Gullargaht Rehab: A move in the opposite direction!

Gullarghat, a location once said to house more than 150 families, has now become a land ruled by tigers of Melghat. Gopi Nanda, the only tribal still staying in the location, said, “We were shown many locations to rehabilitate at. After a lot of deliberations our elders of the village decided to move from this location.” He said that out of the 150n families in the village about 30 were not interested in moving but due to the majority wanting to move out they were left with no other option.

Another issue, pointed out by Nanda, was that the amount that was settled by the government for the rehabilitated villagers was never given completely to them. He said that due to the huge amount of Rs. 10lakh which many villagers thought would be enough to help them sustain the villagers accepted the program and moved out of Gullarghat. Problems started to arise once the money was exhausted and they were left to fend for themselves. Nanda stated that there were a couple of reasons behind people running   out of the money; firstly there was no skill development or money management training given to the villagers. The other major reason was that a few people did not either receive or collect the complete amount of Rs. 10 lakh. This occurred due to the rush of moving the tribal villagers by the government and because the some villagers were content with the first installment of Rs. 5Lakh they had received in the beginning of the rehabilitation and did not bother to collect the rest.

Upon speaking with the Melghat Tiger Reserve officials they said that as far as the dissemination of the amount promised to the villagers was concerned, the administration had guided all villagers into opening a bank account and all their dues were paid to them electronically via bank transfers. Also a lot of women had received skill development training such as tailoring work, typing on computer etc. The training were given in order to help them sustain themselves and their families.

Through all this deliberations and interviews one could argue that even when the government took an initiative to educate and rehabilitate the tribal’s of Melghat they might have inadvertently made a decision that could make the tribal villagers not only landless but also homeless.