Indore · September 2026
Madhya Pradesh Field Survey- Indore Outskirts
Upon the margins of Indore, in Sadalpur and Rangwasa, live the households of the Nath, and these stand apart from all the rest in the very shape of the family. Here there are, in effect, no adult men: the respondents are almost wholly women, among them an unusual number divorced or widowed, who keep their households alone. In consequence the order of eating is reversed, the children being served first and the mother absorbing whatever shortfall remains. Alone among the four, every one of these families holds a ration card.
- Conducted by
- -
- Location
- Indore
- Respondents
- 13 households
FINDINGS
The survey found food insecurity here no less complete than elsewhere, affirmed universally and at the severe level. The households owned neither land nor livestock, and drew their water from a distance, from no tap of their own. The most pointed finding of the entire study resides in this quarter: though these households alone possess the ration card the State provides, they were found to be not one degree less hungry than those possessing nothing — a quiet but damning testimony to the distance between formal entitlement and actual relief.
FIELD NOTES
- 01The outskirts of Indore were surveyed in rain, and the character of the place was that of a neglected urban margin — the ground polluted, littered and ill-drained, the standing water of the monsoon mingling with refuse to insalubrious effect. The roads were poor and in parts unmade, and ongoing construction had left the approaches broken and muddied, so that movement between households was slow and difficult. The wet weather throughout made the fieldwork laborious and now and then obliged its suspension. Interviews were conducted sensitively, the more so given that many respondents were women heading their households alone; consent was recorded in each instance. The sample, here as elsewhere, was one of convenience and partly linked by kinship, which should temper any claim to statistical representativeness.
PHOTOS
