For me Odisha is a land of contradictions, and the story starts from a rainy day when I came to Bhawanipatna, Kalahandi, Odisha from Chattisgarh.My home for the next three months would be Swasthya Swaraj, a health‑care NGO that runs clinics in remote tribal villages where Google Maps gives up and cellphone signals go to die.
The very next morning I was going to Kerpai, the first of our clinics. My phone bars vanished, replaced by an ocean of green so lush I could almost feel my pulse slow. It was serenity painted in green—until the human stories started to surface. Malaria in every shade of severity, toddlers with swollen bellies from hunger, mothers who never made it to a hospital, infants who never got a single vaccine. I treated children with fractured bones who stared at me dry‑eyed because the system had taught them that even pain could be normal. Schools stood roofless, teacherless. The state was elsewhere, and the forest had learned to live without it. I felt a slow, sad anger settle in my chest.
Below are a few snapshots from that time—little windows into the beauty and the brutality that coexist on these hills.
Sunset on Kutrumali
We had just wrapped up a school‑health camp in Silet and went to Kutrumali, a plateau of ghost‑white soil where Vedanta is itching to mine bauxite for the health camp. Sachin and I were soaking it all in when a man called us into his hut. Inside, his wife lay on the floor, face swollen and bloodied—domestic violence, almost certainly. Her vitals were steady, so we patched her up as best we could and stepped back into the twilight, carrying our quiet rage with us.
Sick kids soon clustered around our makeshift table. We handed out tablets for malaria, lotion for scabies, iron for anemia. The village school, maybe fifty metres away, was locked and crumbling—no teacher for months. Deepak broke the gloom by teaching the kids a song, clapping out a beat under a sky that was rapidly losing its light. The solar panels on the ridge were dead, so we finished the clinic by phone‑torch, our pockets rattling with empty blister packs. There wasn’t a drop of drinking water on the hill; the villagers trek miles for every sip. And yet, amid all that scarcity, an adolescent girl in a bright blue frock marched up to me and laid out their plan of resistance.
“We will not leave our land—no politician, no company can make us. We’ll fight together.”
Her certainty felt larger than the mining trucks that would soon grind up that very path.
(Kutrumali village)
{To be continued…)
