Rae Bareily: NDTV reporter Kashish travels to a remote village in the constituency of Rae Bareily in Uttar Pradesh where farms have been wiped out and women are badly in debt because of drought.
She narrates her visit to the drought-affected region:
At 11 am, Hanuman, nearly a hundred years old, walks us around a village that's almost the same age.
The only growth this village has seen in a century: It's population. There was no road here till last year. The area is part of the Rae Bareily constituency, associated with the Gandhi family for 50 years. But they are so remote that Sonia Gandhi has never managed to reach them nor has any sort of development.
Hanuman tells us the village finally has a visitor. An unwelcome one. The drought. A village already used to getting by on nothing, is forced to make do with even less.
Hanuman explains, "Sometimes we get food, sometimes there is no meal".
An hour later...we meet Guru Prasad, a Dalit with less than an acre of land. He has 13 people in his family. Guru Prasad says the odds are against his survival: "If we get any odd work here and there, we eat. Otherwise, we don't. Since there's no water in the fields, so there's no ploughing and no sowing at all."
We join Guru's family for lunch. Chappatis and one vegetable. His daughter-in-law says dal hasn't been on the menu for months. Who can afford it?
After lunch, Guru Prasad's young daughters head to a field where they have temporary jobs. A reality faced by almost every family in this panchayat.
The age-old caste system weaves in more complications. Guddi's husband is a Brahmin, so he can't work with lower castes. That's forced him to move a hundred kilometers to find work in the city.
Guddi has 7 children, all of them girls. She's been borrowing money to feed them. Sometimes, she asks neighbours to loan her some vegetables for her next meal.
"My life is a borrowed one," she says, "we live on debt now." Sometimes, she says, she contemplates killing herself.
That evening, just before we leave, the village pradhan says he has something to show us. He walks us to a river which could easily have watered fields, if a dam had been built. "But who do we make these suggestions to", he complains?
So, a drought that could have been mitigated...attacks this village everyday with full force. There is no shelter.