The drought is no time to be a dhobi

Farmers in Rajoli suffered losses on their cotton crop last season with high temperatures causing a pink bollworm attack, and switched to red chilli.
Drought I Express Photo Service
Drought I Express Photo Service

RAJOLI (RAICHUR): When matches are made in Rajoli, Hulligeamma Budeappa is the first to know. She is in her early 60s and her family has been doing the laundry for 15 families for generations. As is the tradition for rural dhobis, she is paid at wedding time in cash and new clothes. Or she is paid in paddy every year, 50 seru (one seru is a little over a kg) per person in her household.

Hulligeamma’s life depends on water. She makes a living from it and gets paid in produce that needs it. So the current drought has hit her harder and Hulligeamma is crying hoarse about it.

Rajoli is a village in the drought-prone district of Raichur (rainfall less than 650 mm) in Karnataka. It has seen six consecutive seasons of deficient rainfall. In the past monsoon year, two cycles of rain (the southwest monsoon from June to September and the northeast from October to December) were short by 15 per cent and 71 per cent respectively in Karnataka. 

Farmers in Rajoli suffered losses on their cotton crop last season with high temperatures causing a pink bollworm attack, and switched to red chilli. But too many people planted chilli and prices crashed this year.

It was a bitter harvest. Standing chilli crops have been burnt to avoid the reaping expenses. Many fields are dotted with abandoned heaps of chilli, like hot blisters.

With little money to go around and barely enough water, tempers are short and generosity scarce.

All of Rajoli’s drinking water sources have dried up and its people have to go to a tap in Irapuram village, 3 km away. Hulligeamma says, “You will have to go without drinking water if you don’t have a two-wheeler.”

The gram panchayat has tried to ease the villagers’ hardship by renting a tap from a farmer for Rs 8,000 a month but it rarely serves all the families.

There are 11 people in Hulligeamma’s family: three sons, three daughters-in-law, three grandchildren, Hulligeamma and her paralysed husband. Her youngest son brings drinking water, four pots every two days, for the entire family on a borrowed motorcycle.

“He gets up at 6 am and spends an hour at the tap,” she says. “Often there are people from Irapuram too. Then he has to wait till they are done, which means he has to spend nearly two hours at the tap.”

If the boy falls ill, then the family simply has to make do with what is left because none of the others knows how to ride a two-wheeler. Should that happen, the ‘good water’ is reserved for the older people and the younger ones drink salt water. “Salt water gives us diarrhea,” Hulligeamma explains. “At least the young people have the health to withstand it.”

Sometimes, she begs the neighbours to fetch her a pot too. “They can be insulting,” she says. “They don’t have enough to be generous.”

The dhobi community of Rajoli live along a three feet wide canal. There’s a tap that gives salt water for a few hours in the evening and each family might get five to eight pots on a good day. If the children have any play time after school, they are handed water pots to go look for a tap.

Food is cooked in salt water so the dal ends up rare. “We have to pour oil and even then it is only half cooked,” says Hulligeamma’s daughter-in-law. Better-off neighbours with fewer mouths to feed, like Yeramma Iraimatti, have switched to vegetables like ladies finger and tomatoes. Yeramma is also one of the rare few who orders water cans from a store.

Last week there was a wedding in the wealthier part of the Rajoli. Barely in their twenties, Nagesh and Saraswati wed in the presence of over 500 guests and nearly a hundred stayed over in the neem-shaded house. The young groom says, “We had to hire tankers for the water: Rs 500 for the tanker and Rs 800 for a tractor to pull it... I drove it myself. We need two such tankers a day. I wish I hadn’t married.”

Hulligeamma has been called in to do the laundry. “Normally my daughters-in-law and I would take the clothes to the canal nearby,” she says, but that has dried up. Her regular customers send her a lesser load once a week. Earlier the upper-caste households used to send a bundle twice a week. 

“There is the water stored in a drum (500 litres). We may need four of that for the wedding, but I'll make do with one.”

But how? Hulligeamma breaks into a wide smile.

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