Loisingha (Bolangir), April 16: In the arid zone of western Orissa’s Bolangir district, Balgopal Mishra is wrestling with his rickety Tata Sierra. Its backdoor refuses to shut and once banged closed, swings open as soon the vehicle moves. Mishra, pushing 63, gives up and hops on to a battered Mahindra jeep that clatters away into the heat and dust of the Bolangir roads.

Mishra would have been better off in a trusted Ambassador, also his electoral symbol. But he has none. He also has no polling agents as he insists that he can’t pay them, unlike Sangeeta Singhdeo, his opponent from BJP and sitting MP from Bolangir.

All that the Independent candidate for the Bolangir Lok Sabha constituency has is a dream: a dream of a separate Koshal Raj that would bring back the golden days of the region — now known more for tales of starvation, acute deprivation, child sale, mass migration and unemployment.

With two rath yatras to build opinion for Koshal, the rebel BJP legislator from Loisingha seems to have fired the imagination of farmers and youths of the region. “We have got nothing from the state in all these years. So why not a separate Koshal state?” asks Jayant Sahoo, an educated youth in Loisingha.

“We need water. So if Koshal state can give me water, then what’s the harm,” says Jala Bakul, a farmer in the contiguous Saintala Assembly constituency.

Though the breakaway demand is not new, neglect by successive chief ministers seems to have fuelled the drive. Official records state that 6 per cent of the crop area in Bolangir district is irrigated; actually it is lesser. Though showers are the only succour, successive droughts have broken the farmers’ backs.

They are yet to get insurance for the crop damaged by drought two years ago. The rice millers-bureaucrats nexus and corrupt officials of the Food Corporation of India have meant that farmers remain hitched to poverty. Though there are plans galore for Bolangir and the rest of the region, they have remained pipe dreams.

During the last one year, Mishra has gone around Kalahandi, Nuapara, Sambalpur, Deogarh, Jharsuguda, Boud, Bolangir, Sonepur, Sundargarh, parts of Raygada and parts of Angul districts, which he hopes would be carved out of Orissa for the proposed Koshal state.

The name of the new state has been derived from Koshal, a kingdom of the 11th century that comprised these districts and parts of Chhattisgarh. He has also formed the Koshal Rajya Kriyanusthan Committee that would support candidates fighting the election on the Koshal plank.

“The Orissa government seems interested in keeping the area poor so that they can project it outside for getting more funds from the Centre,” said Mishra, who has made underdevelopment and distress of the farming community his issues. A farmer himself, Mishra estimates that tillers in the region lost Rs 1,200 crore on account of distress sale of paddy and due to non-payment of crop insurance.