IFFCO Foundation Bulletin Aug 2013 Vol.1 No.2

Contents
Priyanka Basu
Singing for a Living, Living to Sing: Some Methodological 1-17
Choices in Reading Performance Practices from
Rural India and Bangladesh
Chandrani Dutta and Dr. Anuradha Banerjee
An Inventory of Population Resources in Disaster Prone 18-37
Coastal Districts of West Bengal and Odisha:
Challenges to Risk Management
Aruna Pandey
Food Security, Field Logistics and the Promise of Delivery 38-44
Harish S. Wankhede
Development and Exclusion: Struggles of the Oppressed 45-51
Communities and the Quest for Economic Justice
The IFFCO Foundation Bulletin
Volume 1 Number 2 August 2013

1
Priyanka Basu Methodological Choices and Rural Performance Art
Singing for a Living, Living to Sing: Some Methodological Choices in
Reading Performance Practices from Rural India and Bangladesh
Priyanka Basu1
This paper engages with the literature and the modes of practice in the song-theatre genre
of Kobigaan (musical contests between two groups of poet-singers). It thus introduces the
ritual spaces where seasonal community performance practices take place and are related
to the agricultural calendar of the working populace. In the process these performances
also highlight larger issues of livelihood, and collective social behaviour. The dialogic
quality of these performances encompasses the immediacy of the audience, the performance
space and the obvious presence of the performer. Based on fieldwork in select villages of
India and Bangladesh, this paper analyses if and how performance can be used as a method
to study socio-cultural aspects. Within its limited scope, this paper will briefly engage with
certain field-based observations of the genre and will situate the specific observations
within the rubric of broader methodological choices. In this endeavour, the paper will try
to re-read performance into song genres that have jostled between literary history and
practice in search of its own performative identity.
Keywords: Kobigaan, rural performance, caste, class, ethnography, practice and identity
1. Introduction
In his ‘Introduction’ to Rabelais and his World, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) introduces,
exemplifies and analyses the related categories of ‘folk laughter’, ‘folk festivities of the
carnival type’and ‘folk humour’, thus offering a historical overview of ‘laughter’in general
and how it formed a key element in the lives of the populace in the Renaissance and the
Middle Ages in Europe. Bakhtin writes:
‘The manifestations of this folk culture can be divided into three distinct forms.
1. Ritual spectacles: carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace
2. Comic verbal compositions: parodies both oral and written, in Latin and in the
vernacular
1
Priyanka Basu, PhD Scholar, Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia, School of Oriental
andAfrican Studies Studies (SOAS), University of London, 10 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London,
WC1H 0XG
Email: 256154@soas.ac.uk
2
For example, Bakhtin’s insights on the subject of ‘abuse’and ‘abusive language’mark a certain traditional
quality of it:
It is characteristic for the familiar speech of the marketplace to use abusive language, insulting words or
expressions, some of them quite lengthy and complex. The abuse is grammatically and semantically
isolated from context and is regarded as a complete unit, something like a proverb…Abusive expressions
are not homogenous in origin; they had various functions in primitive communication and had in most
cases the character of magic and incantations…These abuses were ambivalent: while humiliating and
mortifying they at the same time revived and renewed. (Morris, 1994, p. 203)

2
3. Various genres of billingsgate: curses, oaths, popular blazons’
These three forms of folk humour, reflecting in spite of their variety a single humorous
aspect of the world, are closely linked and interwoven in many ways (Morris, 1994, p.196)
Bakhtin later emphasises on the nature and quality of the language (or forms of speech)
that develops, mutates, and continues as they churn out of the festive spaces.2
What is
interesting and worth discerning in the forms laid down by him is the innate presence of
performative genres and traditions that produce speech forms, laughter and a distinct folk
culture. This paper aims to use performance as an investigative tool into community
festivities and religious rituals as they become a point of performer-audience dialogue in
narrative traditions. This study does not seek to impose Bakhtinian exemplifications onto a
SouthAsian context in an attempt to universalise performance proper. On the other hand, it
sifts through the South Asian context (the village performances in West Bengal and
Bangladesh) to see whether a theorisation of performance cultures in this context is possible
at all or not.
Performance cultures are not isolated wholes but intrinsically connected with the
communities’ agrarian calendar, collective social behaviour and more importantly, their
collective/cultural memory. Individual anecdotal case studies from rural spaces will clarify
how and why performance becomes a paradigm in studying communities and livelihoods.
For example, if one considers the practice of Kobigaan in its twentieth century variant, it is
visible how the performers have emerged from the peasant community itself and claim to
have found an expression of surrounding socio-economic structure through the content of
the performance genre. Many of such performers were endorsed by the Indian People’s
TheatreAssociation (IPTA) and the later Left Movement in West Bengal in order to highlight
the conditions of the marginalised, especially the peasants.3
In a sense then, the practitioners
of Kobigaan link their current repertoire to the whole body of mass-songs propagated by
the IPTA; these songs speak of debates of immediate concern between the farmer and the
land-lord, factory-owner and the worker and so on.4
The songs of Kobigaan, therefore, not
only contain a repertoire of religious/mythological songs but also those speaking of the
day-to-day socio-economic concerns of the rural populace. The performers who still work
between Kobigaan performances and peasantry have thus brought the performance as a
means to their livelihood in the course of time. A number of performance genres (in this
case) make use of a similar format and sometimes similar subjects, thus hinting at a shared
repertoire in certain respects. Since this study concerns itself with performance practices
from West Bengal and Bangladesh (which once was a common geographical entity named
‘Bengal’), it is to be remembered that a gamut of performance cultures still exist having
3
Most of the performers interviewed in course of the fieldwork in West Bengal inform about their peasant
background and how for some of them economic oppression became a reason to emerge as a Kobigaan
performer.
4
In Bangladesh, the district of Chittagong saw a spurge of Leftist Kobigaan performers beginning with
Ramesh Shil. For details on kobiyal Ramesh Shil, see http://www.banglapedia.org/HT/S_0341.HTM

3
different names but not an entirely distinct demarcating structure.5
Acommon characteristic
of these genres is the use of narration or story-telling, thus hinting at the inter-textuality
embedded within the practices themselves:
‘A focus on performance brings out the obvious: that much of our relationship to reality,
even to the everyday, is negotiated through performance. The invisible is often made visible
through performance….The term orature has been used variously since the Ugandan linguist
Pio Zirimu coined it in the early seventies of the last century to counter the tendency to see
the arts communicated orally and received aurally as an inferior or a lower rung in the
linear development of literature. He was rejecting the term oral literature…But his brief
definition of orature as the use of utterance as an aesthetic means of expression remains
tantalizingly out there, pointing to an oral system of aesthetics that did not need validity
from the literary.’ (Ngugi wa Thiongo, 2007, p. 4)
Narratives as part of continuing traditions marked the performance cultures of pre-modern
or pre-colonial societies where drama, discourse, song, dance and the allied forms did not
have strict demarcations. A common myth could be enacted, sung, danced and performed
in variable ways and in tandem with the agricultural (as also the performance) calendar.
For example, a song addressed to a daughter by her mother or a community of elderly
women can be sung thematically both as part of marriage songs or as part of the Bijoya
songs for the goddess Durga on the eve of her departure after the ten-day long festival. A
typical marriage song from Bangladesh runs thus:
‘Gao tolo, gao tolo konya hey
Pendo biyaar shaari
Ei shaari pindiya jaiben
Tomaar shoshurbari
Gao tolo, gao tolo, konya hey
Pendo naaker phool,
Paata bahaar chiruni diya
Tuliya baandho chul’ (Karim, 1993, pp.26-27)6
5
Though this paper would only consider the performance practice of Kobigaan within its scope, a number
of other genres namely Tarja, Bolan, Aalkaap, Gambhira, Khawno, Badai, Leto and Ashtak have similar
structural and contextual aspects. These are seasonal performance practices relating mostly to the agrarian
calendar and also aligned with religious festivities; the principle guiding factor behind each of them is the
dialogic nature of their presentation. For details on each of these genres, see Nishith Chakraborty, 2003.
Tarjagaan. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre; Mohit Ray, 2000. Bolan. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal
Cultural Centre; Md. Nurul Islam, 2001. Alkaap. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre; Pushpajeet
Roy, 2000. Gambhira. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre; Dhananjay, 2009. Khawno. Kolkata:
Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre; Shibendu Manna, 2001. Badaigaan. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal Cultural
Centre; Barunkumar Chakrabarty, 2001. Leto. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre; Sujit Biswas,
2004. Ashtak. Kolkata: Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre. Also, for a complete and exhaustive list of the
performers and practitioners within a range of related genres, see Directory: Folk Artistes of Bengal, 2004
by the Kolkata Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre.
6
The same essay also provides a classification of performative song genres based on categories such as
region, narrative qualities, devotion, prayer, labour, festivals and social awareness. Though the author
places Kobigaan within the category of regional song genres, such water-tight divisions do not seem ap-
propriate given a range of issue that each of these genres cover.

