Keonjhar: The yellow flowers below the Mahua trees are a feast for the eyes and the same flowers are at times the only source of income for forest dwellers here.
Every morning children and elders go inside the forest with different baskets and bags to collect Mahua flowers.
Once they are back at home, they lay the flowers in the sun to get them dried. Once they are properly dried, the flowers are ready for sale.
While the sale of this flower gives an income to forest dwellers for three to four months, it can also be used as a food item.
People, particularly in hilly regions, prepare delicious cakes by using these flowers. Some also take these flowers after frying them as a side item to the main course.
However, the earnings from the sale of dried Mahua flowers are meagre due to the interference of middlemen.
Often they have to go for a distress sale due to the lack of awareness.
They are not aware about the price fixed by the Panchayat Department for Mahua flowers. They usually sell the flowers to middlemen at a far lower price.
Due to the unfair practice, the middlemen would get richer while the people who make all the effort to collect the flowers from the forest and drying them have to settle for meager earnings.
Earlier one could find a lot of Mahua trees inside the forests but due to indiscriminate mining activities in various parts of Bansapal, Telkoi, Sadar, Patna, Harichandanpur, Jhumpura, Ghatagaon and Joda blocks in this district, the number of trees has been decreasing.
The forest dwellers are using whatever meager earnings they had from the sale of Mahua flowers to survive the entire year.
They buy clothes, grocery items and other necessary things for the family with this money.
“When you compare their labour with whatever they are getting from the sale of flowers, one could say their earnings are inadequate. They can only be benefitted only when they get a fair price for their collection,” tribal leader Subarna Nayak pointed out.
“A Mahua flower trader has to get a license to carry on the trade. But on many occasions, the flowers are collected illegally and smuggled. This apart, due to rampant mining activities, the number of Mahua tree is getting lesser. As these trees are not among the species of the trees planted under afforestation, the day is not far when there will be no Mahua trees,” said Panchanan Khamania, a resident of Bansapal area.
“Mahua flower business is profitable. The government also gets revenue from it. So there are some restrictions and a rate for this flower is fixed and intimated to the Collectors,” said Additional District Magistrate Bhakta Charan Pradhan.
PNN