Twenty kilometres away from Aurangabad, there is a small village adjacent to the main road called Farola. After walking for almost two kilometres on a “kachha” road and then another couple of yards through kada-kichad(during rainy season), you will reach the house of Umrabee Shaikh. Umrabee is approximately 65 years old. She was wearing a white salwaar kameez the day i visited her. She has infinite wrinkles on her face. When you look at her eyes, you see the suffering she has been through her whole life. Umrabee lives alone. She has been living alone since a long time.
Umrabee tells me that she was married off at a age when she did not even understand what marriage meant. Only after a couple of years of her marriage her husband disowned her. She had nowhere to go except her parents house. She decided that she would not marry again and has been living alone ever since.

Since Farola is located off the main road, the village has been affected by the incredible industrialisation in both good and bad ways. The rapid industrialisation has provided the local youth with employment oppurtunities. On the other hand, people have lost their farm lands. The industries have brought along the pollution of the ground water, air and soil. This discouraged the farmer to plough his land. It encourages him to abandon his land and work as a labourer in the industry.
Umrabee’s house has been provided by the Gram Pachayat (which had IIRD’s extension member as its Sarpanch) under the Indira Gandhi Prayas Yojana Scheme. Though she has a house to live in now, but the house lacks the basic facilities which usually accompanies a house. She doesn’t have a tap in the house,no water tank, no stove, no cooking gas, no cooking oil, no bed, no fan, nothing. She walks a kilometre at her age to get her water. She collects dry leaves, figs and uses them to cook her food.
She has a constant pain in her knees and does not even get proper treatment in her village. She neither has the resources nor the means.
You will see her running here and there after her ‘murgis'(chicken). She’s got three hens and one cock. IIRD had given her a goat under its Elderly Care Programme six months back. She now has two goats. The goat reproduces twice a year. And the kid sells for Rs2500-Rs3000. Hence, these acts as modes of income generation for her, the only modes of income generation. She goes out during the daytime to feed her two goats. The goats seem to be her best friends. She loves them like her children.
Her biggest challenge is to cook for herself. Right from the availability of food grains and vegetable to the fact that she has to cook only for herself everyday of her life. Umrabee gets a certain amount of wheat from a relative of hers. But these grains dont last long. And even if she has grains, she doesn’t have vegetables or dal or anything to eat with. Neither does she have materials like cooking oil, kerosene, masala powder, etc. She tells me that sometimes she goes to sleep without having any food at all. I wonder how often this sometimes is.
Umrabee is one amongst thousands and thousands of women like these in our country. No savings, no children, no income, no one to rely on, nothing. That is the kind of life they live everyday.