http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4137615,00.html
In the days after the devastating earthquake that wrecked this part of western India on January 26, soldiers arrived and erected the tents as emergency shelter.
But the village’s influential upper caste Patel community refused to move in. There was nothing wrong with the tents. The problem was the new neighbours 15 metres away: Adhoi’s Dalits (untouchables) who had already set up a makeshift camp using old bedsheets and bamboo poles.
Three weeks after the quake ripped across the state of Gujarat, killing at least 30,000, it is clear that in the villages at least, shared adversity has done little to break down old prejudices.
From lower caste Hindus and poor Muslim families there are mounting accusations that much of the aid that has cascaded into Kutch, the worst affected district, has been withheld from them.
In the hours after the tremors reduced Adhoi’s main street to rubble, burying a parade of small girls, villagers worked together to retrieve and cremate more than 400 dead.
But, the poor and their leaders allege, when the first aid trucks appeared the next day members of the dominant Jain and Patel communities diverted them towards their own people.
“For the first three days we had nothing to eat,” a Dalit villager, Pravin Bharwad, complained. “They told the trucks to avoid us and said we were disease-ridden.”
The Jains started a relief kitchen, but only the upper castes were encouraged to eat there, he said.
Though Adhoi is completely destroyed, the communities now refuse to live with each other. The Dalits’ camp is to the north. Next door are the Kolis, another “backward” caste. The Patels and the Jains have set up camp down the road to the right, close to the village’s shattered and pigeon-infested temple. The shepherd caste is somewhere else.
Ten thousand people now live in a series of discrete encampments. "This is what they have learned from their forefathers and have been following for ages.