class cultivators into ordinary ones. They all turned into Sukhbasis. The daily wage labourers and landless are generally called "Sukhbasi" in Kalahandi meaning those who live happily. A proverb for Sukhbasi runs thus: "Gai nai goru, sukhe nid karu" which means the men without cattle have happy sound sleep. Continuous occurrence of drought along with the irregular rainfall has resulted in crop failures and thus people became poorer to poorer. The state's Bureau of Statistics and Economics has analyzed the rainfall of South Western Kalahandi and has reported that "there is a year of drought in every three or four years". Along with the drought the problems such as rural unemployment, non-industrialization, growth of population and rapid deforestation are some of the major problems of Kalahandi. Hence being gripped both by nature and men, the rural inhabitant of Kalahandi has found no other way of survival. As a result, either he has migrated from his motherland or lived in the wasteland as a crippled soldier. Kalahandi has been in the news since the middle of the 1980s when India Today reported sale of a child by its parents due to financial crisis. That article led the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to pay a visit to the district and brought the district to the attention of the national stage for its acute poverty and famine. Subsequently, similar reported cases of starvation deaths and sale of children have led to the announcement of a host of relief efforts and development projects. This backward phenomena despite richness of Kalahandi was called Kalahandi Syndrome by social workers. Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao announced the famous KBK project for backward undivided Kalahandi, Bolangir and Koraput districts in 1994. Nonetheless, Kalahandi has not been able to take off despite of hosts of programmes, largely because of lacuna at implementation stage. As the basic infrastructure is dismal state, the development progress is very slow. Kalahandi is more often used a symbol of backwardness in popular media and among politicians or social workers. Use of Kalahandi in popular literature has been controversial. In a literary conference, "Rajya Sastriya Lekhaka Sammilani" in 1994 at Bhawanipatna, many invited speakers and local intellectuals pointed out that it's not wise to use the name "Kalahandi" as synonym for starvation death. Starvation death does not imply image of Kalahandi completely and by using it for starvation death other rich aspects of