4
[‘Wake up, wake up, dear daughter
Sport your wedding dress
You have to wear your saree
To the house of your in-laws
Wake up, wake up dear daughter
Wear your nose-stud
And with your comb of cursive décor
Tie your hair in a bun’.]7
Familiar images of the mother-daughter parlance in the household, the preparations for a
wedding, the attire and jewellery, find repetitions in numerous songs genres throughout the
length and breadth of the Indian territories as well, according a certain thematic ubiquity to
performance forms in the South Asian context.
Rural festivities mark a break from quotidian everyday work culture and engaging in a
community-based enjoyment that highlight the community solidarity, kinship and networks
of local ritual behaviour in a collective performance. Within its scope this paper will engage
with two case studies of performances and performers witnessed during rural festivals and
analyse the methodological schema that can go into reading such performance structures.
The performance descriptions are based on fieldwork undertaken in West Bengal and
Bangladesh over one year (June 2012-June 2013) and document a particular genre of musical
performance called Kobigaan.8
The following section in the form of an anecdote raises a
number of issues that will be taken up gradually in the discussion of the methodological
approaches for performance genres.
2. Songs of Discord: Performance and the Question of Class
‘I hate the word “kobiyal”! It sounds cheap
and insulting. “Kobi-sarkar” or simply
“sarkar” on the other hand makes it much
more respectable…Think of our magician
P C Sorcar! Our vocation is as magical as
that of the magician’s himself…’9
7
Translation by the author. All translations in this paper including the conversations with the practitioners
are done by the author unless otherwise mentioned.
8
Kobigaan or Kobir Ladai is one of the many song-theatre genres operating within the form of verse-
duelling or poetic contest. Here, two poet-singers (kobiyal) and their team of orchestra and chorus (dohaar)
engage in a long-standing debate, both in prose and songs. The performers may even humorously inter-
weave mythological narratives with everyday political or social reports in the newspaper. There is much
debate about the origin of the genre and performers trace and historicise their discipleship and lineage
variously.
9
In conversation with Manoranjan Sarkar (Basu) (29.06.2013), a Kobigaan performer from borderland
migrant communities in West Bengal. The quote and its significance will be much clearer when understood
within the context of the following section on caste; meanwhile it serves as a prelude and leitmotif to this
section on class.

5
It was in the eventful month of October (2012) in West Bengal that one ventured out of the
festive mayhem of the city of Kolkata with an ‘assumed promise’ of the lull of rural rituals.
The continuity of the ‘vision’ of the rural locale as an embodiment of pristine values (both
in its inhabitant human behaviour and the surrounding ‘natural’ conservation) aided the
thoughts of a prospective fieldwork on Kobigaan–the song contests much discursivised
historically and retaining its ‘universals’.10
Axiomatic as it would sound, ‘…there is no
knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a political act’ (Fabian,
1983, p.1). This “knowledge of the Other” although read in its reference frames of history
and political eventfulness, rests more on its encounter with Time; thus it is not strange how
the enterprise commenced with the credentials of the “innocent” Other, gained momentum
with the perturbed ‘discovery’ of the ‘savage’ kind, proceeded to epiphanies through
cognition and continued still in efforts at understanding and formulating the Other.11
The village of Boro Sangra in the Birbhum district of West Bengal had arranged for a
Kobigaan performance on nabami (the ninth day) of the Durga Puja festival. One’s earlier
familiarity with the performance genre was made possible to a certain extent through
interviews of performers and a curtailed 45-minute long performance on the proscenium
stage, in an auditorium in the city.12
The aim was to accompany the kobiyals (performers as
they are designated in Kobigaan) as they travelled in the adjoining villages to sing through
the night. The performance in its rural set-up usually commences in the late afternoon or
evening and continues till late night or early dawn, depending upon the response of the
gathered audience. The excitement, however, was already at low ebb after waiting for the
kobiyals at the Ahmedpur station for more than three hours, being huddled into a vehicle
with nine other men thereafter and battling the bumpy muddy tract into the village. There
was, incidentally, no scope for rest and preparation before the commencement of the show.
First of all, there was no accommodation in the sense that one was assured by the performers
and the prospect of putting up with 9 men in a single room did not seem very encouraging.
This also revealed how the performers (as travellers) themselves are much less acquainted
with the host spaces where they are invited to perform. The performers of genres like
Kobigaan are inherently itinerant in nature, travelling between a group of near and far
10
The use of ‘universal history’ is crucial to the distinction of time. In Time and the Other: Anthropology
Makes its Objects (1983), Johannes Fabian introduces the ambiguity that emerges out of the alignment of
the universal and the general: ‘Universals appears to have two connotations. One is that of totality; in this
sense, universal designates the whole world at all times. The other is one of generality: that which is
applicable to a large number of instances’(Fabian, 1983, p.3). Fabian highlights how this ambiguity continues
in the anthropologist’s quest for the universal. The author has used the concept of the universal, here, as
emerging out of the existent ethnographic-historical discourse on the performance practice of Kobigaan so
far and how it ideologically prefaced the author’s ethnographic experience.
11
By stressing on the ‘Other’ the author is underlining her positionality before even trying to position the
subject that she is looking at. ‘Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power,
privilege, and biases just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our object.’ The Time-
driven nature of the ethnographic enterprise gradually juxtaposes this positionality with that of the Other’s—
known as ‘reflexive ethnography’—thus challenging the universals. See (Madison, 2005, p.7).
12
These interviews and performances are analysed at length in the ongoing PhD on Kobigaan, entitled
“Cockfight in Tune: Reading Nations, Communities and Performance in the ‘Bengali’ Kobigaan”, where
the documentations are discussed under the contexts of rural and urban performances respectively.

6
villages. The itinerancy of the female practitioner in Kobigaan however raises the normative
questions of the “good woman” and the “bad woman”. In most cases these women are seen
as “polluted” since they have to share the male spaces outside the domestic sphere, thus
forming the binary between the public and the private. Secondly, minutes after one had
reached the village and was looking for some corner to pen down the amassing observations,
one was hurriedly dragged to the open space in front of the village temple where the puja
had been arranged. It was unthinkable to one of the host villagers that one should not have
the blessed opportunity of viewing a prolonged animal sacrifice on such an auspicious day.
After about 20 sacrifices of goats one felt nauseated enough to go back in search of an
accommodation; there still wasn’t a vague idea as to when the performance would take
place.
The performance began rather late at around 8:00 pm in the evening after the devotees had
been fed the sumptuous non-vegetarian dinner that is mandatory on nabami. The performers
explained continually how this was only a ‘minor delay’ and narrated several incidents
where performances had finally not taken place at all. However, when there was signal
enough for this performance to begin, one did not delay further to take the place right in
front of the stage-space. There was no stage as such; it was simply marked off from the rest
of the audience by the fact that it was covered by carpets and the prior placement of musical
instruments required for a Kobigaan performance. The audience was flowing in from the
village as also from the nearby villages amidst the beating of the dhaak (drums), the k(n)aashi
(cymbals) and a casio (much to the author’s surprise since it is not one of the ‘traditional’
instruments used in the performance). The daakgaan (invocation) which is performed only
by the chorus (dohaar) as a norm continued for nearly about an hour while the kobiyals
came in and took their seats on the stage.13
The audience, it occurred gradually, was overwhelmingly male and inebriated. They were
accompanied by boys and children. It was only after the first performer had started singing
and the festival organising committee had provided them with the topic of song contest that
the audience began to respond in protest. They were put off by the Sanskrit couplets recited
by the kobiyal and vehemently expressed their inability at comprehension. In the middle of
the performance the audience roared in dissent and demanded a change of the topic of the
song contest. The dissent ensued specifically on the grounds of their disinterest in a new
topic. The thoughtful organisers, who presumed that the audience had gathered for an
educative session apart from the usual entertainment, allotted the kobiyals the roles of
Durga (the worshipped goddess and the symbol of the ‘good’) and Mahishasur (the slain
demon signifying the ‘evil’).14
The audience, on the other hand, insisted on a topic of their
13
The rough key format of Kobigaan performances in West Bengal runs: Daakgaan (general
invocation)àBhavani-Vandana (invocation to the goddess) Kobir Ladai (main debate).
14
In a typical Kobigaan performance, the two performers (or kobiyals) take up the roles given to them and
contest with each other. These roles can be particular mythological characters (as in the performance
discussed above) or more general (like the debate between male and female, young and the old, landlord
and the peasant) or more thematic (modern and pre-modern). Role-playing is a foremost and significant
aspect in Kobigaan and involves a performer-audience dialogism that allows us to enter into the broader
themes of religion in community practices. However, the idea of role-playing is variable and cannot be
assigned a generalised character within Kobigaan itself.

7
choice – the debate between the Past and the Present – although they have been hearing
this over the years. One of them was inebriated enough to roll on to the stage-space up to
the feet of the singer and place his request. The others broke in a guffaw to encourage his
act, some of the saner few tried to control him, the singers looked befuddled and the
interrupted performance gave way to a pandemonium. However, the audience at the end of
it was victorious as the performers began afresh as Past and Present, which is a common
and oft-repeated theme in performance. It can be speculated, however, that the public appeal
of this topic is more than others since the kobiyals find numerous innovative ways debating,
analogising, inflicting insults and being equivocal through the medium of Past Vs. Present.
Notably, the same topic was employed at another performance (documented later in the
course of fieldwork), where the abstract concept of Past and Present was made more
immediately realisable and entertaining as Grandfather Vs. Grandson by the male and
female kobiyal respectively.
One scrawled rapid notes, adjusted the camera and tripod, exchanged a smile or two with
the performing group, continued being wary of the locals gazing and gathered around and
tried concentrating on the performance that ran mostly all night. It was later next day, while
travelling back the bumpy muddy tract on a cycle-van with the nine men, that the companion-
performer divulged, ‘you see, what you saw last night was not Kobigaan! It was more of
Kheur, the vulgar element of the genre. We could not help but give in to the unruly,
uneducated audience and sing for them. Sadly, that’s our profession. But you must have
realised last night that Kobigaan is not for everybody!’And one travelled on.
The comprehension of Kobigaan by the public is primarily in relation to its variant in
nineteenth century Calcutta (now Kolkata). Back then, while the colonial city was expanding
and evolving, both with respect to its territories as well as its ‘tastes’, the genre was being
habitually patronised by the affluent Bengali babus.Although full descriptions of Kobigaan
performances do not feature in the contemporary literature or newspapers, the available
rough sketches signify how it would gradually tend towards the more erotic and ‘obscene’
analogies as the performance progressed through the night. The blame lay upon the kheur,
a component in Kobigaan that generally draws upon overt sexual imagery aided by a rustic
humour. It did have much to offer to the amusement of the watching plebeian who would
break into a guffaw every now and then, thus adding much to the vexation of the colonial
ruling order. Kobigaan thus suffered a backlash and was subjected to containment-an event
that ‘erased’ the genre to a certain degree but not the names of those who sang it: Anthony
Firingi, Bhola Moira, Bhabani Beney, Rashu-Nrishingho, Nitai Bairagi and others.
Discourses on Kobigaan have toggled between reminiscences and silences. The public
memory is speculative, unaware and abandoning when it comes to commenting on the
current status of the genre. Despite the public rankings of it as ‘living’ or ‘dead’, Kobigaan
still continues as a revived practice in West Bengal. Its counterpart in Bangladesh differs
strongly in content and structure and according to the shifts from rural to urban locales. In
fact, Gumani Dewan in West Bengal and Ramesh Shil in Chittagong, Bangladesh, are the
two names that are tied together in realising the changing trends of Kobigaan practices in
the twentieth century. They are remembered and revered for the introduction of social

