Another interesting trip that I made towards the latter half of the project, this time with Vinod Kumar, the architect and regional planner in our team, was to a village in Haryana, where we got data for a paper we were jointly writing on schools, not just locations but also the quality of teaching etc.
A trip that depressed me much was to Mehboobnagar in Andhra Pradesh and this was in connection with a totally different project that CSD was doing for UNICEF Delhi – a literacy project evaluation. We found very visible and almost universal signs of heavy drinking by both men and women in the evenings. They were landless labourers, from some of the poorest communities in one of the poorest districts in India. Questioning the women as to why they frittered away their meagre earnings and also ruined their health so, we got the defiant answer, 'How else do you think we can face the next day. Our life is so hard!'
What was even more stunning was to learn that they habitually dosed their infants and young children with opium to keep them quiet while they were away at work or even when they carried them along!
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