Welcome to Nabarangpur. (Source: Express Photo by Neeraj Priyadarshi) Welcome to Nabarangpur. (Source: Express Photo by Neeraj Priyadarshi)

It is just one of India’s districts — 675 at last count.

Yet, Nabarangpur in Odisha encapsulates the most basic challenges faced by the country as it marks its 68th year of Independence today — it is, arguably, India’s poorest district.

A discernible reduction in its poverty levels, an upgrade in its infrastructure for bijli, sadak, paani, padhai and sehat; expansion of opportunities for its growing young; and an improvement in welfare outcomes for Nabarangpur’s 1.2 million-plus people – nearly 56 per cent of whom are Adivasis and another 14.5 per cent Dalits – may, therefore, be the ultimate indicators for the health of the India Story.

WATCH VIDEO (Explained: Why Is Nabrangpur District Zero?)

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That’s why beginning today and for the next one year, a team of reporters, photographers and editors of The Indian Express will make Nabarangpur their beat — their home.

They will investigate and explain how its children, women men grapple with change and challenge, opportunity and conflict. They will track and monitor the institutions of governance and government — from the panchayat, schools and hospitals to the public distribution system, police station and markets; from local businesses and industry to politics and its key players. They will investigate the working of welfare schemes, from MGNREGA to the more recent Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan and Atal Pension Yojana. They will identify change in homes, neighbourhoods and communities and make sense of the tension between aspiration and grievance.

In short, they will work to cover India from a corner — where it’s the least covered.

How and why did we choose Nabarangpur? Especially when there aren’t any recent official estimates of poverty at a district level? In fact, the last comparative poverty study conducted was based on the National Sample Survey Organisation’s household consumer expenditure survey for 2004-05 (Siladitya Chaudhuri and Nivedita Gupta, ‘Levels of Living and Poverty Patterns: A District-Wise Analysis for India’, Economic & Political Weekly, February 28, 2009). There have been no district-wise estimates since then using the NSSO’s latest quinquennial 68th round survey data for 2011-12.

WATCH VIDEO (District Zero: Independence Day Special)

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Given that limitation, we used estimates for 2004-05 as our starting point. That analysis revealed a total of 13 districts having 80 per cent or more people living below the poverty line. These included six in rural areas: The Dangs (Gujarat), Dantewada (Chhattisgarh), Lohardaga (Jharkhand), Chitrakoot (Uttar Pradesh), Nabarangpur (Odisha) and Bastar (Chhattisgarh), in that order. Dantewada and Nabarangpur figured in the list of 80 per cent-plus urban poverty ratio districts as well, which also had Gajapati and Boudh (Odisha); Raichur, Bellary and Haveri (Karnataka); Banka (Bihar) and Beed (Maharashtra).

The next step was to analyse the same 13 districts using district-level literacy rates and “houselisting and housing” data from the 2011 Census data. We considered 11 indicators in all, which can be seen as reasonable proxies for poverty ranking. These included percentage of households having access to electricity for lighting homes; drinking tap-water from a treated source; latrine facility within the premises; drainage connectivity for wastewater; and LPG connection for cooking. The other indicators included literacy rates; percentage of households having dwellings with walls made of kutcha material (mud, grass, thatch, etc); using a banking facility and owning TVs, mobile phones and motorised two-wheelers.

What we found was that in at least seven out of the 11 indicators, Nabarangpur stood behind every other district.

To illustrate, in the 2004-05 study, The Dangs emerged as the country’s poorest district. But going by our Census-based approach, the literacy rate for The Dangs in 2011 (75.16 per cent) was far higher than Nabarangpur’s 46.43 per cent. Similarly, 61.5 per cent of households in The Dangs were electrified, 46.1 per cent availed of banking services and 28.4 homes had latrines, whereas the corresponding ratios were just 12.6, 24.1 and 9.3 for Nabarangpur. Only in two out of 11 indicators — quality of dwelling wall material and wastewater drainage connectivity — did The Dangs fare worse than Nabarangpur.

This perhaps points to the progress that Gujarat’s most-backward district with almost 95 per cent tribal population may have made during the last decade, whether it is from high growth or purposive government intervention (dairy cooperatives, for instance).

Similarly, if one takes Dantewada, this Naxalite-affected district may have a literacy rate of 42.12 per cent that is lower than Nabarangpur’s. But it still does better than Nabarangpur in seven of the 11 indicators. Thus, Dantewada has a higher percentage of households with access to electricity (38.2), banking services (31.5), treated tap-water (10.2) and LPG connections (9.1), apart from latrines (15.3) and ownership of television (14.7) and two-wheelers (9.4).

All things considered, it would be fair, then, to zero in on Nabarangpur.

That’s why Nabarangpur is our District Zero.

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