As many as 205 women of Idamalakkudi, a tribal village hidden in the forests of Kerala’s Idukki district, are infertile and more are on their way to becoming so, thanks to the unscientific and uncontrolled use of the “pill”.
If the findings of the State Health Department are to be taken seriously, the situation may soon necessitate the inclusion of the Muthuvan tribe, still living far away from modern civilisation, in the list of endangered communities. As per the department’s findings, it is the unscientific use of contraceptive pills that has made these women infertile.
The main reason why women of Idamalakkudi are popping the pill without control is their fear for living in total isolation in the inhuman conditions of the Valapuras (or Valaymapuras), the houses where menstruating women and women after delivery are supposed to stay. But rights workers are suspicious about the lack of control over the supply of the pills to these women.
In the Muthuvan society, women in periods are forced to spend seven days and women after delivery have to spend a month in the quarantine homes called Valapuras. “Every fertile woman will have to spend seven days of every month of her life between puberty and menopause in Valapuras,” says Jayakumar of Idukki, who has made several study trips to Idamalakkudi.
“But why the authorities are not taking notice of how the Muthuvans are becoming an endangered species through the use of pills though reports on this have been appearing for the past five yearsIJ I have my doubts about this but I should not utter them openly because it would be equal to questioning the concept of humanity of our system,” he said.
Over 380 women have got married in Idamalakkudi in the past five years and 117 of them are yet to bear children not because they do not want to become mothers or real children. There are nearly 90 couples in the village who have not had the luck to parent children after their first babies were born despite intense desire.
It has also been found that 90 per cent of the girls above the age of 12 are “addicts” of the contraceptive pills, cartons of which are brought to Idamalakkudi from Munnar and several places in Tamil Nadu. The Pioneer had in a January, 2012 report warned about how the “pill” problem was getting out of hand in the tribal village.
Pill-popping is no secret affair in Idamalakkudi and parents of girls are well aware of this. Parents even promote the habit. Studies quote villagers as saying that the mothers themselves make their girls eat the pill in order to help them avoid menstruation and thereby escape the hardships of living in the quarantine homes.
The excessive and unscientific use of contraceptive pills by women in the settlements has led to 70-per cent drop in childbirth in Idamalakkudi in the past three years. Health workers warn that the Muthuvans, said to be the tribe with oldest traditions and customs among Kerala’s Adivasis, could vanish with the next two or three generations if the situation is allowed to continue.
NGOs working for the welfare of tribes people point out that there are intermediaries operating between drug traders and the Adivasis. These agents are well aware of the health hazards like infertility, fatal anemia, uterine problems and even cancer the unscientific use of the pill could cause, they say.