Sometime in 2006, when he had set himself up in Delhi, Anwer began to work towards getting sanction for a road to his village. It was a foolishly ambitious quest: pulling the levers of power in the capital, a thousand kilometres from his village. The metalled road on which a taxi took me to Hridaychak about a decade later is testimony to his perseverance.’ – A Feast of Vultures
'In 2010, when a few hunger-related deaths in Gaya district were reported, informal estimates said that, in Bihar alone, about a hundred Mahadalits had died of hunger that year. The deaths have not ceased'—A Feast of Vultures
'All 17 states have ISHI scores that are significantly worse than the “low” and “moderate” hunger categories. Twelve of the 17 states fall into the “alarming” category, and one—Madhya Pradesh—falls into the “extremely alarming” category.' — India State Hunger IndexOperational Holdings of Land in India
'Four main points emerge from the analysis: there has been a sharp rise in landlessness in rural India; caste disparities in access to land have persisted over time; there has been a rise in inequality in distribution of land cultivated by households; and there has been a decline in the proportion of manual labour households that combined wage labour with cultivation of small holdings.' — Operational Holdings of Land in India
Even though 85 per cent of rural women are engaged in agriculture, only 13 per cent of them own land. The situation is far worse in Bihar, where only 7 per cent of women have land rights. ‘The story is not very different in our village either. Most women do not own land or any kind of property. They are at the mercy of men,' Anwer said.'—A Feast of Vultures