dhanpatiya Devi and others of the Parhaiya indigenous tribe she belongs to—one of 75 ‘particularly vulnerable tribal groups’ or PVTGs by official nomenclature—said the peeled and boiled gethi is left overnight in a straw basket lined with paddy husk, positioned in a shallow riverbank for its bitterness to leach out with the flowing water.

It is then sliced thin and consumed with a sprinkling of salt. Dhanpatiya Devi was incredulous as she handed one sample over.

“You won’t like it,” she said.

Dhanpatiya Devi lives in Surungahi, a small hamlet adjoining Nawadih village in the Ramgarh block of north-western Jharkhand’s drought-hit Palamu district.

From September 2023 through January 2024, none of the residents of Surungahi received their monthly quota of subsidised food grains guaranteed by the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013.

When rice was distributed in February 2024, there was no mention of the preceding four months’ quota of rations, said Dhanpatiya Devi.

Across a handful of villages in the Palamu and Lohardaga districts of Jharkhand, the state with the second highest number of multidimensionally poor Indians according to the NITI Aayog’s 2023 report, residents said they experienced months-long periods of being turned away at fair price shops; and many were unable to access any free or subsidised foodgrain for an entire quarter even though the NFSA made food and nutrition a right that poor Indians can demand.



Read more - https://article-14.com/post/foraging-to-fill-gaps-in-food-security-net-jharkhand-s-poorest-adivasis-face-ration-delays-shortages--65e53b4138648