This is something that I have been meaning to write for quite some time. This incident occurred in October 2011 when I was in Assam for my kid brother's wedding. I had recently fractured my foot and it was still in a cast. So, throughout the whole wedding stuff, I was either confined to my room or to a chair - with my leg up. What this meant was that I was pretty much left to entertain myself on my own. So, I would often strike up conversations with anyone who would be sitting near me.
One day, I started talking to this tiny old widow who turned out to be my parents' neighbor. Actually, my parents moved into this neighborhood only in 2006. So, I don't know the neighbors well. Anyway, this old lady turned out to be quite talkative. She started telling me how the village road is being widened by the government. I was aware of this. Recently, a new government medical college was started in our village and after this college became operational, the state government had plans to widen the narrow village road. So, the people residing on both sides of the existing road were about to lose 6-10 feet of land. My parents were also losing about 8 feet of the front garden. Of course, the government was compensating the people with the existing government land rates. I was aware of all this, and when the old lady was narrating these, I was paying her only about half my attention, and that too, out of mere courtesy. But that changed abruptly when the lady started wiping tears from her wrinkled eyes with her withered hands. Now, she had my undivided attention.
She said, "We have a very small piece of land. We have a small paan shop on the road and a hut behind it, and a small vegetable garden so that we do not have to buy vegetables. When the road widens, we will lose our entire piece of land. The government will pay us about Rs.20000. But that is the current official rate of land. The market rate is 10 times of that. At Rs. 20,000, where will we buy another piece of land? How does Rs. 20000 compensate for the continuous monthly income of the paan shop that we will lose? How does Rs. 20000 compensate for the vegetable garden which has been feeding generations of my family?"
I did not have words to comfort her. What was just 8 feet of land to me was an entire family's whole livelihood and sustenance. Yes, the medical college is a good step towards development/progress of the entire state. Yes, the wider road will be good for the overall development of the village. But, do these have to happen at the cost of a poor helpless old widow's livelihood? 63 years ago, we "solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC". But somewhere between then and now, we seem to have lost focus on the "socialist" part.
Socialist...democratic...republic....for the people, of the people, by the people - same meaning, just another way of stating it.....all BIG WORDS! Nothing but hot air, in today's India. We should rather say MONEYED POWERFUL CAPITALIST STATE.
ReplyDeleteIn India, infrastructural development just replaces one set of inequalities with another. Implementing agencies say "redistribution of resources". Donor agencies say, "some loss is inevitable, can't be helped". Consultants do mindless cut-and-paste. Common man LOSES every time.
Just go and see some developed country. They did the same mistakes one century ago. But at that time there was no internet, printed publications were costly and readers very few. Today, there is wide access to information. Yet engineers, consultants, administrators don't bother (And after retirement, many of them SUDDENLY wake up!). Information is useful only for interview and entrance examination. And for writing nice, nice articles. Infrastructural development in India is in fact, undemocratic. It does not represent the people it serves. Development should be bottom-up - many irrigation projects in Andhra Pradesh are bottom-up and have been quite successful. But in most case, development is still top-down, autocratic, despotic.
Of what use such development?