COVER STORY

The ground realities

A first-round study of the drought situation in some of the badly affected States, in the north and the west: Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

A FRONTLINE TEAM

HARDAR SINGH saw few brilliant prospects ahead when this year the rains came unexpectedly early to his village in Jhalawar district of Rajasthan. His expectations limited by the arid and craggy landscape, he still had reason to look ahead to a cultivation cycle somewhat longer than usual, perhaps even a yield that surpassed his best. With five bighas of land and an immediate family of 15, he completed his sowing, dispersing the seed saved up from an earlier year. He then waited for the rains that would nourish his crop of corn and bajra, not quite sure when to abandon hope as one scorching day followed another.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
Withering bajra fields in Chota Narayna village in Ajmer district of Rajasthan.

By late-July, with the few meagre sprouts on his field having withered and died, he swallowed his caste pride to join an exodus to Jaipur. It was his first expedition to the city in search of employment. At the midway point of the Sawan month, when he should have been busy tending his farm, he was one among thousands of near destitutes lining up for the sporadic work opportunities that are offered in Jaipur during the monsoon months. Two weeks into his futile circuit of the labour chowktis where casual daily work is handed out, his spirit broken, he managed to obtain an audience with the local administration after the intercession of local civil rights groups. But the administration is not geared to begin drought relief work in urban centres, and the early manifestations of distress migration have caught it on the blind side.

Dislocation and dispossession

Local conditions may differ as also the mechanisms of coping with adversity, but a number of themes have asserted themselves with almost universal ferocity in this year's drought. Dislocation is one such, as is dispossession. Hiraben Koli in Jadsa village of Kutch is thinking of giving her cattle away. She dare not ask a price for the animal since keeping it alive till the shrinking pasture lands around her village are renewed will itself be an ordeal. If she were to place the animal in the care of a Jain trust, she just might manage to free herself of the burden of nourishing it through the year. But if Hiraben is to come back to her village, she would have to pay a sum far beyond her means to retrieve her buffalo.

As the evidence of a truant monsoon became unmistakably clear, inhabitants of Jadsa village prepared for a mass exodus. By the second week of August, only the old and the infirm remained, left to fend for themselves through months of anticipated scarcity. Along with the landless who were the first to leave, the marginal farmers like Hiraben sought out the uncertain security of employment in the salt pans, construction sites and charcoal kilns elsewhere in the arid district. To sow her bajra crop, Hiraben had contracted a loan of Rs.7,000 at an extortionate interest rate of five paise on the rupee a month. When and if she returns to her village, she would have nothing by way of assets to call her own. Her meagre landholdings could be expropriated to settle the loan. And if her buffalo survives, it would become the property of the institution that tended it through the months of scarcity.

Crushing debt

The crushing burden of debt is another of the universal themes in this year's drought. It is a burden that is borne stoically by small producers who incur a debt to sow their fields and by the landless who are often in need of subsistence loans. For those who inhabit the fringes of official attention, each adverse occurrence in the elements means a further erosion of the ability to plan an autonomous livelihood.

Hari Singh of Budiya Ka Taal village in Agra district took a loan of Rs.7,000 from a local sahukar to sow a 10 bigha plot which he had taken on a paatta (partnership). He is now ruined and knows no way of repaying his loan. With a family of seven to support, he trudges to the nearby town of Tundla in search of a job that will fetch him Rs.50 or less. Bereft of the means to guard against adverse weather fluctuations, he is now on the verge of destitution.

Gajjumajra in Patiala district is at first blush a picture of agrarian prosperity. Houses built in brick and mortar are common and farmers drive around in smart new tractors. Children play in the streets, well clothed and fed. Shedding the customary appearance of bucolic good cheer would be for Gurinder Singh, a smallholding peasant, contrary to the Punjabi ethos. "It is not within us to remain glum," he says, "but this does not change the fact that if there are no rains in the next week our paddy crop will be destroyed." By the second week of August, this gloomy prognosis was an alarming reality.

