Good and bad news from Attappadi

Four days ago a piece of good news came from Attapadi. R Chandran. a native of Dhokukatty, Puttur Panchayat, was awarded PhD by the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Raebareli, one of India's premier centres of pharmaceutical research. It came as proud piece of news that a tribal youth like Chandran pulled off this academic feat. The yardsticks we are used to would not be enough to gauge the distance Dr Chandran traversed, strewn with hurdles harsher than the jungle he crossed, in a land where babies and pregnant women are dying due to lack of healthcare facilities and medicines. But as a travesty of things, another piece of news came from the same Puthur panchayat in Attapadit hat was shocking, painful and most of all disappointing. Muthu, a tribal youth of Anavai, in the same Puthur was denied the job of beat forest officer, even after having cracked the PSC's written test and physical fitness test. The disqualification of Muthu was that he had buck tooth. True, the PSC Eligibility Rules clearly lists this condition among disqualifications. Naturally, the Forest Minister is trying to wriggle out of the issue on this pretext saying that his department is helpless and that he sympathizes with the family. A writer and former PSC member has written a work of justification that this is nothing new and that appointments can be made only in compliance with rules. The fact that Muthu's ordeal was reported by the media is being used by the ruling party – which is adept at letting in all favourites and party ranks into every available job vacancy flouting all rules – to depict the media reports as another conspiracy against the government. They have gone to the extent of lambasting even the young man who was denied a job.

There are some facts that the Forest Minister and those justifying this denial of employment are losing sight of. Muthu hails from an remote forest location 15 kilometers from Mukali. His parents say that his teeth were damaged due to a fall during his younger age. This deformity can be corrected by performing a surgery costing Rs 18,000. In a country full of people's representatives who buy mirrors worth half a lakh rupees at government expense, the followers of leaders who frequently go abroad for treatment at the expense of their party, government or their own, may not understand what it takes for a poor tribal family to raise that much of money. Nor are they aware of how far the treatment facilities are even if they collect money by selling and collecting what they have. If Muthu's buck tooth is a disqualification, the first to bear the guilt would be the administrative and bureaucratic systems that fail to provide the necessary medical facilities for the tribal community, and the political leadership who think about Attapadi only during elections. Every tribal parent works hard for his children's education, to make sure that the miseries and tragedies experienced by them should not be passed on to the next generation; and the offspring too strive to land a government job, even at a lower level. In such context, any law that interferes with that would amount to injustice.

It has also surfaced that Muthu is not the first person to be denied a job due to the disqualification of teeth deformity. Whatever be the number of people rejected on this count in the past, they all constitute injustice. It is not explained how any tooth deformity would interfere with the performance of duties by a government servant, whether in uniform or not. Such rules may be a shameless relic of the aesthetic concepts of physical charm formed in some narrow-minded landed gentry of colonial era. But it is nothing but body shaming and denial of human rights amounting to violation of human dignity. The government has to come up with a 'renaissance' mind-set to rewrite such laws before another candidate falls victim. Muthu must get the job he has come so close to after hard work. And needless to say, there should be no further delay in installing health care facilities in tribal hamlets including his.