Kotha and her family farm on the dry plains of their village. As rainfall has decreased over recent decades, their existence has become harder. Seasons have changed radically - summer and winter are hotter and there are no frosts anymore.

“In the past you might have fifteen days when it rained so hard you couldn’t leave your home. Now that happens for perhaps two days. There’s so little water that our cattle don’t breed anymore, so milk is scarce. We used to only ever buy salt, all the grain, milk and spices were produced here. Now we have to buy everything.”

Kotha Bai, 50, lives with her husband and some of her seven children – five daughters and two sons aged between 17 and 30 – in the village of Purampur, in the Baran district of Rajasthan. The family are members of the Bheel tribe, one of India’s most disadvantaged minorities. Half the villagers here, including Kotha Bai and her family, arrived 30 years ago, after being forcibly removed from the forest area they used to live in because of the construction of a dam. The village has no electricity and no metalled road: it can be cut off for many weeks when the rivers either side of it rise.

The Bheel people were granted small pieces of land to farm in the dry plains of Baran, but as rains have become less reliable over recent decades their existence has become harder. Seasons have changed here radically: “the calendar does not work” as one villager put it. Summer and winter has got hotter – there are no frosts any more. Farmers who used to get two crops a year from a whole variety of beans, pulses and other vegetables now may get very little. Fish and wild animals have also disappeared from diets and as a result anaemia is a common health problem.

Like most of her contemporaries Kotha Bai never went to school and is illiterate. Her children did all go to school, but her grandchildren do so less, because they frequently migrate for months at a time with their parents to the cities, looking for casual labour on building sites.

Before it would rain for four months, in the Chaumasa season, every year. Now it’s two months. In the past you might have 15 days when it rained so hard you couldn’t leave your home. Now that happens for perhaps two days. And in those days we could grow gram [pulses] and ground nut without diesel irrigation pumps. Now that’s not possible – and you need money to irrigate.

I think the power and strength you get from grain we grow now is not what it used to be – look at this young generation. They’re much weaker. The amount of weight I could lift they cannot. And the pregnant mothers, they’re not well. It’s the quantity of food too, it’s just not enough.

20 years ago we grew barley and maize and we ate that as porridge. We ate meat, too, mainly from wild animals we caught in the forest – but you cannot get them any more. There’s so little water now that our cattle don’t breed any more. I have three cows and two bullocks, and in four years we’ve had just one calf. So milk is scarce. 20 years ago we had eight cows and every year a new calf. Then the only thing we ever bought was salt.

All the grain and milk and spices were produced here. But now we have to buy everything.

This year we had a good rain, the first for 10 or 12 years, enough to produce grain for the whole year. But the fact that winter doesn’t come now means that the insects and pests that ate the crops and the food don’t get killed any more by the cold.

So we migrate for casual labouring work in the cities of Kota and Bara. We go for perhaps five months a year, after the harvest. Everyone goes, my sons and daughter-in-laws and the grandchildren,. The older children babysit the younger ones – no, they don’t go to school. We usually go to work on a building site, where the men get 100 or 110 rupees (£1.40) a day, the women less. The men make the cement and the females carry it. It’s dirty work and people get injured. It’s not good for the village, people leaving for work. If a husband goes to work for a construction contractor in Bora the wife is left alone without any means of support: it’s all very difficult. She will feel very insecure if she’s left alone. If some accident happens to her when she’s alone, she can’t even state it to the family because of the shame. So often she takes the children and goes with him. And if someone’s ill in the village, or the migrant has an accident, there’s no means of support. It’s not good, this migration it causes many problems and it affects everything, family life, the social life of the village – but the change in the climate forces us to do it”

Country climate reference: Up in smoke? Asia and the Pacific, November 2007. Reid, Hannah, Simms, Andrew, Johnson, Dr Victoria & Working Group on Climate Change and Development

Do you want to campaign against climate change with a group near you? Find out how at

Photo: Ami Vitale / Oxfam

Photo: Ami Vitale / Oxfam

Photo: Ami Vitale / Oxfam

Photo: Ami Vitale / Oxfam

---