8
issues into the content of songs. Though not altogether absent from the nineteenth century
variant of Kobigaan, the significance of social issues and themes currently revolve around
the struggles of the working class, the plight of the marginalized as well as the atrocities of
governance across social strata. The other striking inclusion in the genre is that of the
participation of female performers-a phenomenon that is absent or rarely mentioned in the
documents from yester-years.
The above prolonged anecdote to one of the very first performances witnessed in the role
of an ethnographer and as part of fieldwork was a deliberate preface to the method, scope
and most importantly the need for taking up a subject called Kobigaan. A number of
keywords ooze out of this narrative that guide and question the validity of a research on
this performance and a host of other related song-genres: performance, positionality,
itinerancy, body/bodies in interaction, Other, historicity, folklore, cultural politics, national
propaganda, class/caste identity, and cultural memory to name a few. Much more than
anything else the performance form and its constant demarcation from other allegedly
‘vulgar’ genres (as indicated in the beginning and end of the anecdote) ties itself strongly
with a class-based identity and the need for the performing community’s upward social
mobility. Not surprisingly thus, much endeavour has gone behind the ‘purification’ of the
genre in order to accord a certain sense of respectability to its subject as well as the performer
himself most of whom are also directly engaged as peasants and employ Kobigaan in
singing for mass-mobilisation. The following section, based on an interview with a
performer, discusses the act of mobilisation more in its caste-based aspect.
3. The Performing Identity: Cross-borders and the Politics of Caste15
How does identity become shaped by the help of performance? Does it change the
architecture of the performance itself in order to foreground that identity? What new parlance
is deployed in order to establish this order? A number of issues have been generated from
the anecdotal previous section and yet there remains a central problematic to the whole
discourse – the inevitability of the question of ‘class’ and the means towards upward social
mobility. In this section, the aim is to set aside the ‘class’ question for the time-being and
scrutinise the politics of caste within the folds of territorial (or geographical) relocations;
performance comes to be employed differently within such a schema (at least as the
performance parlance represents it) though not foregoing the target of upward social mobility
and most importantly, respectability.
The Namsudras, identified as part of the community of backward classes formed the second
largest Hindu caste group in the British province of Bengal and the largest in its eastern
part. They were concentrated in the districts of Bakarganj, Faridpur, Dhaka, Mymensingh,
15
This section is based mainly on the conversation with the performer Manoranjan Sarkar (Basu)
on 29.06.2013 at Talbanda, North 24 Parhanas, West Bengal.

9
Jessore and Khulna (currently in Bangladesh).16
The community, mainly associated with
the so-called ‘menial’ professions of boat-making, cultivation and serving as labourers to
the class of landlords, were considered as out-castes and dictated by the hierarchies of
caste dynamics. The oppressed community were however led under the initiative of their
leader (more revered as an avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu), Harichand Thakur and unified
under the world-view of a universal fraternity (branching out of theVaishnavite brotherhood).
An event in 1873 – historicised as the ‘Movement for Dignity and Equality before Law’–
unified the oppressed caste who declared a prolonged strike against the ruling landlords
thus bringing the economic production to a stand-still and perforating the hegemonic
machinery of the upper class.17
Owing to the struggle upheld by the community their demands
were considered and the event came to be realised as one of the significant cornerstones of
the Namasudras’ identity as a community. The Namasudras were united under the banner
of the ‘Matua-Mahasangha’18
, broadly understood in the paradigm of Hindu folk religion.
The unification and the establishment of the Mahasangha began in the birthplace of
Harichand Thakur in Odakandi, Faridpur (now in Bangladesh) and its second phase of
organisation was carried out post-1947 in Thakurnagar, West Bengal (Chatterjee, 2012).
This brief background then forms a prelude to realising a central problematic: that of a
community’s need and engagements with performance in voicing their ‘marginality’.
Manoranjan Sarkar, a kobiyal from the district of South 24 Parganas in West Bengal,
identifies himself as a part of the Matua sect and community and as a performer bearing his
lineage to the Matua kobiyals in Bangladesh. Unlike the ‘more mainstream’ kobiyals in
West Bengal, hailing from the districts of Bardhamman, Birbhum and Murshidabad, the
performers from southern Bengal use ‘sarkar’as a self-given honorary surname in alignment
with the other members of the performing community; the practice indicates how a
performing group accords a sense of historicity to its performing identity and mobilises
itself towards a struggle against marginality. ‘Sarkar’, on the other hand, becomes more
politically significant if understood within the reference frame of a caste-based performing
community realising their elevated-ness by the token of virtuosity that makes a performer
distinct from the rest. Understandably then, there is a denial voiced by these community of
performers in grouping themselves as belonging to one singular performance tradition (of
Kobigaan) in Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh); the denial explains the faction of
kobiyal communities in West Bengal with respect to the structure, subject and content of
their songs. For instance, the performances stem from the textual content of Vaishnav texts
16
See, ‘The Namasudras: A Socio-Economic Profile’, in Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity
in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal 1872-1947 (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), pp.11-12. Namasudras
are scattered over the six provinces of Dhaka, Barisal, Rajshahi, Khulna, Chattagram and Sylhet in
Bangladesh, contributing to a population count of approximately 3,161,000.
17
See, Government of West Bengal, Backward Classes Welfare Department. The 1873 Movement for Dignity
and Equality before Law. <http://www.anagrasarkalyan.gov.in/pdf/1873-mvmnt-dignt-eqlty-bfr-law.pdf>
18
A number of terms are defined in relation to the key term “Matua”, thus explaining the composition of the
caste and the community in relation to their religious philosophy and practices. These terms are: ‘Matua’,
‘Matua-bhakta’ (or a follower of Matua), ‘Matua-sadhu’, ‘Matua-pagal’ etc. See, Biswas, Samudra. 2012.
Itihash er Aaloye Matua Andolon. Kolkata: Dana.

10
like the Bhagwat Purana or the Chaitanya Charitamrita and most often become a preaching
tool for the practising kobiyal. The representation of the characters from these texts –
deities, devotees and avatars – aim toward the universal principles of compassion, equality
and fraternity. In the case of the other group of kobiyals in West Bengal, however, character
impersonation is not as much in demand as the representation of burning issues of social
concern: farmer Vs, landlord, worker Vs. owner, men Vs, women and so on.
‘The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of
simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-
by-side, of the dispersed’ (Foucault, 1984, p.1). The application of the notion of space in
reading a performance in history has mostly been marred by the notion of time in its pre-
emption and essentialism. As the histories of performances would suggest—more so in the
case of Kobigaan in analysis—the task of writing has most evidently taken into account
the primacy of time over space. The bulk of biographical sketches, song collections, historical
periodisations that have gone into forming the archive of the performance form have been
concerned much less about writing within the socio-spatial (Lefebvre, 1991, p.73). dynamics.
This does not however hint in any way at the fact that ‘time’ needs to be separated from the
skein of space-time, but that it needs to be read as ‘as one of the various distributive
operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space’(Foucalt, 1984,
p.2). The Partition of Bengal and the cultural memories aligned with it (both individual and
collective) shape much of the identity of the Matua as a performing community. The
territorial replacements ushered in by the event of Partition, thus dividing a pan-Bengali
identity on the basis of religious majorities and minorities, have fed much into the cultural
politics of West Bengal and Bangladesh post-partition. Individuals and groups relocating
themselves within partitioned geographies have jostled with the idea of lineage, root and
legacies thereafter. Such anxieties that have bolstered later movements and initiatives on
the part of the ‘relocated Matua community in West Bengal, have also been superimposed
on the identity of the community as performers: the root of the performance genre, the
lineage of the performers and a clearly demarcated legacy of discipleship become issues
that a performer’s sense of history constantly grapples with.
Role-playing is a mainstay in the execution of a performance. Kobigaan performances in
Bangladesh in the villages of Majumdarkandi and Lamchari (in the district of Comillah)
and Pirojpur town (in the district of Pirojpur) revealed how the performer or the poet-
singer executed the role bestowed on him throughout the length and breadth of the
performance.19
It is a common practice among these performers to announce the death of
the ‘name’ and its coming back to life before and after the role-playing.20
Such practices
are universalised among the Matua performing community irrespective of their locations
in West Bengal and Bangladesh. On the other hand, the ‘more mainstream’ kobiyals of
West Bengal do not adhere to such strictures of role-playing and concentrate more on the
19
These performances were documented in Bangladesh from 13th-18th November, 2012.
20
Here ‘name’ signifies the real name of the performer (e.g. Manoranjan Sarkar) which is said to be ‘dead’ as
he assumes the role of the character given to him and which is reassumed at the end when the role-playing
ends.

