Raghopur Diara, Nov. 22: The constituency of Bihar's young deputy chief minister, Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD, is appropriately an island in the stream. Adrift in the Ganga waters off Patna. You can only reach it by boat, at Rs 5 a spot on rickety decks. Once here, having lumbered up the sandbanks and entered elephant grass country, you may be entitled to feel a little isolated. For several months each year, the months of tide in the mighty river, Raghopur does remain off access, or marooned or drowned.

Thirty-odd kilometres east of Patna lies the Kachchi Dargah Ganga bank, where boats, hand-crafted, diesel-propelled, leave for Raghopur. There is provision for a pontoon crossing - and a future bridge is blue-printed - but the rusted pontoon floats lie untidily tethered to the bank. It's only the boat you may ride across.

But now's a moment crossing the Ganga and getting out of Raghopur is futile even if there's pressing need. The island is doubly strapped for cash. Crop-loss compensation, the annual relief allocation for farmers in this flood-prone pocket, hasn't arrived. And demonetisation has soaked up the paltry savings people still had. Their old currency notes went into the bank, but the bank gave nothing back, not a penny.

Raghopur doesn't have ATMs, and only branches of Grameen Bank. There's no cash at hand. "It's our fortune we are a close-knit society," said Keshav Rai, a small farmer and kerosene agent, "People are able to make do on credit and borrowings, some of us have struck barter arrangements, I give away kerosene, I get rations, but is this the way to be?

Raghopur is fittingly Tejashwi's because for all of the time nature keeps it beyond reach, the deputy chief minister can officially not be bothered. That affords him time and space for the larger tasks and constituency he has mandated himself for as junior chief executive of the state. "On the few occasions he has come he has told us as much quite openly: he can't dedicate himself to Raghopur's interests and concerns, he has the whole of Bihar to look after, bade neta ho gaye hain..."

Even the deaf would have caught the sarcasm of Naga Pahalwan, one of a cluster of villagers lounging about the roadside tea vend under the early winter sun. "But we are used to this," Pahalwan added, "Not the first time someone has come with folded hands, got their votes, and simply gone away."

As categories go, Raghopur is an Amethi-Rae Bareli class constituency, a clan pocketborough of Bihar's first family of politics: the Yadavs. Former chief minister Rabri Devi represented it through her years in office and thereafter; her younger son has been bequeathed the seat now.

But that has seldom meant special attention, much less pampering. Raghopur is a bare necessities island - a single cemented track snakes around its hamlets, it gets fair hours of power each day, there are a few schools, that's about all.

You'll find children not at school but yoked to livelihood chores - slapping dung cakes, ferrying bales of harvest, assisting at tea and cycle-repair shacks. The elders, now that it's lean season on the farm, mostly lounge about, the men on crossroads, the women in their little courtyards. Not too much can come to happen in Raghopur; perhaps in the evenings, when power is kind, they'd cluster around television sets; satellites dishes aren't rare to spot. But for all their other needs, people must cross the river, get out of Raghopur.

Says Keshav, the small farmer: "Many of us don't have enough petty cash to cross over to Patna, and those who do would rather save it, who knows when money will become available." Or deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav.