I recently discovered an interesting Weblog by Atanu Dey. He writes very interesting stuff, and this caught my attention.
Read the complete piece. It is thought-provoking.

He writes:

Furthermore, economic development is both a cause and a consequence of urbanization.

As for the cause for urbanization, I need not deliberate much attention to the role of economic development. However, as a consequence—the social ramifications at that—I like to devote my two-bit worth here. One glaring social (cultural?) consequence of urbanization is that cities grow bigger, become more crowded, and are available material comforts that are generally denied to the average rural Indian. This consequence has seen us face a very disturbing reality that doesn’t seem to abate—migration of the rural populace into our already-crowded cities.

A typical Indian villager who has visited a bustling city—Bombay, Delhi or Bangalore—is almost always overwhelmed by its size, the city’s “attractions” (as shown in our Bollywood potboilers), all outcomes of enormous wealth that our cities hold. He longs to enjoy all these, and somehow believes that this holds a promise of a much better life that what he leads at present. A typical profile of this rural Indian is this: he is either and/or a poor farmer (landless or otherwise), a person with little or no education.

This migration is causing harm in many ways: The land he leaves behind is left with no one to till. Of course, there’re always people to be found, but this does not explain the loss of the villager who has migrated. If he is a landless peasant, he has no skill or previous experience to find jobs in the city that suit him. Invariably, he ends up doing work involving severe physical labour while he is paid a pittance. His living conditions in the city—well, the less said about India’s slums, the better. In the end, he is worse than what he was.

Of course, I’ve not taken into account the pathetic agricultural policies that are leading large numbers of farmers to commit suicide. In this case, maybe—just maybe, the farmer who migrates is better off in his new life. But again, that’s doubtable. For example, in Karnataka, people of this profile have teemed into Bangalore (are still arriving in hordes) in search of jobs; invariably, they end up becoming labourers on construction sites, while their families are as large as 8—10 if not more. The problem is compounded even here: these people sometimes bring their families along with them in which case, they also need to work, the average wage rate being as low as Rs.70-100 a day. If they don’t bring their families along, their women end up in prostitution back home—just to support the children/old folks.

Another disturbing trend is the context of landed farmers who sell their land and migrate to cities, or sell their land for the lure of money. I’ll restrict this examination to only lands that are in the periphery of the cities. Bangalore is a classic case. Agricultural lands in the radius of say, 20-30 Kms are now being converted to residential sites/layouts. These lands purchased are then advertised as “Premium Layouts in the heart of the City,” “just a stone’s throw away from MG Road,” and so on. The kind of profits these builders make is just amazing. That’s beside the point.

Anyway, given proper encouragement to farming, owners of these lands would have never sold them to builders. One of the deadly long-term effects of this is that it both reduces the green cover and depletes food production at the same time. I can see this all around me. The locality where I live in was formerly agricultural land measuring up to 20 acres. Today, it’s a well-formed residential layout.

Now, there’s another drama that has been in operation—in the name of rural economic development—for God knows, how many years. The name of the drama is: Setting up Industrial Zones/Areas in rural areas with the objective of promoting living standards of the rural folk and boosting the economy. Again, the same pattern repeats, and very often, these projects:

a) Turn out to be mere devices for politicians to make money
b) Further deplete the green cover
c) Add all kinds of incompetent industries, which are financed by Industrial Development Boards/Corporations; inevitably, they end up bankrupt within a few years. The Industrial Development Boards make scant recoveries from such bankruptcies. A case in point is the Peenya Industrial Area (near Bangalore), once South Asia’s largest Industrial Belt, today a vast landscape of ruin.
d) Truly competitive enterprises, when they’re set up in these areas, naturally employ quality people. But the flipside is that farmers who have given their lands for a pittance to the government end up being manual labourers/low cadre workers, mostly engaged in low-paying physical work. It’s not my intention to speak derogatorily about any kind of work, but just that the whole exercise is self-defeating; the rural Indian isn’t in any better shape than he was before. Another aspect–heh heh!–is that it again leads us to doubt the true intentions of our political masters about whom I’m never tired to bitch and crib about. Although I’m not an expert in Economics, yet I observe with interest the various proposals, ideas, and schemes–like this one by Atanu Dey–and generally mull over them.

As I’ve done in this blog entry.