Dhar, Madhya Pradesh · September 2026
Madhya Pradesh Field Survey- Dhar District
The Dhar households are wholly of the Bhil, drawn from Lakshman Kheri, Jhabua and the villages adjacent. They are households sustained by women — nine of the thirteen respondents — who go out to daily wage-labour while the men, by their own account, stand aside and are reckoned a burden. Earnings seldom exceed five or six thousand rupees a month; the households are modest in size; and of land, livestock or ration card there is none.
- Conducted by
- -
- Location
- Dhar, Madhya Pradesh
- Respondents
- 0 households
FINDINGS
The survey found food insecurity to be complete: every household had relied upon fewer and meaner foods, curtailed its meals, and seen its children go hungry on five days or more within the month. The order of eating was uniform and striking — in every case the men were fed first and the women last, a hierarchy the more notable for being upheld in homes the women themselves support. No household possessed any reserve against want: neither field, nor beast, nor card of entitlement. The defining finding of Dhar is this double burden borne by its women, who both earn the household’s food and eat the least of it.
FIELD NOTES
- 01Fieldwork in Dhar was conducted under heavy and persistent monsoon rain, which turned the earthen approach-tracks to mud and made several of the outlying hamlets troublesome to reach. In places the roads were unmade altogether, and where construction had been begun it stood unfinished, so that the way in was broken and waterlogged by turns. The rains, which respondents named as the hardest season of their year, thus pressed upon the survey the very hardship it had come to record. Interviews were conducted gently and with consent recorded beforehand; the women answered readily, though questions touching the children’s hunger were met at first with a certain reticence. It should be noted that several households approached were bound by kinship, which may bear upon the uniformity of their replies.
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