11
essence of the debate that for them is central to the performance genre. In the words of the
performer Manoranjan Sarkar tracing his lineage to the kobiyal-gurus in Bangladesh, ‘the
kobiyals in West Bengal lack the depth and seriousness of subject as well as the literary
aesthetics of the genre. Role-playing is no matter of joke and my forte lies in respecting the
status of the character I play. This means that I cannot step out of it throughout my
performance and I have no right to disrespect it by doing so.’
The following section sums up both this and the preceding sections and offers perspectives
on performance as a methodological model based on the issues generated so far. In so
doing it will also lay down the questions concerning the epistemological shifts in the study
of the subject.
4. Reading Performance into History: The Need for Critical Ethnography
The task of re-looking into a much historicised performance genre as Kobigaan through
the lens of performance is fraught with difficulties. The first and obvious question in this
regard stems from the choices of methodology. As a subject of critical enquiry, Kobigaan
has had numerous historical documentations in the form of memoirs, song collections, and
paragraphs in books of literary histories as also folklore reports pertaining to current practices
of the genre. These documentations have aimed towards treating the subject as a universal
whole, most often deriding it on the basis of ‘obscenity’, ‘vulgarity’ and other such allied
epithets. Inevitably thus, the authors themselves have maintained ambiguous positions within
the act of reviving and highlighting the song genres; or for that matter, aligning them with
a ‘universalising’history of traditions.21
There are a number of generalities that are witnessed
in the process especially with regard to the use of language in discussing the genre, aligning
it with a ‘national tradition’ that propagandises for a cultural-literary heritage and finally in
the treatment of the subject as part of the literary canon. The process is complex in itself
where canonisation of performers as ‘historical’ entities and the containment of the genre
itself have gone hand in hand.22
What is lost more than anything else in this complex
mechanism is the vehement and deliberate detachment of the genre from the subject of
performance. The immediate focus on the performance of Kobigaan thus ensues from the
21
For example, the histories of Kobigaan and the song compilations by figures like Ishwarchandra Gupta,
Kedarnath Bandopadhyay, Durgadas Lahiri, Prafulla Chandra Pal and others have followed a distinct
lineage in the matter of presenting the genre with other allied genres. On the other hand, scholarship on the
genre in Bangladesh by figures like Dinesh Chandra Sinha, Swarochish Sarkar or Syamon Zakaria have
focussed on the performance more from the point-of-view of viewing folklore and reporting on it (especially
in the works of Sarkar and Zakaria).
22
It is interesting in this regard to consider the depiction of performers (kobiyals) in films: Anthony Firingi
(1967), a film made on the legendary figure of the kobiyal himself is regarded as one of the holy texts as per
the Bengali film canon. As recently as July 2013, the Calcutta-based director Srijit Mukherji has begun
shooting on Anthony as his subject for the film Jatiswar, beginning with his first shot in the ‘historical’
precincts of Shobhabajar Rajbari and Naatmondir in north Calcutta, as stated by him. A detailed analytical
account on the circulation of films on Kobigaan and their reception is offered in the broader research on
Kobigaan while it is important here to note the facets of living with ‘too much of history’.

12
urgent need of bringing performance back into the subject. This, however, does not signify
in any way that history needs to be forsaken in the current methodological schema but to
find on the other hand ways of doing both.
A suggested method of treating the subject of Kobigaan in this endeavour could well be the
analytical tools of ethno-history. Ethno-history allows entry into a subject from both historical
and ethnological perspectives thus taking into its ambit a variety of resources ranging from
official archival documents to memoirs to visual media to folklore and performance. On
the other hand, it differs only a tad bit more from historical methodology proper in the
sense that it applies critical use of ethnographical concepts and material to the study of
historical resources.23
Ethno-history thus can be one of the several tools that are necessary
to look at Kobigaan but not the sole analytical one for it would again mean treating the
subject under the light essentialisms. Critical ethnography allied with a study of micro-
history on the other hand allows us to bring in the category of performance back in to the
subject of Kobigaan. The study of performance demands in this regard looking at the genre
of not only actual contemporary practices of Kobigaan in its rural and urban variants, but
also to look at it in its circulation through various media: fairs, festivals, films, cds and
dvds. To bring the tools of performance back to the study of Kobigaan is not simply to fill
up the fissures in archived data by speculations but to find a link between Kobigaan as an
‘idea’ and as a practice.24
‘If man is a sapient animal, a tool making animal,
a self-making animal, a symbolizing animal,
he is no less, a performing animal, Homo
performans, not in the sense, perhaps that a circus
animal may be a performing animal, but in the
sense that man is a self-making animal—his
performances are, in a way, reflexive; in
performance he reveals himself to himself’ (Turner, 1985, p.187).
Performance is primarily and most importantly about experience. Criticisms vary upon the
occurrence of experience first or expression. Regardless of the debate, both experience and
expression entail a two-way traffic as the quotidian ordinariness ruptures towards
23
In explaining the employment of historical and ethnological methods together to enable a cultural study,
JamesAxtell (1979, p.2) writes: ‘…ethnohistory is essentially the use of historical and ethnological methods
and materials to gain knowledge of the nature and causes of change in a culture defined by ethnological
concepts and categories.’ For further discussions on ethnohistory as a method of enquiry into cultures, see,
Axtell, J., 1979. Ethnohistory: An Historian’s Viewpoint. Ethnohistory, Vol. 26, No. 1
24
This difference and the wide gap between ‘idea’ and ‘practice’ of Kobigaan is one of the crucial points of
entry into the research. At several levels of encounters with people talking about Kobigaan, it became
evident how the genre continued in an ambiguity about its existence. It’s supposed discontinuity as a
practice and the consequent death at the level of ideas places it in a more pronounced way within the rubric
of the politics of revival and later the broader cultural politics of the state. The aim is to concern oneself
with the practice itself and revisit the ideas at intervals within the analysis to understand the politics of
performance practices.

13
performance. It is here that self-reflexivity becomes a pre-condition towards the study of
performance with regard to positionality and furthers the experience of a performance.
Before even beginning to look at the performance proper for a new reading, it is crucial to
justify the researcher’s position in the process of a research. This is reiterating what D
Soyini Madison puts as a question in her discussion on positionality: ‘How do we begin to
discuss our positionality as ethnographers and those who represent Others?’, thus borrowing
the three positions in qualitative research:
• ‘The ventriloquist stance that merely “transmits” information in an effort toward
neutrality and is absent of a political or rhetorical stance. The position of the
ethnographer aims to be invisible, that is, the “self” strives to be nonexistent in the
text.
• The positionality of voices is where the subjects themselves are the focus, and their
voices carry forward indigenous meanings and experiences that are in opposition to
dominant discourses and practices. The position of the ethnographer is vaguely present
but not addressed.
• The activism stance in which the ethnographer takes a clear position in intervening on
hegemonic practices and serves as an advocate in exposing the material effects of
marginalized locations while offering alternatives’ (Fine, 1994, p.6).
The ‘absence’ of the self in the text is as impossible as the ‘knowledge of the Other’ with
respect to temporality. The first and the second positions together on the other hand lead us
to an ethnographical methodological tool that further problematises the question of
positionality, i.e., ‘participant-observation’. Does ‘participant-observation’ allow an
individual perceiving a performance to gradually emerge as an ‘insider’ in the process? Is
inheritance of performance skills from a kobiyal a method of easier access by virtue of
‘participation’? There is a subjective distance both on the part of the observer and the
informer, though this position can only be transformed to different levels of interaction in
the process of being with each other. It is here that performance becomes a reflexive
methodological tool in understanding the community practices, specifically by means of
its dialogic character. Dialogism emerges as a kind of ‘more than a definite position, the
dialogical stance is situated in the space between competing ideologies. It brings self and
other together even while it holds them apart. It is more like a hyphen than a period.’25
25
See, Clifford Geertz, ‘Thinking as Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Anthropology of Fieldwork in
the New States, Antioch Review 28, (Summer, 1968), 140, quoted in Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performing
as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnology of performance’, Literature in Performance 5, No. 2
(1982), p.9. Conquergood borrows the idea of performance as a moral act thus introducing the question
of ethics into it from Geertz’s essay which clearly highlights activism as part of the act of thinking: ‘…it
has been much more difficult to regard thinking as an abstention from action, theorising as an alterna-
tive to commitment, and the intellectual life as a kind of secular monasticism, excused from accountabil-
ity by its sensitivity to the good.’

14
5. How to View Performance: Conceptual Approaches
The need for performance as a methodological tool in analysing Kobigaan brings forth
certain key categories that recur in the understanding of the genre and the socio-political,
cultural and economic paraphernalia attached to it. These categories are enumerated as
follows:
5.1 Cultural Performance/Social Performance
While cultural performance accords a sense of specificity to an act of performance by the
use of definitive ‘markings’ of a beginning, middle and end, social performances are marked
by their quality of being ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’. The aim therefore is to place a
performance genre – namely Kobigaan – within the networks of cultural and social
performances. While social performances occur according to a cultural script, the actors
may not be self-consciously aware that their enactments are culturally scripted. On the
other hand, as Victor Turner writes, ‘when we act in everyday life we do not merely re-act
to indicative stimuli, we act in frames we have wrested from the genres of cultural
performance’ (Turner, 1982, p.122). The reason behind placing Kobigaan at the juncture
of cultural and social performances is to reconsider the roles of the performers and audiences
in conjunction with their socio-cultural embededness. While the language of the performance
itself is of key concern, the heteroglossic quality that produces the different discourses
(and an official discourse) around Kobigaan needs to be scrutinised. This category becomes
an entry point and allows us to look at the performer and the audience, the community and
the nation, the cultural politics and the political economy of performance of which ‘class’
and ‘caste’ are two major nodes of speculation.
5.2 Translocality: Mobility, Migration and Socio-Spatial Interconnectedness
The explorative human nature towards the understanding of diverse cultures stems from
the propensity to travel. The itinerant qualities of the human subject allow him/her to
establish networks within cultures that feed data into his explorative interrogations.
Speculating more closely, if one shifts the lens of this category of itinerancy to the level of
performance, it opens possibilities of looking at both the performer and the audience as
belonging to an itinerant status. In performances as Kobigaan where the performer and the
audience are travellers together—one by professional/economic choices and the other by
socio-cultural/religious choices—itinerancy prefaces the point of connection that the
performance space finally establishes between the viewer and the performer. As a concept,
translocality is used to describe socio-spatial dynamics and processes of simultaneity and
identity formation that transcend boundaries—including, and also extending beyond, those
of nation-states. Not only does the idea of itinerancy and translocality allow us to read the
performing and audience communities in their mobility across borders, but it also allows
us to understand the loci of networks of knowledge formed continuously by such interactions.
For example, the mobility and interconnectedness between Kobigaan performers in
Bangladesh and those residing on the borderlands/margins of the state of West Bengal by
the capacity of the OBC status brings in the larger questions of caste and politics into the
rubric of performance.