All the 200 families in Gajjumajra, say local residents, are in debt. Loans have been arranged to install pumps that tap into a rapidly receding water table. The monsoon failure this year has already induced some of the villagers to sell their land. Others are trading in the wheat they had kept aside for consumption. Raising water from underground sources is becoming increasingly expensive. Years of reckless use has meant that the ability to withstand adversities of the weather has been eroded. Even if the water can be raised to save the paddy, the costs of production are likely to be substantially higher than the norm. There will be no profit to be made from the harvest and that is bad news for the debt-ridden farmers of Punjab.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
Adjacent to a community pond in Chota Narayna village, a well sunk as part of a groundwater recharge programme by the Social Work Research Centre, Tilonia. The Rajasthan State Irrigation Department worked on the pond as part of drought relief works in 2000, but left the project incomplete.

Partial sowing has taken place in 15 districts of Madhya Pradesh which have been categorised as "deficient" in rainfall. Another 24 districts are in the "scanty" category and have seen no sowing at all. Orange trees in the thousands have shrivelled and died in Chhindwara district.

Sporadic greenery is visible in parts of Bhopal division. But Kushi Lal warns against forming any firm judgment on the basis of these impressions. His village of Banpur has had just one spell of rain early in July. Its only pond, about 25 years old, is almost dry and the village community has to fetch its requirements of drinking water from elsewhere.

Alauddin, a small holder from a nearby village, has seen his crop of soya and corn fail. He is now left with a debt of Rs.4,000 to a cooperative bank. He is anxious to know if the government would assent to a large scale loan write-off, but is uncertain about the kind of priorities that shape these decisions. Dayaram from Banpur village has a loan of Rs.3,000, also from a cooperative, hanging over his head. He has not managed to raise a decent crop in over three years but has not benefited from any of the relief works launched over the years of scarcity. He is eager now to volunteer for any food-for-work programme that may be launched but unsure whether his claims will be entertained when the muster rolls of beneficiaries are drawn up. That, he points out, is entirely dependent on the caprices of the local administration.

Beyond the resources of memory

Memory is a valuable resource in times of adversity, particularly for people engaged in a cyclical operation. But the drought this year defies memory and saps inner reserves of strength. Sri Ram, a 90-something marginal farmer in Jhiran village of Bijnor district in Uttar Pradesh, sits despondent on his barren fields. His two bigha plot has not been tilled, as there has been no rain at all. The groundwater level has fallen so low that tubewells do not function. The option of raising groundwater through diesel engines is not open to him. Even if he were to pay a tubewell operator for surplus water to sustain critical farm operations, the price would be well beyond him. The kharif crop has not been sown and there is little likelihood that even a fodder crop could be raised. "I have never seen anything like this," says Sri Ram, groping for a means to cope with the utterly unforeseen.

Ram Chandra Nehra, a substantial farmer and an influential voice within Sihore village in Sikar district of Rajasthan, has managed to sow little more than two bighas of fodder crop in a farm of 100 bighas. At the midway point of the Sawan month, his farm is usually bustling with activity, employing on an average 15 workers every day from dawn till dusk. But today the farm is a picture of desolation with only a few of his many head of cattle hanging about indolently. He expresses the near universal sentiment of complete befuddlement, never having seen a similar situation in all his 65 years. "I am regarded as one of the better farmers in this area," he claims. "I have grain stocked for my family and perhaps a few more for a year or two. My stock of fodder could last me out these adversities. But I tremble within when I think of what lies ahead. What possibly could those less fortunate than me be doing?"

In Chhota Narayna of Ajmer district, memory reaches back to the year 1987, which was the last occasion villagers had to migrate out of the village in search of employment in the mid-Sawan month. Of the village's 1,800 bighas of land, just under three-quarters was sown. But less than a fifth of the crop survived even till early August. Surveying the parched fields with their stunted crops, Ram Karan, a worker with the Social Work Research Centre in Tilonia village, points to another hazard. Deprived of all sources of fodder, cattle are known to forage in the withering fields for nourishment. But the wasted crop has failed to soak up any nutrients and may turn into a slow poison for the animals.

As dark clouds swirled around the neighbouring district of Jaipur, there were hopes that a good spell of rain within the week could save the wilting crop. But the rains which briefly revived over Jaipur brought little more than a dusty flurry to the village. Even a fodder crop now appears ambitious. And a rabi sowing is seldom undertaken in the village, which lies within the vast stretch of soil-saline land abutting the Sambhar lake. If anything, winter rains would only partially mitigate the anticipated crisis of drinking water.

