Alia’s predicament is akin to most of residents in India’s half a million villages. Where poverty is secular and shows no sign of receding. Like Barigaon, most of India’s villages are entirely sustained by natural resources like land and forest. With 70 per cent of population depending on agriculture and around 400 million people on forests, environment controls the rural economy . It is the survival base on which life depends. And the relation between ecology and economy is so strong, and yet fragile, that even a small disturbance will lead to a human catastrophe like the impending starvation in Barigaon this year.

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