15
5.3 The Anthropology of the Body
In his essay, ‘Towards an Anthropology of the Body’, John Blacking (1977) reviews the
socio-somatic implications of the body: ‘Our chief concern is with the cultural processes
and products that are externalisations and extensions of the body in varying contexts of
social interaction. The division of physical and cultural (or social) anthropology is no
longer useful…’(Blacking, 1977, p.2). The social body constrains the ways in which the
physical body is looked at and there is a continuous exchange between these two kinds of
bodies in action, specifically with respect to performance. Shared somatic states help us to
realise the domains like politics, religion, music, kinship or economic life and how such
cultural categories relate to biological functions. The most immediate reference of shared
somatic states in Kobigaan is the idea of trance-a special behaviour or technique of the
body. Since ‘music are endowed with the particular power of inducing or precipitating
trance’ (Rouge, 1977, p.233), it is a specific kind of ‘possession music’ that becomes a
unifying factor around which specific possession ceremonies are arranged. In Kobigaan
the idea of role-playing and that of trance are closely linked as are the acts of group protest,
disruption and physical fights in between performances (as the above anecdote as also
historical accounts of Kobigaan would suggest). The ‘Anthropology of the Body’ also
brings forward in this regard the concepts of laughter, transgression, carnivalesque and
subversive performances.
5.4 Memory, Reception, Circulation
The thick line of memory and historical memory, Pierre (1989) emphasises the act of
‘forgetting’ as also remembering a performance genre like Kobigaan. Memory, here plays
an important part with reference to lineage as also with learning. The play of memory
creates multiple memories on which the performer banks upon: (1) the learnt principles of
performance and; (2) whatever happens in the ‘here and now’ of the performance. There
are two kinds of knowledge systems resting upon this memory-the audience memory which
rests itself on (a) structured memory of Kobigaan ensuing from the tradition of Kobigaan
and building up a standardised memory structure and ; (b) non-structured, creating a
knowledge bank which does not come directly from what the Kobigaan is presenting. But
it is from this non-structured memory that the long time cultural memory of the community
gets enriched; such memories are more to do with the social practices. Secondly, the
performance memory, relating to a particular memory, emerges as a very single memory
relating to a singular performance. This is the memory which makes larger than life images
of performers (writings of Kobigaan history only based on biographies and memoirs). It is
through the performance memory that a then-and-there kind of relationship gets built in
between the performance and the audience. The divisions of structured and unstructured
memory allow us to witness critically the representations of Kobigaan in various media
ranging from the films, to telecasts on television, to dvds as also within the more tangible
spaces of the fairs and festivals. In a sense the distinction between the physical and virtual
spaces marks the role of the audience as manifest. For example, in a physical space the
audience actually evolves into the space itself and the performance gears up on the basis of
the audience.

16
6. Conclusion
Performance is more a method than a medium in understanding the cultural practice of a
community placed in a national-political context. The study of Kobigaan in this regard acts
as an entry point into the research on performance. More specifically, this hypothesises
how Kobigaan occurs both at the level of ideas and practice and yet remains somewhat
oblivious between the two. The purpose of this paper was to introduce the category of
performance as a part and parcel of ‘everyday’ existence and speech, engaging briefly with
performance descriptions and performer’s world-views about the genre, highlighting how
this sense of oblivion is selective pertaining to different social groups and categories and
yet how their collective imaginations have allowed the genre to mutate and embody itself
through actual practices over time. Is it possible to resituate performance practices by
taking performance as a model and mode of investigation? In the process of looking at
performances, the reference to existing archives shift epistemologically and newer forms
of archives continually get added to the existing ones. Since performance is a political act,
tradition, lineage and pedagogy have important roles to play in the dissemination of Kobigaan
as a reservoir of knowledge at the levels of individual, community-based and state/national
politics; it is here that sites of exhibitionism and heritage-building allow performances to
be morphed continually. In its broader aspect, this paper chose to introduce performance as
mode of inquisition within the existing histories of performances in order to navigate the
networks of knowledge that are formed within and around them. In so doing, it has considered
a number of categories through which performance analysis can be continued and foreground
as methodological choices.
References
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Biswas, Samudra, 2012. Itihash er aloye matua andolon. Kolkata: Dana; Somnath Das
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____1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press
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Accessed 17 September 2012
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ethical dimensions of the ethnology of performance. Literature in Performance, Vol.5, No. 2, p.9.
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Oaks, CA: Sage, p.150

18
Chandrani Dutta and Anuradha Banerjee Disaster Management
An Inventory of Population Resources in Disaster Prone Coastal Districts of
West Bengal and Odisha: Challenges to Risk Management
Chandrani Dutta
Dr. Anuradha Banerjee1
Natural hazards like earthquakes, floods, cyclones and droughts have on many occasions
turned into major disasters in India. These have jeopardised millions of lives and have
disrupted the entire functioning of the society. Disasters are a result of both climatic
externalities, as well as, low levels of social and economic development. Hence, backward
regions of the country become more vulnerable in times of such climatic events. Instead of
only focusing on relief activities in the aftermath of a disaster, preventive measures need to
be harnessed. In such cases, reducing risks needs to take into account socio-economic
development of the region, in addition to its existing political environment. In this paper,
drawing on census data (2001-2011), analysis of the social and economic composition of
selected rural West Bengal and Odisha district has been done, to draw attention to the
various factors constraining effective implementation of disaster management.
Keywords: cyclones, disaster risk management, socio-economic vulnerabilities
1. Introduction and Background
Many regions of India are regularly exposed to climatic extremities like floods, droughts,
landslides, cyclones and earthquakes. When such extreme climatological, hydrological
and geological processes take place in the vicinity of human habitation, they often lead to
disasters. In any form, disasters disrupt the entire functioning of the society and result in
widespread human, material, and environmental losses. A climatic hazard is not singularly
responsible in creating disasters. Broad based vulnerabilities are strongly related to the
occurrence of disasters: dangerous locations, limited access to resources, illness and
disability, old age, poverty, lack of appropriate institutions, low education and training and
skills, population expansion, uncontrolled development, environmental degradation etc.
Rural population living in fragile mountain regions, on lands very close to sea and in
settlements located in river deltas have been found to be at high risk in view of their
geographic location and inappropriate and much underdeveloped physical and social
infrastructure.
1
Chandrani Dutta, Senior PhD scholar, Centre for the Study of Regional Development (C.S.R.D.),
School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (J.N.U.), New Delhi-67.
Email: thisischandrani@gmail.com
Dr. Anuradha Banerjee, Associate Professor, Population Studies and Geography, C.S.R.D.,
School of Social Sciences, J.N.U., New Delhi-67.
Email: anuradha_csrd@yahoo.co.in

19
All over the world natural disasters have claimed more than 1.5 million lives. Five countries
with the highest number of disasters during the period 1900-2002 were United States of
America (655 disasters), India (459), China (429), Philippines (355) and Indonesia (276)
(UNDPcited in Johnson, 2004, p.14). The impact of natural disasters is mediated by context
and population specific features and vulnerabilities. As such, the outcome of disasters is
worse for countries with low human development indicators, especially for the poor and
deprived living in these countries, which together accounted for 53 per cent of the disaster
related deaths in and around the world (Dayton-Johnson, 2004). The adaptive capacity of
such backward regions is usually low, social assistance infrastructure is negligent, poverty
and social inequality are high and disaster policies are non-functioning. Such negative
externalities get augmented in these regions due to their huge rural population base living
on the peripheries. While earthquakes claim an average of 130 million people every year,
droughts affect an average of 220 million, and about 119 million people are exposed to
tropical cyclones, with some experiencing an average of more than four events every year
(UNDP, n.d.).
In India natural hazards are common and many have turned into major disasters. On different
occasions, earthquakes, floods and droughts have shook the country and bared regional
economies to nature’s fury. The impact is magnified in case of a poor monsoon and a lean
agricultural season since agriculture is the mainstay of more than half of the country’s
population, and as such the livelihoods and food security of vulnerable and marginalised
sections likely to be living in rain-fed areas are more affected. This paper focuses on tropical
cyclones along the Indian coastlines which have usually occurred in socially and
economically less developed regions of the country.
Despite the presence of elongated coastline on the west and east which serve as threshold
to natural hazards like tropical cyclones, storm surges, floods and tsunamis, the entire
Indian coastline is subjected to severe winds and cyclonic storms from the Arabian Sea
and the Bay of Bengal. States like Gujarat in the west and Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and
West Bengal in the east, lie in the trajectory of cyclones originating in the Arabian Sea and
Bay of Bengal respectively. In terms of their physiography and greater susceptibility to
natural hazards, these states are best understood as fragile, and their population at greater
risk of exposure. Low lying districts like South 24 Parganas and Midnapur in coastal West
Bengal, and Balasore, Cuttack, Puri and Ganjam from coastal Odisha, having an approximate
elevation of one to two metres, are at greatest risk as they lie in the route of the cyclones
originating in the Bay of Bengal (NDMA, GoI, 2008).2
At the national level, disaster management underwent a paradigm shift after the 2004 tsunami
which hit major parts of coastal South Asia. Now, apart from identifying danger areas, the
nodal disaster management authority is doing an inventory of vulnerable, discriminated
and marginalised population segments and their specific requirements, so as to effectively
2
National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Government of India (GoI)