What, then, can be done? In the villages of Rajasthan, where the water budget traditionally has been little more than an assurance of bare subsistence, the dominant opinion is that the year's famine relief work should include a widely dispersed programme of sinking tubewells. Even so reckless a gamble against the realities of depleting groundwater and rising salinity may just pay off. In the desperation of the moment, the villagers of Ajmer and Dausa districts can only cling to this tiny sliver of hope.

Sharpening disparities

The rapid widening of social and economic disparities is another of the universal themes of this drought. Ram Karan offers a reality check even as the villagers of Narayna press their case for a tubewell. The State government is now discouraging the spread of tubewells because of concerns over the receding water table and the deteriorating quality of the water. But the town of Kishangarh, he points out, is just 30 km from the village. And the vast marble-cutting units there seemingly observe few constraints in their use of water. Groundwater from many adjoining villages has been tapped to keep the marble slabs cool as the vast blades cut through them.

GOPAL SUNGER
Following the intervention of local civil rights groups, Hardar Singh, a migrant from Rajasthan's Jhalawar district (in orange turban), gets a hearing from the Jaipur district administration, which, however, is not equipped to handle distress migration at this time.

The arid districts of Kutch, Saurashtra and north Gujarat occupy around 80 per cent of the State's landmass. But they get only 30 per cent of available water. The more prosperous south and central Gujarat corner more than a fair share of the State's water. Around two decades ago, borewells were thought of as a quick-fix solution, particularly in northern Gujarat's Sabarkantha and Mehsana districts. The result was a massive over-exploitation of the State's water resources. Wells are now being sunk to depths of almost 400 metres to access a water table that falls by a few metres each year. Salination and excess fluoride have also made the water unfit for both agriculture and human consumption.

A sharpening of disparities is also foretold by the state of the crop in the States of Punjab and Haryana, which afford job opportunities for workers from less well-endowed States during the harvest. Crops in Mansa, Sangrur, Bhatinda and Faridkot districts of Punjab have been badly damaged because of the rainfall deficit - which has been of the order of 50 to 60 per cent - and the low groundwater level. Sowing operations have not been undertaken in some areas in Ropar, Muktsar, Patiala and Jalandhar districts. In the fields of central and northern Punjab where paddy is grown, no drastic shrinkage of area sown has been reported. But the situation is grim. For instance, in Patiala district paddy is grown on 255,000 hectares, of which only 187,000 ha was actually sown. And as Chief Agriculture Officer B.S. Sohal points out, now even the standing paddy crop is in danger of being destroyed.

A considerable shrinkage of employment opportunities is inevitable in view of the fact that this year will bring a smaller harvest of paddy grown at much greater expense, while farmers try to scale back their commitments.

Fewer opportunities

Haryana, another magnet for migrant workers in the harvest months, is going through travails of even greater intensity. Huge tracts of land have been left unsown in the districts of Rewari, Gurgaon, Jhajjar and Rohtak. Farmers in Rewari district, where jowar, bajra, moong and gowar are customarily grown, recall that at the same time last year, fields were flush with crops that rose above their heads. Apart from the destruction to the traditional crops in Gurgaon, floriculture and bee farming have been affected by the drought. As in the neighbouring State of Rajasthan, the price of fodder has risen from Rs.80 to Rs.250 a quintal. Since an average productive animal requires at least 25 kg of fodder a day, anticipated expenses for the smallest holder could exceed the wage he earns from relief works.

V.V. KRISHNAN
A farmer at Jhiran village in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh.

Sugarcane and paddy growing areas in the north and northwest of the State have been hit. The vegetable crop in Sonepat, which meets a large part of Delhi's needs, has failed. Scientists at the Chaudhary Charan Singh Harayana Agricultural University estimate that the sugarcane yield could decline by 40 per cent.

Chander Kishore, a senior rice breeder at the university's Regional Research Centre in Karnal, believes that paddy will take an even more severe blow. Virtually no transplantation has taken place. "Paddy needs standing water and the losses due to transpiration are high," says he. Gajraj Singh Sahrawat, Deputy Director (Agriculture), believes that the system of double cropping in paddy has reached the end of its tether. The first round of transplantation traditionally begins in April and the second in June. Between these two events in the agricultural calendar, a great deal of water is consumed for irrigation, taking a heavy toll of groundwater levels. The recharge during the monsoon months is never quite complete.

