A few months ago I travelled to Darbhanga district of Bihar. This post draws from 3 of the places I visited during my journey: a poor village, a lower-middle class village, and a lower-middle class part of the city.

Agriculture

All crops have been destroyed due to low rainfall which has been appropriately labelled by one villager as “God’s Piss.” The fields are now full of weeds. Some desperate farmers have planted more plants, only for them to be burnt again. Other farmers with more money have used it to plant mango tress, which will only give fruits after many years. Another class of farmers have sold their fields to brickyards, whose owners are locally known as “Sand Mafias.” The selling of field gives the household a lot of money, but it is very likely that those funds would be exhausted soon and the farmer would end up landless. After the brickyard is done with the field, the empty hole turns into a pond. Nearby fields are now gradually getting destroyed as their sand is now falling in the pond. Some fields have already been destroyed like this. The ponds are also a hotspot for defecation.

Mini-forests are also common in the village, with an average family owning around 5 tress. The village I visited mostly contained mango tress and bamboo. The bamboo is used for constructing homes, and the villagers are careful to give the grass (bamboo is a grass) enough time to regenerate. It is easy to travel in the forest due to its low density.

Agriculture is mostly limited to self subsistence. Crops are usually consumed by the villagers, but a large part is sent to the family members living in the city. These people working in the city are usually males who are barely able to survive on their daily wages. However, due to crop failures this year, the trend has been reversed with people in city sending money to their families in the village.

Education

Thankfully, girls are now also being sent to schools. Households have enough funds to send all of their children. However, girls still face heavy discrimination. They have to do all of the usual household chores, while boys laze around and play games. The talks of marriage start as soon as they are 18, sometimes even before that. One girl who I talked to in the village told me how she is facing pressures from the family when she hasn’t even finished her bachelors. However, I was able to see some positive impact of Indian serials on gender roles.

The situation is quite different in the city. One can see couples wearing expensive clothes in the universities. The students seem very progressive on most ideas and they were speaking very fluent Hindi with little accent. This was quite a shock to me, as I wasn’t expecting such a high level of westernization in Darbhanga. I think it would be quite impossible for me to distinguish these people from the normal batch of students I meet in Delhi.

City

Like most Indian cities, there is significant urban sprawl. I suspect a legal ceiling on building height, since I didn’t saw any buildings higher than 5 floors. The city is highly dependent on private vehicles for transportation, due to virtual absence of public transport.

The houses are made of bricks and coloured with light colours like yellow and pink. (It was actually painful to see the pink houses. They didn’t look cute at all.) I was not able to find the outlet of drainage system, but I can at least confirm that they were not dumping it in the “3 lakes.” However, there are a lot of swamps, which are disappearing with creation of new residential homes. In fact, I was able to find more pigs than cows or horses in the area. Those houses, however, looked pretty comfortable. The houses of the poor regions, on the other hand, fared much worse. There was virtual absence of paint on buildings, and some 1 room houses were actually in the middle of a swamp, with people using scattered bricks to go inside their own houses.

Transportation

For people without private means of transportation, tempo is the only vehicle that they can use to travel from one place to another. Tempo can be thought of as a big auto-rickshaw with a capacity of up to 11 adults. For people from the poor village, the fare for the nearest market and railway station is ₹20. In the city, due to considerable urban sprawl, the fare for going from one corner of the city to another can cost even up to ₹100. The number of private cars have increased a lot since the last time I came here 5+ years ago. Cars, which are usually purchased by people in the city, can now be spotted even in the poor village. I don’t think there is any public transport.

Village

Most houses in the village only have a ground floor. The walls are made of bricks, while the roof is made of a combination of bamboo and ceramic tiles. Earlier the houses were made of mud and dry grasses, but the constant need for maintenance was very bothersome for the villagers. The houses become very hot during summers, so people would escape to the forest in afternoon. This escape is not possible for villages with little forest cover, and living in that heat is unbearable.

Most houses have toilet nowadays. One person told me how a group of vigilantes started slapping people who were defecating on the road, with the result of people shifting to forests for defecation. Groups of houses usually use a common hand pump. The hand pump gives cold water in the summers, and hot water in the winters. The water is drinkable. However, nearby villages are feeling a acute scarcity of drinkable water.

The electricity supply has improved over the years. Earlier there was electricity only at night with frequent cuts. Now it’s available both in day and night with less frequent cuts. Households have a smart phone or at least a dumb phone. The government have added street lamps powered by solar power at around 10m distance in the village. No lamp have been stolen yet. The younger generation exhibit some skill in operating the smart phones, but that only go as far as pushing a particular sequence of buttons. It is better than nothing though. A lot of houses have government subsidized TVs right in their home. Only a few years earlier there was only 1 TV in the whole village, with many people gathering at that house to watch TV in a very communal manner.

There is a sharp hindu-muslim divide in the village. So sharp, in fact, such that hindu live on one side of the road while muslim live on the other side. The hindus talk of the other side with much prejudice. However, I was surprised to see that during Muharram almost all hindus participated in the proceedings, providing lemon juice and money if they were not walking in the march.