20
address the needs of children, aged and marginalised sections, in the process integrating
disaster mitigation with the development process.
As such, this paper is an inventory of population facing greatest threat from environmental
disasters. This inventory is important to identify weak sections and poor infrastructure,
and accordingly ensure effective preventive measures and service delivery including relief
operations and long-term aid and rehabilitation, independent capacity building and
sustainable growth. This exercise also helps us to understand how regional socio-economic
specificities and the regional and macro political context constrain or enable disaster
management. Here, the coastal districts of Odisha and West Bengal have been chosen for
detailed study because over the years they have been battered with disasters time and again,
and despite concerted efforts they have continuously reported low levels of development
(GoI, 2009a).
The paper is structured in the following manner. In the first section a temporal study of the
occurrences of tropical cyclones along the eastern and western coasts of India depict the
vulnerability of the area with respect to climatic externalities. In the next two sections,
social and economic development of the coastal districts of the two states have been analysed,
which along with other factors posing challenges to disaster mitigation in India, finds mention
in the third section of this paper.
2. Cyclone affected Coastal Districts of West Bengal and Odisha
‘A long coastline of about 7,516 km of flat coastal terrain, shallow continental shelf, high
population density, geographical location and physiological features of its coastal areas
makes India, in the North Indian Ocean (NIO) Basin, extremely vulnerable to cyclones and
its associated hazards like storm tide (the combined effects of storm surge, astronomical
tide, high velocity winds and heavy rains’ (NDMA, GoI, 2008).3
A low pressure area with winds circulating at a speed of more than 61km/hr is called a
cyclone or tropical storm. Though the frequency of tropical cyclones in the NIO covering
the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea is only 7 per cent of the global total, its impact on
India’s east coast and Bangladesh’s coast is particularly devastating. In the last 270 years,
twenty-one of twenty-three major cyclones, killing 10,000 or more lives worldwide, have
occurred in the east coast of the Indian subcontinent and have been accompanied with
related disasters probably due to the intense storm tide effect. Coastal districts of Tamil
Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and Puducherry on the east and Gujarat on
the west are most vulnerable to climatic hazards associated with tropical cyclones (see
Tables 1 and 2).
3
Storm surge is an abnormal rise in the water level along a shore resulting primarily from high winds and
low pressure generated with tropical cyclones. Astronomical Tide refer to the tidal levels and the character
which would result from gravitational effects, e.g., of the Earth, Sun and the Moon, without any atmospheric
influences.

21
Table 1: Major Tropical Cyclone Disasters over Past 270 Years in Terms of Human Loss
East Coast of India
State Coastal Districts No. of Cyclones
West Bengal (69)
24 Parganas (North and South) 35
Midnapur 34
Odisha (98)
Balasore 32
Cuttack 32
Puri 19
Ganjam 15
Table 2: Number of Cyclones Crossing the Coastal Districts of
West Bengal and Odisha (1891-2002)
Source: Indian Meteorological Department, GoI, n.d.
S. No. Year Country Deaths
1 1737 Hoogly, West Bengal, India 300,000
2 1779 Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India 20,000
3 1782 Coringa, Andhra Pradesh, India 20,000
5 1788 The Antilles, Carribean Islands, West Indies 22,000
6 1822 Barisal/Backergunj, Bangladesh 50,000
7 1831 Balasore, Odisha, India 22,000
8 1833 Sagar Island, West Bengal, India 30,000
10 1864 Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India 30,000
11 1867 Contai, West Bengal, India 50,000
12 1876 Backergunj, Bangladesh 200,000-250,000
13 1881 China 300,000
14 1897 Bangladesh 175,000
15 1942 Contai, West Bengal, India 15,000
16 1961 Bangladesh 11,468
19 1970 Bangladesh 300,000
20 1971 Paradip, Odisha, India 10,000
21 1977 Divi Seema, Andhra Pradesh, India 10,000
22 1991 Bangladesh 138,000
23 1999 South of Paradip, Odisha, India
9893* (15,681,072
pop. Affected)
Source: NDMA, GoI, 2008

22
Coastal Odisha and West Bengal, comprising deltas of varied sizes and shapes, are
characterised by flat inundated deltaic plains. These areas witness concentration of runoff
post heavy rainfall brought in by cyclonic storms in short duration (Khatua and Panigrahi,
2001). Storm surges cause maximum damage to these areas and their communities. More
generally, it has been observed that the degree of disaster potential depends on the storm
surge associated with the cyclone at the time of landfall, characteristics of the coast, phases
of the tides and vulnerability of the area and the community. It has been found that the
Probable Maximum Storm Surge (PMSS, see Figure 1) is highest along the West Bengal
coast ranging from 9 to 12.5 metres, which gradually reduces to 3.8 metres in Khurda
district of Odisha. In 1999, the super cyclone in 1999 generated a wind speed of 252km/hr
followed by a storm surge of 7 to 9 metres close to Paradip coast in Odisha (NDMA, GoI,
2008).
Fig. 1 : Cyclone Wind and Probable Maximum Storm Surge (PMSS) Map of India
Source: (NDMA, GoI, 2008)

23
Frequent cyclones along with storm surges, heavy rainfall and inundation of coastal tracts
have pushed millions to the margins of the economy and society, often resulting in their
destitution and pauperisation and completely depleting their coping capacity (Fuentes and
Seck, 2007). The implications are particularly devastating in rural areas where income
sources and assets are anyway extremely limited, and sudden shocks at short intervals can
push them in a downward spiral.Approximately 32 crore people or one-third of the country’s
total population is exposed to cyclone related hazards and the number rises each year
(NDMA, GoI, 2008).
Lindell and Prater (2003) have identified two types of disaster impacts i.e. physical and
social impact at the local and household levels. Physical impact relates to different
geographical and natural hazard agents. Hazard mitigation practices, emergency
preparedness practices and institutional capacity are effective instruments to minimise the
intensity of the impact. On the other hand, even in situations of substantial physical impact,
presence of community recovery resources, households’ coping mechanisms with extra
assistance and advanced socio-demographic and economic development, goes a long way
in reigning in social impacts. Others have similarly stressed upon the importance of
communal resources and capacity building, mitigation practices, social and economic
development of the population and other institutional mechanisms (Rodriguez-Oreggia, et
al., 2008).
This type of geographical, physical, social and economic profile severely handicaps
prevention and risk mitigation activities, which has been further investigated in case of the
low lying coastal districts of West Bengal and Odisha (see Figure 2). Low human
development levels especially found in Odisha makes this state more vulnerable compared
to West Bengal, in times of disasters (GoI, 2009b).
Figure 2: Coastal Districts of West Bengal and Odisha
Source: Location map generated with the help of Arc GIS 9

24
2.1 Social, Demographic, Economic Profile of Population in the Coastal Districts of West
Bengal and Odisha
From the above it follows then that a demographic, social and economic profiling of this
region is imperative to understand the challenges to disaster management. This has to be
the first step in designing appropriate preventive and remedial strategies.
As mentioned previously, these West Bengal and Odisha districts lie on the eastern coast
and have a high proportion of rural poor engaged in primary activities, mostly agriculture
and fishing. Housing conditions are also of very poor quality, living as they do in kutcha
(made of grass, thatch, mud, hay) structures. Tables 3 to 6 (see annexure) detail the
demographic, economic and social profile of the 13 coastal districts of West Bengal and
Odisha identified above. A detailed distribution of pucca and kutcha (permanent or non-
permanent) housing structures, disaggregated on the basis of scheduled caste and tribe
population and based on 2001 census is presented in tables 7 to 10 (see annexure). This
exercise clearly brings out the evolving trends reflecting on the nature of socio-economic
change that has occurred, if at all. The purpose is to see if, over the years, these districts
have become better equipped to deal with disasters.
Data shows a rise in the proportion of population living in urban areas along with
corresponding rise in literacy levels as well as scheduled caste and scheduled tribe population
over the 2001-2011 period. There remains however many districts in Odisha with a strong
concentration of rural population, for instance, Kendrapara, Jagatsinghapur, Baleshwar
(94.2 per cent, 89.8 per cent and 89.1 per cent respectively). On the literacy front, significant
improvement is seen in female literacy over 2001–2011 in both West Bengal and Odisha
districts. The sex ratio pattern makes for a troubling picture in the state of Odisha, where
especially the rural areas of most of the selected districts have revealed a fall in sex ratio
with a consecutive gain in urban sex ratio. This pattern however has not taken place in the
district of Baleshwar, nor is it so evident in the five districts of West Bengal. A possible
reason for this gain in urban sex ratio could be female out-migration from the rural areas of
Odisha, but this needs further investigation (see annexure).
The proportion of main workers to marginal workers has declined, more so in districts of
Odisha which are more rural in comparison to West Bengal districts. In the category of
main workers, the number of agricultural cultivators has fallen and that of agricultural
labourers has risen (see annexure, Table 5). These trends are a reflection of the increasing
scarcity of secure and regular wage employment in agriculture dominated rural economies.
Majority are engaged in low paid, casual and oppressive work and petty modes of exploitative
self-employment which have exacerbated their vulnerability to climatic shocks. For example,
in Odisha, a large number have taken up fishing (inland and marine) which continues to be
labour-intensive and not completely commercialised. These fishing communities are largely
classified as living below the poverty line, completely exposed to climatic vagaries and
consequences thereof, according to the estimates provided by the Directorate of Fisheries,
Government of Odisha (GoO, 2010). West Bengal also has a huge section of its population
engaged in fishing; almost 76981 marine fishermen families, in the period 2004-11, were
found to pursue this activity signifying similar dangers associated with this profession

