The mountain range, hoever, still hovers over the hills, as crisp and grand as ever, bringing calm to even the most irate of personalities.
It’s precisely the route from Palung to Dandabas and then further down to Gogane VDC that has meant radical transformation for this area’s inhabitants. Two kilometers of paved road, and a further twenty-four kilometers of dirt road brought with it a handful of opportunities.
“Before the road came, we had to carry our sacks of potatoes or cauliflower to the market to sell. If we set off early in the morning, we didn’t reach home till about two in the morning the next day. Even then, how much can a man carry on his back?” asks Ram Chandra Thing. He is one of the many who were resilient for the definite construction of the road.
For the people of Dandabas village, making ends meet was a struggle in itself. Six months in the year, many were forced to seek labor elsewhere, in Narayanghat, Chitwan, and sometimes Kathmandu, working on others’ fields.
“As soon as the boys were old enough, we all started looking for outlets to send them away – often weaving carpets in the cities,” laments Ram Chandra. Now, the need to find labor elsewhere is recessing, and for the younger ones, it has meant they finally have an opportunity to go to school.
The local school, Shri Sundar Devi High School, presently has about five hundred students. “Before the road came, there were at most 150 students in the school,” recalls the school’s headmaster.
At around the same time that the road was being constructed, the GIP (Girls Incentive Programme) which was also in operation, provided the necessary boost for female participation in education, with the provision of free oil for every girl that went to school. And with the road on its way, there wasn’t a need for the students to be pulled out even after the oil stopped being distributed.
“Initially, even if it was just greed for oil, the girls were sent to school. Now it’s become a habit and we have the knowledge of how important a school is,” says local villager Devi Maya Tamang.
The bigger project funded by the World Food Programme (WFP), Manahara-Dandabas Rural Road, although begun in 1997, didn’t pick up in the Dandabas sector until 2002. Since then, self-sustenance agriculture has been the focus of all the villagers in this area.
“On average, even the lower-income households have a yearly turnover of about one lakh (100,000) Rupees,” says Thing. Previously, due to lack of transport, the villagers were not able to reap the benefits of their land. Landslides had destroyed their farmlands, and whatever vegetation was possible, was not being utilized as the market was inaccessible.
“It simply wasn’t possible to grow all we wanted to, because we had no way of selling it. So, our land was just going to waste,” Thing added. Now the village is renowned for its potatoes and cauliflower, which find their way all the way to Kathmandu and Hetauda.
Many families in Dandabas are even making a surplus, allowing them to take their profits and invest in fertilizers, seeds, thus increasing their production potential. The difference the road has made to the lives in Dandabas is most tangible. It has been five months since electricity has found its way here; there is a lodge and restaurant, and a newly established mill. Above all, you can see the smiles on the residents’ faces, and at least a speck of fulfillment. However, the days of desperation are not all gone. “There is water shortage that needs to be resolved. We hardly even have water for drinking; the closest supply is hours away. For farmers like us, without water, we have nothing,” says Ram Chandra.
Along with the shortage of water, the vegetation has recently become victim to club root which has often meant that a whole year of hard labor for many has amounted to nothing, with the ailment spreading throughout their crops. This said, the livelihood of Dandabas is certainly no longer in the dire situation the villagers themselves recall living in. It is the first village along the rural road to have been able to reap the tangible benefits of road development. Further down the hill, in Gogane things aren’t quite the same.
ON THE OTHER SIDE….
The road from Dandabas to Gogane VDC is a difficult one. It swivels and stumbles downwards, for what seems like forever. Upon reaching Kagati Khola, the last village to benefit from the road, the almost miraculous feeling of progress experienced in Dandabas is gone. The mountain range is no longer visible, and the lodges and mills already seem like distant memory. Scurrying schoolchildren in their uniforms are nowhere to be seen, and the pristine and clean appearances of the villagers of Dandabas are replaced by exactly what one would expect from a place like Gogane.
The road has arrived, and yet its benefits not quite. If Dandabas was about 10 kilometers from Palung, Kagati Khola is almost 16 kilometers further down, towards the end of a challenging bend.
“Mathijati subidha chhaina (we don’t have facilities like the others),” says Debaki Kaliraj. Referring to the area’s ward no., the very first thing she proclaims is that “Number one, we have problems.”
Of these, it’s the road itself that is posing as a rather significant problem. The road “has changed our lives completely. We now know how to live, how to fend for ourselves,” says Debaki. However, her complaints are that though they have been taught to grow their own vegetables and have had a taste of what self-sustenance looks like, the road is simply not stable enough to ensure that trucks and vehicles come to pick up their labor, to take to the market and sell.
“Just last week, a whole three quintal load of radish went to waste. All of it, rotten, because the truck couldn’t get to our village.” The difficulties do not end here. As with Dandabas, there is not enough water for vegetation.
There is no nearby school, either, meaning that the children leave early in the morning, only to come back late at night, tired and hungry.
“We send our kids to school. We know how important it is now, but it’s so difficult. We worry when they leave, something might happen along the way, and can’t fulfill their basic demands for notebooks, pencils,” says Putu Maya Shrestha.
Getting to and from health posts is still a challenge for these villagers.“We can’t take pregnant women on our backs, and when the road is blocked as often as it is, we face grave problems,” declares Putu Maya. The problems are many, and thus far, the only solution to come has been the road. The project, however, has been a success in its construction.
BEHIND AND BEYOND…
The World Food Programme (WFP), the facilitators of the road construction project, working hand in hand with MDI (Manahari Development Institute) Nepal have been the driving force behind the road construction. It was carried out under WFP’s work for food drive, distributing rice in exchange for labor in the construction. But there have been a few complaints that some of the laborers haven’t even received their supply of rice. “We worked so hard and still haven’t seen all the rice we were meant to have gotten,” says Debaki.
Perhaps all the benefits to be reaped by the road are yet to be seen in these villages. It is however certain that the road and the rice that came with it alone are not the solution to food security problems faced by villagers in the VDCs connected to the project. The age-old issue of food dependency is one that can only be commented on in the years to come. In sum, only time will be able to tell exactly how revolutionary this road has been for its target beneficiaries.
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