Our mornings in Mhaswad village, located in western Maharashtra, begin with the sound of birds. Some days ago, the birdcalls were accompanied by the soft murmur of voices outside the kitchen window. At 6:30 am, Bhalu Kaka, our cook, was speaking in hushed, urgent tones to Shiva. He was pointing to the back door. A cobra had been spotted. Shiva, the local mason, nodded silently. He is also the village snake-catcher. He gazed into the shadows, moved a few bricks, but found nothing. He came back in the afternoon. Then again in the evening. No luck. The next morning, he was back. Shiva: There is no work for the local mason; his sole means of earning money is by catching snakes that may have strayed into some home or other. Photo: Prabhat Sinha.I asked him, “Shiva Bhau, is Bhalu Kaka calling you every day for this? You must be spending so much on fuel for your bike.” Shiva, now in his early 50s, did not reply immediately. I remembered a different Shiva from years ago – athletic, sharp, a man whose hands could shape beautiful clay toys or scale the tallest tree with a smile. The man before me now seemed folded into himself. He looked older than his years, and tired. There were wide gaps in his mouth where once there were teeth. He finally shook his head. “No. I had to sell my bike,” indicating that the fuel costs had become too much for him. “Now I need fuel for my legs,” he said. Shiva had come for Bhalu Kaka’s poha, yes, but mostly in hope of catching a snake. “There is no work,” he said, his voice flat. “The contractor hasn’t paid me for my last job, which was two years ago. There seems to be no money in the construction market, people don’t pay. Everything is finished.”His hobby, which rested on his skill of catching venomous snakes – the common krait, cobra, Russell’s viper – had become the only source of sustenance for him. “If I catch one, people give Rs 50 or Rs 100, and if I am lucky sometimes even Rs 500, he says.” This time he hadn’t earned a single rupee in four days. So, he kept returning, scanning the kitchen’s edge, willing a deadly serpent to appear so he could risk his life for a few hundred rupees. His survival now literally rested on a thin, scaly line.Is the situation really this bad? I began to look around. At the sports foundation for rural and tribal children where I work, in this very village, my phone rings daily with people seeking jobs. Kabir, an M.Tech graduate from Pune, pleads for any position – clerk, security guard, anything. “In Pune, I get Rs 18,000 a month. My cost of living is more than that. I’d rather be home,” he says. A former school principal from Baramati, in his late forties, once earning Rs 50,000, now has applied for a Rs 20,000 teacher’s job at our organisation; his school hadn’t paid his or his colleagues’ salaries for six months.The data echoes their desperation. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), India’s employment rate has been reducing. As per the International Labour Organisation, the labour force participation rate for rural India is around 50%. Moreover, over 80 per cent of the workforce engages in the informal sector, as wage labour in farms and construction workers; as drivers and and gig and platform workers. Are these signs of a growing India? Millions are seeking work that isn’t there. Startling as the data is, Shiva’s story has put a face on the statistics for me: his life has been reduced to waiting for a cobra, in the hope of earning Rs 200 by catching it.Ambu: Caught between historical neglect and callous officialdom, her life has been an unending series of diminishments. Photo: Prabhat Sinha.It is a cruel irony that in this same country, a single wedding can cost billions, while Shiva gambles with venom for a day’s meal and Ambu waits for an identity. Ambu, who is from the Matang (Dalit) community, is about five feet tall, her frame speaking of a lifetime of malnutrition. When I met her, she was barefoot, waiting outside the District Collector’s office in Satara. She had been there since 11 a.m. it was now 4 p.m. With her were two women from the Holar (Dalit) community.“Dada, you are from Mhaswad, no?” she asked, recognising me. Ambu works as a wage labourer at a local hospital. She is a widow with two children. For two years, she has been trying to get an Aadhaar card so she can access the widow’s pension of Rs 1,500 per month – a sum that means survival for her.The clerk at the office had been predictable in his response: “Sir is in a meeting,’ or “Sir has gone for a field visit.” For over 70% of India’s poor, accessing a government official is a heartbreaking task, akin to hitting their heads against a wall of indifference and power. I asked Ambu and the two women to accompany me. The Collector called the district head dealing with the issue of Aadhaar card. What followed was a lesson in bureaucratic humiliation. The district head began the process of questioning the applicants: “Are you Pakistani? Are you Bangladeshi? Do you have a passport?”I watched Ambu and the other women shrink. They looked down at their bare feet. From birth, their life had been a series of diminishments: born into Dalit households, never sent to school, married as child brides, beaten, widowed, struggling for every meal. Now, after two years of walking to government offices, waiting for hours without food, they were being asked if they were foreign infiltrators.A woman tends to her goats at Mhaswad village. Photo: Prabhat Sinha.The problem is a vicious circle born of historical neglect and new, rigid laws. Born at home, they were never issued birth certificates. Married young, they have no school records. A 2023 push to root out “illegal immigrants” tightened the rules: no birth certificate, no Aadhaar. But how do you produce a document you were never given?The Collector was clear: without a birth certificate or a sworn affidavit from a District Judge vouching for her birth in a specific village, Ambu could not get Aadhaar. And because she, the mother, has no Aadhaar card, her children cannot get theirs either. They are citizens becoming ghosts in their own country. The numbers are staggering. According to a report in The Hindu in August 2025, while exact figures are contested, studies and parliamentary answers suggest millions of Indians, predominantly from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Nomadic Tribes, lack any form of official documentation. They are effectively invisible to the state whose schemes are meant for them. Savitri is not an anomaly; she is one in a vast, silent multitude.The question hangs in the air, as palpable as the cobra’s absence in Bhalu Kaka’s kitchen: Was this acceptable – demanding papers from those who were never given any, meant for them? Are Ambu and Shiv – Dalit, born here, living here for generations – “infiltrators”? A house at Mhaswad village. Photo: Prabhat Sinha.This is the reality of our Viksit Bharat. Where a man risks a cobra’s bite for Rs 200. Where a woman waits two years barefoot for a card that proves she exists, so she can claim Rs 1,500 meant to keep her children fed. Where an M.Tech graduate begs for a guard’s job. Their search is for more than money or plastic cards. It is a search for dignity, for recognition, for the right to simply be without having to prove it to a suspicious state. In the space between the silent cobra and the elusive Aadhaar card lies the true story of New Rural Bharat—a story of incredible resilience meeting immense indifference. We must ask ourselves: is this the foundation upon which a superpower is built?Prabhat Sinha, a former athlete and NBA sports agent, runs the Mann Deshi Champions sports programme for rural and tribal children.