Drying Out - Banaskantha

DRYING OUT: BANASKANTHA

Ajit Chaudhuri

Visited in October 1988
Written in November 1995

Anyone who has gone through the grind of management school would have come across the term ‘mid-term projects’ wherein you are sent out in the midst of your course to an organisation to do some real work for a period of ten weeks or so. Motivation to select a particular assignment varies – among the common ones are; it looks good on your future CV, it takes you home, it’s an assignment for two and thereby gives you the opportunity to spend time with your girlfriend at some organisation’s expense. Me and a (male, I might add sadly) friend chose an obscure and vague project with Banas Dairy at Palanpur simply because we could get to see a part of the world we hadn’t as yet and, possibly more importantly, it was unlikely we would have to do any serious work.

We were right on both counts! Banas Dairy had no clue what to do with two bright young soon-to-be management graduates and its Managing Director almost had a heart attack when he discovered that he would have to put up with us for slightly longer than the week he had thought while formulating the project. We had no idea what ‘enquiring into the efficacy of first-line supervision of village milk societies and suggesting methods to increase milk procurement’ entailed, but soon got into the business of procuring a map of the district, selecting thirty far-flung villages and insisting upon visiting them.

Our status as visiting management cats enabled us to bulldoze our way through – we would disappear into the countryside for ten days at a time along with a jeep, driver and interpreter, live off the land, take our night halts in the villages, meet a large number of interesting people and then return to Palanpur (which, after field trips like these, would seem like Bombay for a while) before setting off again. The result was a thoroughly enjoyable project, lots of travel and lolling around and just enough work (or pretence of it) to impress the daylights out of Banas Dairy on counts of diligence and rigour.

Banaskantha (pronounced Banaaskaantha), in which Banas Dairy operates and from which it gets its name, is the northernmost district of Gujarat and, to my mind, its most beautiful. It is geographically diverse – as you travel from east to west you come across heavily forested hills, then agricultural plains, desert, and finally swampy uninhabited marshlands known locally as rann which forms the district’s border with Pakistan. To the south and east lie Mehsana and Sabarkantha districts respectively, to the north lie three districts of Rajasthan, Sirohi, Jalor and Barmer. To the west, along with Pakistan, is Kutch. Banaskantha is divided into eleven tehsils, all of which we roamed around in.

Danta, the easternmost tehsil, is all hill and forest with tribal communities staying deep within. Tucked inside these hills is a booming town of some religious significance or the other called Ambaji. The best way to judge the size of a town is to find out how many film halls it has. Ambaji had two, so we stayed two days, which gives you an idea of what was on offer in the list of exciting things to do in town. The restaurants seemed to offer more variety than the entertainment industry – we were introduced to innovative delicacies such as ‘green piss masala’ and ‘switcarn veg soop’.

The central part of the district was a cow belt, with a popular Indian breed of cattle, the Kankrej, getting its name from a tehsil in these parts. The milk societies here were highly active, and spending time studying them was good fun. We soon got into a routine, getting into a village in the afternoon, resting, watching the milk collection, chatting with people until late at night, getting a tour of the village early the next morning, looking into the books of the milk society, and then pushing off into the next one.

The highlight of the day would be watching the evening milk collection. It is mainly the young ladies of the village who bring the day’s output to the milk society, so we would sit around the society building trying to look as official as possible while observing them with the sun setting into the background. Pure, unadulterated pleasure!

That Banaskantha is a border district is very obvious, especially when travelling within the tehsils adjoining Pakistan. The smugglers here are not the usual run-of-the-mill, small time fellows one normally finds in all of India’s borders, who are constantly running shy of the police and security forces. The area falls on the highly lucrative grand trunk route of drugs, Afghanistan via Karachi and Bombay to the US, and the men involved are appropriately nasty – well armed, willing to return fire, and distrustful of strangers in their villages, especially after dark.

This is where travelling through the local dairy cooperative has its advantages. Banas Dairy was enough of a people’s organisation for us to stay in these villages, meet people and chat to them even about things like the drug trade. At the same time, it was enough of a government organization for us to be allowed through check posts without the usual grilling, and to get accommodation at official guest houses (albeit the worst rooms, and only when no one, from peons upwards, needed it for any purpose whatsoever).

In talking with people, we got to understand what the modus operandi was. Banaskantha and Pakistan are separated by a thirty to fifty kilometre stretch of rann which is uninhabited and nearly impossible for humans to cross because of quicksand. Camels, however, can detect quicksand and are therefore able to cross relatively easily. Their insides are stuffed with drugs that side, they wander across on their own, they are picked up here, shot, and the drugs are taken out and transported to Bombay. Simple! This was borne out by the fact that, for some officially unexplained reason, the price of camels in western Banaskantha was very high.

In between the travel we slacked off at the dairy’s main office just outside the district headquarters, Palanpur. The guest house we were put up in was comfortable and Karsanbhai, the man Friday, a good cook though a trifle generous with his sugar in the dal. Time was spent eating, sleeping, seeing movies in town, and spending a maximum of one hour at the office mulling over papers and whatnot.

The height of excitement was a visit to a fair one evening, where we saw an assortment of acts guaranteed to zap the peasantry. There was a ‘Ride of Death’ in which a fellow on a Rajdoot motorcycle drives up and down around the insides of a large wooden circular drum with a female pillion waving her hands to the paying public. There was also the usual assortment of photo studios (with cut-outs of Amitabh Bachhan, Dharmendra and Rekha to pose with you) and fortune tellers. The most fascinating stall was ‘Hiralal Gadha, the talking donkey’ in which the paying public would form a circle around a man and his donkey and the man would ask the donkey who was the tallest, shortest, oldest, etc., etc., person in the room and the donkey would walk around and point to the person by touching her/him with its nose. Once the donkey’s credentials were established, the pair would have some fun at the audience’s expense – pointing out the biggest miser, the man nagged most by his wife, etc. Good fun all around!

The visit to Banaskantha ended with a presentation by us to the dairy’s management on our findings and a discussion about what could be done. To our shock and horror, those guys decided to implement much of what we suggested. To my further shock and horror, today, seven years later, the dairy is still functional and, I am told, profitable.