This year, Sahrawat believes that the fact that July remained dry meant that farmers had to use all the available water, brought up at considerable expense and uncertainty owing to unstable power supply, to try and save the paddy crop. This was done at the expense of the standing crop of cane and the freshly sown jowar. Now he estimates that the farmer could take a hit on all three fronts. The losses in paddy in the most securely irrigated districts of Haryana could be as high as 25 per cent. Where rainfall dependence is higher, the magnitude of the loss could be even more. What the agricultural sector in Haryana faces today, in the estimation of Sahrawat, is a loss running to hundreds of crores of rupees.

Caught in the pincer of rising input costs and shrinking availability, militant farmers in the district of Panipat breached the Delhi-Rewari canal to draw water for their paddyfields. As their fields were inundated by the uncontrolled spurt of water, the city of Delhi woke up to a severe disruption in its water supply. Within Haryana, electricity board offices, which are the focus of rural ire over erratic power supplies, are in a virtual state of siege.

Rainfall in Haryana this year has been less than a fifth of the norm. A special girdawari or crop survey was announced by the State government between August 5 and 20. But the prolongation of the dry weather made this survey an unnecessary formality. Although a firm estimate of crop damage - conducted by village level officials or patwaris - is normally called for before invoking the drought code, the entire State of Haryana has already been declared drought hit.

Shrinking availability

All of Maharashtra, similarly, has been declared drought hit, for the first time since 1972. Although rainfall this year in Maharashtra does not compare as unfavourably with the last three years as in some other States, special difficulties have been posed by its temporal distribution. According to officials of the State Department of Agriculture, of the total kharif area of 13.63 million ha, 12.05 million ha was sown. But of this, almost a fifth has been badly affected by the drying up of the monsoons in July.

V.V.KRISHNAN
The plight of a canal in western Uttar Pradesh.

The problem, as Ashok Dhawale, general secretary of the Maharashtra Rajya Kisan Sabha points out, is that the rains in July are expected to nourish the first sowing to life and also prepare the ground for a second round of sowing. Neither happened. The dry spell in July destroyed crops of paddy, soya, cereals and pulses. Hopes were revived by rains in early August. But their suspicions now aroused about the vagaries of the weather, peasants are holding back on their second sowing, for fear that all their stocks of seed would be exhausted.

Cotton and sugarcane growers in Maharashtra have been particularly badly affected. In the case of both these crops, the situation in Maharashtra has a major bearing on aggregate availability. The State accounts for over a quarter of India's total cotton output and for just under 20 per cent of its sugarcane. In conjunction with Uttar Pradesh, which also has been declared completely drought hit, Maharashtra accounts for 55 per cent of India's sugarcane.

SANDEEP SAXENA
At Gohana in Sonepat district of Haryana, a farmer ploughs the field hoping the rains would come.

Cotton and sugarcane growers have not been paid for last season's offtake, though prices at least in the case of the latter commodity are at historic lows. Under the Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme, the Maharashtra State Cotton Growers' Marketing Federation is responsible for the purchase of cotton from the grower. The last season's payments have been due since January. The Federation, which has contracted to repay loans directly to the banks, has been known to settle this component without undue delay. But the tardiness in settling farmers' dues is engendering serious livelihood pressures in this season of scarcity.

Cotton is grown over 3.15 million ha in Maharashtra, almost entirely in rain-fed land. Irrationalities in the monopoly procurement scheme and slack prices have induced many farmers to switch to soya cultivation. This has proved a major error this year. As Udayan Sharma, secretary of the Amaravati district committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) points out, soya requires a lot of water. By July it was clear that the whole crop was lost. Orange trees in the Vidarbha region were all in bloom in June. But the dryness in July has killed all the flowers.

A crisis of availability in the case of cotton and sugarcane is also foretold by the drought conditions in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Western Uttar Pradesh, which prides itself as the "sugar bowl" of the country, could see a loss of 40 per cent or more in the sugarcane harvest. And Bhatinda in Punjab, which is known as the district of "white gold" for its bountiful cotton crop, has seen a 30 per cent decline in cultivation. The problems of extracting groundwater have been acute and farmers have been selling their cattle and jewellery to raise money to run diesel engines. Cotton cultivation begins in May and the crop needs to be irrigated within the first month. With only isolated patches having received this benediction, a massive crop failure in Bhatinda district is a virtual certainty.

