I live in the Jamudiha village in the Keonjhar district of Odisha. My village is an archetypical representation of deprivation in this area: rocky landscape, little cultivable land, rain-fed agriculture, high distress migration and desperate labour work in the mines. I am from the Bhuyan tribe, which means ‘children of the soil’. Some believe that our ancestors sprang out of ‘Mother Earth’ miraculously and thus the name.