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Did all people of Tamil Nadu know that the country was waging a war against Pakistan? Were our villagers aware of the serious situation our country was facing because of the happenings in Bangladesh? To find an answer to these and other questions, a group of students and teachers of the Department of Statistics of the Madras Christian College visited Ammanambakkam village during the second week of December.

There was hardly any change in Ammanambakkam, situated near Acharapakkam railway station since the students had visited it two years earlier. There was not much difference between the Caste village and the Harijan section. The government had not distributed any land to the landless labourers whose huts are erected on the mirasdar's lands. There were several children of the school-going age whose names had not been entered in any school register.

About 100 adults were interviewed by students. Not a single woman in the Harijan section had heard of the war our jawans were waging so bravely at that very moment. Even in the Caste village less than 10 per cent of the women had barely heard of a war. Among men, only 15 per cent of the Harijans had heard of the war and in the Caste section 25 per cent had. Even those who had heard were not clear about the cause of the war nor the identity of the enemy. On the whole, more than four-fifths of the adult population of Ammanambakkam were not aware of the Indo-Pakistan War.

In the Harijan section of the village hardly any one had heard of Bangladesh and the refugees, in contrast to the rest of the world where the news was flashed over the radio and TV. Not a single woman knew about the existence of Bangladesh. Why, in our earlier survey of the same village we had found that not a single Harijan had heard of Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi. Hardly any steps had been taken by the government to change this deplorable situation during the last three years. On the average less than 10 per cent of the adults of Ammanambakkam knew about the existence of Bangladesh and its people.

The ignorance of the people of Ammanambakkam is typical of the situation in hundreds of hamlets spread all over Tamil Nadu. It was found in a pre-election survey conducted a year ago that about 15% of the voters of Tamil Nadu had not heard of Mrs Indira Gandhi and an overwhelming proportion of those ignorant voters were drawn from villages with a population of less than 5,000 people.

In spite of frequent appeals made to the Government, Ammanambakkam remains poor and backward and its people ill-clad. A new generation of illiterate and ignorant voters is growing up. Except for the mirasdar's house there is not a single brick structure in the village and the only one-room thatch-roofed school no longer keeps the sun and rain out. One hopes that the Government will pay special attention to villages like Ammanambakkam, and wipe out poverty, ignorance and misery from their midst.