25
(GoI, n.d.). However, the extended coastline of Odisha, stretching across six districts,
adds more to the risk. Given their almost complete dependence on this risky venture for
livelihoods, weather forecasts are mostly ignored and families attempt to maximise income
by sending out children as well on fishing expeditions. So acute is economic distress that
even past experiences of devastating disasters like the 1999 super cyclone have not led to
the adoption of safe fishing methods in tune with the local ecology. Moreover, an
overwhelming proportion of this region’s population is scheduled caste and scheduled tribe
and data shows that these marginalised and discriminated sections have lesser access to
improved living standards (for example, see annexure, Tables 7-10).
Latest census results report a decline in the number of agricultural cultivators and an increase
in agricultural labourers as evident in all the selected districts of West Bengal and Odisha.
This is but one indication of immiserising growth. So it is not just vulnerable livelihoods
but also the structural context of wage scarcity and reproduction squeeze that underlies
occupational multiplicity with their attendant forms of exploitation.
2.2 Housing Scenario in the Districts of Odisha and West Bengal with Special Reference
to their Rural Population
Housing in rural India mostly presents a landscape of non-permanent structures with kutcha
roofs and mud walls. Kutcha construction but obviously cannot withstand a cyclone. In
fact, much of the population is left homeless post disaster. Building appropriate housing
structures in disaster-prone areas is thus of utmost importance and not only because of loss
of shelter but also because of associated loss of valuables, cattle and crucial means of
production like fishing equipment or agricultural implements. The last decade has seen
some improvement on this front as evident in the declining number of kutcha houses (see
annexure, Tables 7 to 9 and 11). Nonetheless, several low lying regions of the country like
the South 24 Parganas in West Bengal, have a preponderance of kutcha construction which
increases the damage potential in times of storm surges and floods.
Safe housing is only a beginning towards ensuring better safeguards against environmental
and geographical disasters. Disaster insurance can bring critical respite to the affected
during crises. However, in developing countries delivery of such services remains a major
challenge given poor banking and information and technological communication coverage
in rural, ecologically or politically sensitive and peripheral areas. In addition, there is need
to educate people on using formal banking services for saving as opposed to traditional
mechanisms, for example, burying savings and assets in dug chambers in households.
Introduction of other banking services accompanied with socially sensitive financial
inclusion can go a long way in extending financial security to families in hazard prone
regions. Since 2001, people’s access to banking has shown an improvement (see annexure,
Tables 10 and 11).
An important aspect of intervention in the area of disaster management is adoption of a
balanced regional approach and linking these interventions with other developmental
initiatives. In Jagatsinghapur, post 1999 supercyclone, strong correlation was noted between
rehabilitation measures and improvement in housing. But this was not observed in other

26
similarly affected areas. Why this was the case is a matter of further research. More generally,
other possible areas where greater action is required includes building of shelter belts,
levees, bridges; putting up stations with advanced communication systems to alert people;
ensuring wage security; access to formal institutions; individual and community capacity
building etc. Mitigating and managing disasters can never be a one-dimensional objective.
The capacity to ‘snap back’ to the original state after a disaster does not always depend on
geography, but also on administration, political will and leadership and quality and efficiency
of governance, specifically the bureaucracy. Importantly, as is evident from above, there is
an urgent need to prioritise socio-economically deprived and underdeveloped regions and
these are primarily rural/peripheral areas. However, this should not be read as undermining
the importance of disaster management in urban areas.
3. Challenges to Disaster Risk Management
An important mention with regard to disaster mitigation is Indian government’s National
Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project, initiated with World Bank assistance. The main focus of
this project has been to strengthen structural and non-structural cyclone mitigation efforts
and reduce vulnerability of coastal districts prone to cyclones. Structural measures include
construction of cyclone resistant buildings, road links, culverts, bridges, canals, drains,
saline embankments, surface water tanks and communication and power transmission
networks. Non-structural measures comprise early warning systems, communication and
dissemination, management of coastal zones, awareness generation, disaster risk
management and capacity development (NDMA, GoI, 2008). This project has to be
understood against the backdrop of a shift from a post disaster management to a pre-disaster
risk reduction and management approach, focusing on preparedness and awareness.
Catastrophic calamities like the Latur earthquake in1993, 1999 Odisha super cyclone, the
Maharashtra and Gujarat earthquake in 2001 and occurrences of floods and droughts in
different parts of the country had failed to bring about a desperately required change in the
disaster risk management approach. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami changed this.According
to National Disaster Management Guidelines, disaster risk reduction is a combination of
two important factors- preparedness and mitigation. In it’s National Policy on Disaster
Management (2009), the Government of India, for the first time, introduced key concepts
like prevention and preparedness through knowledge, innovation and education; mitigation
with the help of technology aiming towards environmental sustainability and integrating
disaster management and development planning process. More specifically, creation of
avenues for financial security through mechanisms like disaster risk insurance, micro-
financing, provision of home loans to construct safer living structures and encouraging
community participation in developing and building a ‘culture of preparedness’, find a
mention. A logical question then is that, is this achievable in a country like India where the
most exposed population does not possess basic social and economic capabilities to bring
forth innovation and sustainability in creating a ‘culture of preparedness’ in disaster risk
management? Moreover, a weak, rent-seeking and ill-equipped administrative machinery
further saps the resilience and adaptive capacity of the region in question.
Though the National Policy on Disaster Management (2009) recognises the critical

27
importance of the three tiers of the government acting together in the field of disaster
management, disaster management is still listed as a state subject. Consequently, the central
government is seen in a supportive role. States have depended on their budget or plan funds
for disaster management and risk mitigation. In fact, a guideline issued by the Central
Government to the states clearly states, ‘Funds available under the ongoing schemes may
be used for mitigation/preparedness’. Even the Calamity Relief Fund, set up in 1990-91 by
the Central Government to reduce states’ burden on relief expenditure, has not proved
effective. On the administrative aspect, the policy clearly identifies the Ministry of Home
Affairs as the nodal agency tasked with relief and rehabilitation, the department of revenue
at the state level or the collector as the chairman of the coordination review committee at
the district level and panchayati raj institutions and urban local bodies at the local level
(Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, 2005). On the other hand,
implementation of the new policy remains a challenge. For example, there have been focused
interventions in drought area development plans, but none of these have a pre-disaster
mitigation aspect built in. Despite identification of vulnerable areas and a policy stressing
on prevention in place, the 2009 Aila cylone in West Bengal and the recent Uttarakhand
tragedy completely laid bare the unpreparedness of state machinery and their archaically
casual attitude to implementing the new policy paradigm. In the latter case, it is telling that
the chief minister headed State Disaster Management Authority, constituted in 2007, had
not even prepared the mandatory disaster management plan till the time of the tragedy i.e.
even after more than five years of its formation and had not even bothered to shift populations
identified as vulnerable to safer locations-and this in a state where landslides are a regular
phenomena (Tripathi, 2013). The Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s report
submitted to the Parliament on 23rd April, 2013, is even more telling-according to it the
national executive body of the National Disaster Management Authority had not met even
once between 2008 and 2012-and this in a country like India where 76 per cent of the
coastline is prone to cyclones and tsunamis, 59 per cent of the landmass is earthquake
prone, 10 per cent is prone to floods and river erosion and 68 per cent to droughts (Tripathi,
2013). It is imperative that every authority, at every level, should approach disaster risk
management seriously and on a high priority and focus on increasing capabilities of the
people and the region alongside good governance built on efficiency, transparency and
accountability.
Long term measures like creation of sand dunes, mangrove forests and construction of
sluice gates are necessary to combat floods and cyclones. However, in the context of a
large poor population, conserving natural safeguards against desperate efforts to secure
daily livelihood fails. This has happened in the destruction of the mangrove forests in the
name of shrimp farming in the coastal areas of West Bengal and Odisha. People from these
developing regions practice shrimp farming in the mangrove swamps as land is cheap and
there is no effective government regulation (BBC News, 2004). Provision of minimum
decent work and extending social protection is one answer to conserving fragile coastal
ecology as a natural safeguard against strong cyclonic winds and tides. A long term
perspective, such as this, will in the end benefit not only the local population but the region
as a whole.

28
4. Conclusion
Disaster management should be based on an integrated approach factoring in physiography,
human development and the political and administrative machinery of the region. In
developing countries, the growing incidence of natural disasters correlates to the increasing
vulnerability of households and communities which exacerbate the impact of disasters and
make recovery all the more difficult (Vatsa and Krimgold, 2000; Carter, et al., 2007). If
disaster risk management practices continue to be given lip-service only, then human
development of concerned regions remains compromised.
References
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Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3728019.stm
[Accessed 31 August 2013]
Carter, M. R., Little, P., and Mogues, T. (2007). Poverty traps and natural disasters in Ethiopia and Honduras.
World Development, Vol.35, No.5. pp.835-856.
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between resolutions and reality
Available at: http://www.cbgaindia.org/files/working_papers/
Public%20Policy%20towards%20Natural%20Disasters%20in%20India.pdf
Dayton- Johnson, J., 2004. National disasters and adaptive capacity. OECD Development Centre, Working
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[Accessed 6 September 2013]
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[Accessed November 2011)
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some empirical evidences. Human development report 2007. Fighting climate change: human solidarity in a
divided world. Occasional Paper.
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[Accessed November 2011]
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Khatua, K., Panigrahi, S., 2001. Flood and Cyclone in Coastal Odisha.
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Ministry of Environment and Forests, GoI, 2009a. World Bank assisted integrated coastal zone management
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[Accessed 13 December 2011]
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30
Annexure
Table 3: Growth Trends in Urban Population and Sex Ratio in Coastal Districts of
Odisha and West Bengal between 2001-2011
Source: Computed from Census of India 2001 and 2011
* In the 2011 Census, data has been disaggregated into Paschim and Purba Medinipur.
S.No.
Name of the
District
TRU
% Urban
Pop. 2011
% Urban
Pop. 2001
2011
Sex
Ratio
2001
Sex
Ratio
2011
Child Sex
Ratio
2001
Child Sex
Ratio
1
North Twenty
Four Parganas
Total 57.27 54.30 955 926 956 958
Rural
-
947 942 960 963
Urban 961 912 951 950
2
South Twenty
Four Parganas
Total 25.58 15.73 956 937 963 964
Rural
-
954 942 964 965
Urban 961 913 957 955
3
Paschim
Medinipur*
Total 12.22 - 966 963
Rural
-
- 965 962
Urban - 974 972
4
Purba
Medinipur*
Total 11.63 - 938 946
Rural
-
- 939 945
Urban - 929 958
5 Kolkata
Total 100.00 100.00 908 829 933 927
Rural
-Urban 908 829 933 927
6 Bhadrak
Total 12.34 10.58 981 974 942 943
Rural
-
985 979 942 941
Urban 956 934 938 957
7 Cuttack
Total 28.05 27.39 940 938 914 939
Rural
-
945 964 919 939
Urban 927 874 899 940
8 Ganjam
Total 21.76 17.60 983 998 908 939
Rural
-
995 1011 907 943
Urban 941 939 913 913
9 Jagatsinghapur
Total 10.20 9.88 968 963 929 926
Rural
-
976 984 933 928
Urban 900 787 899 907
10 Kendrapara
Total 5.80 5.69 1007 1014 926 940
Rural
-
1010 1018 928 942
Urban 954 948 897 914
11 Khordha
Total 48.16 42.92 929 902 916 926
Rural
-
959 972 924 931
Urban 898 817 906 917
12 Baleshwar
Total 10.92 10.89 957 953 943 944
Rural
-
957 957 943 943
Urban 959 920 947 945
13 Puri
Total 15.6 13.57759 963 968 932 931
Rural
-
963 976 933 932
Urban 963 921 926 920

