Guna

The Scindias (Congress)

Won from Guna: Of 14 elections (including two bypolls) since 1957, the Scindias have won 11. 
Jyotiraditya Scindia won the bypolls here in February 2002 after father Madhavrao’s demise.
Votes for Scindia: 74.28 per cent (last election)

• Only 30 per cent of Guna’s children are fully immunised
• Less than 50 per cent households access potable water and power
• 75 per cent of villages aren’t connected by pucca roads
• Number of high schools per one lakh population is eight

"Their only objective is to safeguard their ancestral assets," says 75-year-old Gajraj Singh of Negma village, 20 km from Guna. He is referring to the Scindias, whom this constituency has been electing and re-electing since the very first general election, as if it’s their fief. Which it actually once was.

A single hand-pump is the sole source of water, not only for the 600-odd residents of Negma but for some neighbouring villages too. Four hours is the minimum every family has to spend on collecting drinking water every day. In Raniganj, those unfortunate enough to fall ill during the monsoons have to be carried almost 10 km on wooden khats; no vehicle can reach the village as the rains wash out any semblance of a road.

At Aroi, about 11 km off the Agra-Mumbai highway, says Sanman Singh: "Sometimes, we don’t get power for 15 days at a stretch." All the villagers chipped in to buy the Rs 25,000 pumpset, to build a common irrigation facility. The entire investment has gone waste, because there’s no power. Says Singh: "We don’t want much. Just give us power for four months a year. But these great leaders couldn’t even do this."

At least 30 starvation deaths were reported from Shivpuri in 2002. Every year, thousands of cattle die for want for fodder and water. "Not a penny of the drought relief fund has reached us," says Ayodhi Bai. In September 2002, a government study found 6,785 children in 43 blocks of Shivpuri severely malnourished—an average of 160 a block. Anganwadis, supposed to provide children nutrition, seem to exist only on paper. In July 2002, when Swami Agnivesh’s Bandhua Mukti Morcha rescued 11 Sahariya tribal families working as bonded labour in a stone quarry barely 10 km from Shivpuri, it was only a public admittance of a well-known fact. When asked whether they will vote for the Scindias again, the people of Aroi are unanimous: "We pray that the maharaja doesn’t win this time." Says Gangaram, an old man: "We have voted them to power again and again. But things have only got worse and worse."