Coping mechanisms

"We are leaving the cattle in the jungle to graze. Maybe they will survive. I do not remember such a drought in my lifetime. There was one about 45 years ago when people survived eating the bark of trees like sheesham and babool," recalls the octogenarian pradhan, Babulal Yadav of Pauri village in Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh. Swaran Singh of Jajpur village in Firozabad district, now reduced to a wage labourer, says that he and his family eats only one meal a day now. Maybe, he says, that could soon become one meal in two days. The animals have already started dying.

SANDEEP SAXENA
The remains of the day.

Food deprivation is not an immediate problem in Punjab, but peasant proprietors at the lower end of the scale, particularly Dalits, have begun selling out. "I had two acres of land and I sold it. What could I do when I don't have the money to irrigate the fields or to spend on diesel? Now I am relying on earnings from cattle," says Harminder Singh of Chuharpur village in Patiala district.

For the Dalit families in Punjab, drinking water is an additional problem. Still suffering the stigma of segregation, they are unable to afford the handpumps even where water is at an extractable level.

Farmers in Haryana have abandoned hope for the kharif crop. Their priority is to conserve their animal wealth and hope for adequate rains in September and the winter months. Maybe, just maybe, they could advance the rabi sowing and raise a reasonable crop to mitigate partially their enormous losses in the kharif.

LYLA BAVADAM
At a village in Dhule district in Maharashtra. Seeds for a second round of sowing are stored in the basket. The first crop failed and the farmers are in a quandary with regard to a second round of sowing.

In the villages of Gujarat and Rajasthan women and children have been put to work in the quest for the means of subsistence. The nomadic Rabadis of Gujarat, which normally returns to their villages in the monsoon, are leaving again in search of grazing lands. The desertification of Kutch and north Gujarat means that they have to travel further afield in search of grasslands. Where their quest will bear fruit is uncertain even as they set out. Any kind of vegetation will seemingly do - even the leaves and branches from date and neem trees.

In the hilly areas of Banaskantha district of Gujarat, menfolk have migrated in a largely futile quest of employment, leaving women as the sole source of sustenance for the family. They carry back-breaking bundles of firewood to the nearest town, which could be as far as 15 km away. After scouring the slopes for hours, they get as little as Rs. 5 on every bundle that they carry to the market. If the buyer is a little more thoughtful than usual, he would settle the price in grain. Samsiben Gamar from Kherma village wakes up at 4 a.m., cooks some food and sets off for the market. She returns by the afternoon, completes the household chores and then sets off for the hill slopes again in the evening.

The wait for relief

O.P. Meena, Relief Secretary in the Rajasthan government, believes that public works could start at once, since the Centre has cleared the diversion of available funds from other schemes. "The biggest problem," he says, "will be fodder and drinking water." In earlier years of scarcity, the government could tap the surpluses of adjoining States like Punjab and Haryana. But the sheer expanse of devastation this year renders that impossible. "We will have to supply 14,000 to 15,000 villages and habitations with drinking water out of a total of 41,000," says Meena. The maximum the State has ever done is 4,000.

C.K. Mathew, Secretary to the Rajasthan Chief Minister, points out that in certain parts of the State this is the fifth year of rainfall scarcity in a row. Though 2001 brought adequate rainfall in the aggregate, 8,000 villages spread across 12 districts were nevertheless hit by scarcity conditions. And the financial implications are only beginning to be calculated. In 1987, says Mathew, the State government brought 2.1 million families under famine relief works. Accounting for increases in population and the greater severity of this year's drought, the target this year could well be in the region of 3 million families. And if works and programmes normally begin in December, this time around they would have to kick off immediately. Calculating on the basis of the mandated minimum wage of Rs.60 a day for a whole year, the budgetary requirement for relief works in Rajasthan could well be in excess of Rs.6,000 crores.