31
Table 4 : Growth Trends in SC/ST Population in Coastal Districts of Odisha and West
Bengal between 2001-2011
S.No. Name of the District TRU
% SC
2011
% SC
2001
%ST
2011
%ST 2001
1 North Twenty Four Parganas
Total 21.67 20.60 2.64 2.23
Rural 29.28 29.60 4.60 4.13
Urban 15.99 13.02 1.18 0.62
2 South Twenty Four Parganas
Total 30.19 32.12 1.19 1.23
Rural 33.95 35.03 1.48 1.36
Urban 19.24 16.51 0.34 0.51
3 Paschim Medinipur
Total 19.08 - 14.88 -
Rural 19.92 - 16.43 -
Urban 13.02 - 3.73 -
4 Purba Medinipur
Total 14.63 - 0.55 -
Rural 15.04 - 0.53 -
Urban 11.50 - 0.66 -
5 Kolkata
Total 5.38 6.01 0.24 0.21
Rural - - - -
Urban 5.38 6.01 0.24 0.21
6 Bhadrak
Total 22.23 21.50 2.02 1.88
Rural 23.95 22.78 1.84 1.90
Urban 10.04 10.65 3.27 1.77
7 Cuttack
Total 19.00 19.08 3.57 3.57
Rural 21.54 21.18 4.32 4.47
Urban 12.48 13.52 1.64 1.20
8 Ganjam
Total 19.50 18.57 3.37 2.88
Rural 20.53 19.89 4.07 3.35
Urban 15.80 12.36 0.86 0.65
9 Jagatsinghapur
Total 21.83 21.05 0.69 0.82
Rural 22.69 22.21 0.44 0.55
Urban 14.19 10.49 2.88 3.28
10 Kendrapara
Total 21.51 20.52 0.66 0.52
Rural 21.65 20.62 0.65 0.49
Urban 19.26 18.87 0.74 1.05
11 Khordha
Total 13.21 13.54 5.11 5.18
Rural 16.23 16.71 5.81 6.06
Urban 9.96 9.33 4.36 4.00
12 Baleshwar
Total 20.62 18.84 11.88 11.28
Rural 21.67 19.79 12.34 11.60
Urban 12.10 11.07 8.12 8.73
13 Puri
Total 19.14 18.23 0.36 0.30
Rural 20.71 19.65 0.31 0.31
Urban 10.66 9.21 0.66 0.21

32
Table 5: Growth Trend of Male and Female Literate Population in Coastal Districts of
Odisha and West Bengal between 2001-2011
S. No. Name of the District TRU
% Male
Literates
2011
% Male
Literates
2001
% Female
Literates
2011
% Female
Literates
2001
1 North Twenty Four Parganas
Total 79.23 74.17 72.65 63.11
Rural 72.52 65.53 64.21 51.94
Urban 84.27 81.33 78.89 72.66
2 South Twenty Four Parganas
Total 72.91 67.31 62.39 49.90
Rural 71.30 65.62 59.70 47.05
Urban 77.63 76.23 70.21 65.41
3 Paschim Medinipur
Total 75.37 - 62.35 -
Rural 74.46 - 60.76 -
Urban 81.90 - 73.68 -
4 Purba Medinipur
Total 81.72 - 71.94 -
Rural 81.53 - 71.56 -
Urban 83.12 - 74.84 -
5 Kolkata
Total 81.76 77.00 77.63 70.29
Rural - - - -
Urban 81.76 77.00 77.63 70.29
6 Bhadrak
Total 78.43 72.23 66.73 53.92
Rural 79.03 72.77 67.00 54.09
Urban 74.26 67.70 64.82 52.47
7 Cuttack
Total 81.54 75.31 71.43 58.70
Rural 80.34 73.36 68.44 54.66
Urban 84.59 80.23 79.19 69.96
8 Ganjam
Total 70.97 63.56 54.14 39.66
Rural 68.35 60.42 50.05 34.98
Urban 80.12 77.78 69.27 62.43
9 Jagatsinghapur
Total 83.25 77.92 72.97 61.29
Rural 83.39 77.86 72.84 60.92
Urban 82.04 78.42 74.16 65.02
10 Kendrapara
Total 80.80 74.96 70.49 58.13
Rural 80.70 74.76 70.22 57.66
Urban 82.34 78.19 74.97 66.10
11 Khordha
Total 82.04 77.24 73.07 61.60
Rural 79.17 73.55 67.88 54.89
Urban 85.03 81.77 78.84 71.39
12 Baleshwar
Total 76.10 69.68 63.35 50.33
Rural 75.71 69.03 62.37 48.94
Urban 79.24 74.86 71.32 61.90
13 Puri
Total 81.45058 76.81 70.44843 59.27
Rural 81.2743 76.67 69.49561 58.03
Urban 82.38643 77.66 75.7105 67.33

33
Table6:GrowthTrendsinMainWorkers,MarginalWorkers,MainCultivatorsandAgriculturalLabourersin
CoastalDistrictsofOdishaandWestBengalbetween2001-2011
S.No.
Nameofthe
District
TRU
%Main
Workers
2011
%Main
Workers
2001
%Marginal
Workers
2011
%Marginal
Workers
2011
%Main
Cultivato
rs2011
%Main
Cultivator
s2001
%MainAg.
labourers
2011
%MainAg.
labourers
2001
1
NorthTwentyFour
Parganas
T85.5587.7914.4512.218.5610.4414.2211.81
R78.6582.8621.3517.1420.1823.2833.3526.20
U90.9091.999.108.010.780.591.410.77
2
SouthTwentyFour
Parganas
T67.5974.8232.4125.1813.1316.0919.4119.59
R63.2272.6436.7827.3618.1519.4926.2523.61
U80.2786.7619.7313.241.660.493.791.16
3PaschimMedinipur
T60.20-39.80-28.89-32.39-
R57.72-42.28-32.96-36.73-
U82.53-17.47-3.33-5.09-
4PurbaMedinipur
T59.01-40.99-21.45-24.60-
R56.63-43.37-24.11-27.53-
U80.05-19.95-4.86-6.29-
5Kolkata
T87.7994.5312.215.470.470.360.560.23
R--------
U87.7994.5312.210.470.360.560.23
6Bhadrak
T70.0278.3129.9821.6939.8042.9322.9622.63
R68.6977.7131.3122.2944.4546.3824.9424.20
U79.5283.7120.4816.2911.0913.9610.729.43
(Cont’d...)

34
S.No.
Nameofthe
District
TRU
%Main
Workers
2011
%Main
Workers
2001
%Marginal
Workers
2011
%Marginal
Workers
2011
%Main
Cultivat
ors2011
%Main
Cultivators
2001
%MainAg.
labourers
2011
%MainAg.
labourers
2001
7Cuttack
T74.3677.3125.6422.6917.1221.5019.0516.98
R69.9972.5030.0127.5024.3030.3926.9823.97
U86.2091.3113.808.691.320.951.600.83
8Ganjam
T59.9862.7740.0237.2325.9931.8520.5420.94
R54.9559.2245.0540.7833.4337.9026.0424.69
U82.9687.1117.0412.893.473.603.903.43
9Jagatsinghapur
T71.8975.0728.1124.9331.7332.4019.3218.72
R70.0573.2029.9526.8035.6837.0321.5020.99
U88.9790.4011.039.602.821.693.393.69
10Kendrapara
T69.0275.6030.9824.4038.1643.9621.7620.73
R68.0474.9931.9625.0140.4546.2722.9321.57
U84.8686.6015.1413.408.427.936.667.73
11Khordha
T79.8683.5120.1416.4912.6114.2310.1310.61
R72.9775.1827.0324.8226.0727.7319.9220.19
U86.8793.5513.136.451.101.161.751.34
12Baleshwar
T66.2774.9233.7325.0836.7438.3626.8025.30
R64.2773.4635.7326.5440.7542.6629.2027.57
U86.0687.8713.9412.137.136.569.068.55
13Puri
T72.4782.9027.5317.1032.7238.4417.6519.70
R69.4481.3530.5618.6539.6944.8521.1122.74
U89.5592.6610.457.342.272.892.512.83
Source:ComputedfromCensusofIndia2001and2011

IFFCO Foundation Bulletin Aug 2013 Vol.1 No.2

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