I. Modernization project
Every visitor to India, foreigners, NRIs, over the last two decades testify to the positive changes to many of our metro cities, the highways connecting some of these cities, the wide roads, smooth flyovers, the changing skyline with more glass-and-concrete high-rise office buildings and commercial spaces. They also would notice, approvingly, a greater number of smartly turned out people on the boulevards lined with foreign banks, ubiquitous malls and multiplexes, swanky and polished cars of variegated colors, shapes and sizes swarming the well lighted arterial streets of an ever expanding city on a reclaiming and re-development spree. Also, from the sportsmen to the businessmen and bankers, to the politicians and the government bureaucrats you can discern a certain homogeneity in tastes in material accomplishments and a predisposition to bullishness towards attaining higher and higher GDP no matter whatever else happens to the minor matter of the human development indicators.
Be that as it may, the predominantly export and service industry (especially IT and ITES) propelled growth over the last twenty odd years has brought in its wake an unprecedented wave of urbanization, migration of people from the impoverished and no-prospect rural hinterland to the metropolitan areas, being towed to the caravan of aspiration. All these have led to a rapid increase in the demand for housing in the cities and on the municipal facilities that are failing to keep pace with it. One result is a growth of slum-like dwellings and a general increase in congestion, pollution, noise, pressures on the urban social life, rise in the urban poverty and destitution.
Simultaneously, traditional manufacturing centers in and around the cities are folding up having become sick for a variety of reasons. With the space occupied by the old mills fetching much more return simply as prime real estate properties for building new residential and commercial complexes, closing down the mills – and throwing out the industrial workers who used to work there – has made sound economic sense in today’s liberated environment. Apart from growing unemployment, there has been an upswing in the “semi-employment” in mushrooming unorganized informal sector of economic activities (often requiring very little skills) with more scope for exploitation by the entrepreneurs and less for collective bargaining for the workers’ rights. Thus is created a sizable reserve army of low or semi-skilled, partially employed urban poor with no stable job, no dependable income, living in shoddy unsanitary dwellings devoid of any privacy (not even a toilet space) and open to devastation in the next accidental fire or cloudburst.
Cities are of course not just slums. In a typical city like Pune about 40% population live in the slums. From the descending airplanes the more hopeful and the optimistic disseminator of the modern India story would more conveniently focus on the neatly ordered urban spaces full of gated housing communities enjoying amenities meeting international standards. There are those behemoth highrise commercial buildings where each small cubicle could be servicing offices and private homes in the distant continents with confident and cheeky simulation of the local accents and smart affectation of the customer care. These middle class, predominantly young, men and women, working so hard and earning rather decent salaries by the average Indian standards need avenues for feeling the power of their wallet filled with cash and credit cards from several companies. Thus the city is also dotted with ATM kiosks, multi-brand supermarket chains selling bewildering variety of things of desire, multiplex cinema theatres running ten different movies in a flexible time schedule, fast-food joints and eateries with both local and international cuisine.
The more everything changes in our country however so much within us and without seem to remain the same. The growing perception of a lurch towards modernity, for instance, often enough shows up an awkward gait of young unformed legs burdened by a powerful bulwark of a torso controlled by a smallish hard head, not given to flaccid feel-good emotion, but rather compact and quick in calculating where to lease and when to leash those tearing legs.
Even before the deeply hurt country bade fare well last December to the young woman absolutely embodying the aspirational modern India, savaged by hoodlums (members of the reserve army ?) and succumbing to her injuries, India of the hoary traditions spoke up in many voices, from the religious gurus and the godmen to heads of cultural organization, political leaders, not to leave out the spokespersons of the police and the government administration. And these utterances, apart from establishing benchmarks of retrograde misogynic thinking (like the marshland hastily filled up and piled to erect the brand new re-development project) proved beyond doubt, if any proof were required, that India’s modernization project has been conceived in an essentially narrow, superficial and opportunistic manner. After all unleashing the famed ‘animal spirit’ of entrepreneurial zeal (a’ la John Maynard Keynes) in the economic sphere was the limited intervention planned by the political elite. The complete economic fall out of the policies, the social impact including the required shakedown of the die-hard subterranean sensibilities were wishfully thought to be falling in place all by itself ! The tragic rude jolt showed that the task was nowhere near being defined let alone completed.
(... to be continued)
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