Maharashtra provides relief through its unique Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). About 5,500 relief works are in progress across the State, says Suresh Joshi, Relief and Rehabilitation Secretary. The number of people enrolled on the EGS is also an indicator of rural distress. In May and early June this year, there were about 400,000 people on the EGS. This dropped to about 140,000 in June. In a good monsoon year, the figure for August should have been still lower. But this year the number on the EGS rose to 170,000 in the first week of August. The State government has a budgetary provision of Rs.400 crores for EGS, but Joshi points out that Rs.373 crores has been spent between the months of April and July. Unless the current indicators of weather and crop failure change radically, the State could be in need of a budget of Rs.1,500 crores this year.

Vithal More of the Latur district Kisan Sabha has a tale to tell that is quite far removed from this arid catalogue of budgetary statistics. This south Maharashtra district grows pulses, cotton and sugarcane and received a mere 48 per cent of average precipitation this year. "Apart from government slogans, the people have received nothing," says More. "The formalities to get a job under the EGS are formidable." Officials say that all it requires for EGS work to be made available is for a group of about 15 people to approach the District Collector and make a request. More provides the reality check: "Any group of less than 50 will be disregarded, and in any case this is an impractical clause, since it is difficult for rural people to coordinate such matters."

It has also been pointed out that the government chooses not to be directly involved in the EGS, often leaving unorganised rural labourers at the mercy of contractors. Given Maharashtra's precarious financial position, doubts have been expressed about the government being able to sustain the EGS and other relief measures during the drought.

DIONNE BUNSHA
Grazing sheep on a dry river bed in Sabarkantha, Gujarat. The fodder crisis has herders clutching at straws in their search for fodder.

Madhya Pradesh has placed a demand of Rs.626 crores and 250,000 tonnes of foodgrain on the Centre to relieve rural and urban distress after a third year of drought. But like Haryana, which doubled its estimate of the relief budget from Rs.615 crores to Rs.1,200 crores within the space of a week, this figure could soon increase.

In Uttar Pradesh, the rhetoric of relief has by all accounts been launched on a war footing. The State government claims that 6,302 canals, against the norm of 5,954, are being fed with water so that the lower reaches get an adequate supply. Similarly, nearly 150,000 ponds, it claims, have been filled with water, against the target of 13,600. A sum of Rs.22.10 crores has been disbursed to meet the immediate needs of drinking water.

DIONNE BUNSHA
Amli Koli and her friend from Zadsa village in Kutch digging for drinking water. The water in the nearby village tank is contaminated.

The reality across the vast plains of Uttar Pradesh is of canals running dry, ponds that are little more than reservoirs of slush and handpumps that fail to yield even to the most vigorous importunities.

Government sources reveal that a relief budget of Rs.5,600 crores would be required to cope adequately with the situation. The demand made of the Centre so far is Rs.700 crores, of which Rs.70 crores has been received and another Rs.60 crores promised at an early date. An additional Rs.207 crores is available from State coffers. But as these funds trickle down to the district administrations, their paucity becomes brutally evident.

Kavita Srivastava, an activist with the Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties in Jaipur, points out that muster rolls are drawn up for blocks of 15 days in emergency relief programmes. Typically, this is done once in the lean season for an affected village. By the time one cycle is over, the funds are exhausted, often leaving works incomplete. Wages then remain undisbursed for weeks together.

Aruna Roy of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan, which has been spearheading a "right to information" campaign in Rajasthan, believes that elements in the State administration have perhaps been sensitised by the broad assertion of civic rights by the poor and the under-privileged. But major administrative bottlenecks remain, corruption is still rampant and the political compulsions and core constituencies of the party in power remain unchanged. Coupled with the prevalence of scarcity across a wide geographic expanse in the country, this makes for a forecast of growing misery. Perhaps, say the civil rights groups which are gearing up for an extended struggle, the sheer magnitude of the crisis will galvanise the poor into staking their legitimate claim to the resources of the nation. But the drought of 2002 challenges not merely the administrative resources of the state. More than anything else, it is a challenge to its basic sense of humanity itself.

Reported by Sukumar Muralidharan in Rajasthan, Purnima S. Tripathi in Uttar Pradesh, Naunidhi Kaur in Punjab, V. Venkatesan in Madhya Pradesh, T.K. Rajalakshmi in Haryana, Dionne Bunsha in Gujarat and Lyla Bavadam in Maharashtra.