June 15, 1998

Former Sri Lankan president Premadasa's housing project comes to nought.

By Bharat Desai

Seventy-year-old Kulesari Masuma stares into space, a blank expression on her wizened face. She is old and doesn't understand many things. Some years ago, she was told that life would improve. Maybe it has, she cannot decide. All she knows is that she has spent the past year living in a cramped toilet. That is why she cannot understand why the residents of her village, Mastipur, in Bodhgaya should be beholden to former Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa.

"He is our God. He brought us out of hell," says Kailash Manjhi, a villager, of Premadasa. To the Sri Lankan, a devout Buddhist, it had seemed a sacrilege that the Mahabodhi Vihar -- where Gautama Buddha is believed to have attained nirvana -- should be surrounded by dirt and squalor. He initiated a Rs 75-lakh housing project and a spanking residential complex came up. On April 13, 1993, Premadasa flew in to Bodhgaya from Colombo to hand over the keys of the 100 new houses to poor Dalit families. "Buddhagayagama" was inscribed at the entrance to the colony in Sinhalese, Hindi and English.

Barely 15 days after the inauguration ceremony, Premadasa was assassinated. It was just as well because he would have been sorely disappointed to see his love's labour lost: Buddhagayagama has now turned into a den of vice.

Premadasa's pictures still adorn the soot-smudged walls of the rooms. Smoke billows from burning logs of wood used to heat earthen contraptions that distil illicit liquor. The escape from hell has not wrought any dramatic changes. The impoverished Musahars, a socially deprived community, had lived in the vicinity of the Mahabodhi Vihar in wretched conditions. But while Premadasa helped them have their own houses, there was little else done to help them rebuild their lives. As Manjhi's son Vijay points out, "All we have is a decent house to live in. Our lives haven't changed a bit."

The state Government provided loans to a few residents for the purchase of rickshaws and three handcarts, besides giving five people licences to sell kerosene. But, says schoolteacher Raj Kumar Paswan, the rickshaws and handcarts were sold within days and the money invested in the liquor business -- the quickest road to riches. Nagesh, a distiller, justifies his profession: "Liquor provides easy money." He earns Rs 100 a day. Vijay recently tried to reform his community. Along with a group of conscientious young boys, he went around breaking the earthen pots in which the liquor was brewed. But he only ended up getting badly beaten up by his neighbours.

The moral degeneration is becoming more obvious by the day. The local community hall, used earlier as a school for children, has turned into a shelter for beggars and animals because the children no longer attend classes. Says Vimla Rai who works in the Samanway Ashram, a centre for the rehabilitation of Musahar children: "We offered to set up a school in the village but the residents wanted their children to help them make liquor or beg. The people have good houses to live in, but make no effort to improve their lot."

Buddhagayagama is a dream gone awry. In Sri Lanka, Premadasa had built one lakh houses for the poor through similar schemes. Says M. Vimalsara, a Sri Lankan and head of the Mahabodhi Society's Gaya unit: "Premadasa thought the experiment he had so successfully carried out in Sri Lanka would succeed here too; he was wrong." Vimalsara visits Mastipur periodically but finds it depressing. "Housing was backed with vocational training and job opportunities in Sri Lanka, and most of the beneficiaries are doing extremely well. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Mastipur," he says. The fault lies in expecting something that succeeded abroad -- even in the rest of India -- to be as successful everywhere. To Premadasa's chagrin, Buddhagayagama will remain an example of how money alone is not enough to bring happiness into the lives of people.

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