|
|
|
|
|
FIFTH COLUMN Ugly India How long can we close our eyes to town planning? By Tavleen Singh The real India, we continue to be told, exists outside cities like Delhi and Mumbai. In Mahatma Gandhi's rose-tinted vision of it, we see a rural landscape filled with the sound of temple bells and the beauty of the "cowdust" hour. A place of simplicity and charm, where people live in idyllic harmony with nature and aspire only to that much of their share of the world's resources as can be considered sufficient for their needs. Well, this past week, as us city hacks do at election time, I ventured forth into the real India and returned to Delhi convinced that if Gandhi were able to make this trip now he would have a nervous breakdown. The road I took led to Maneka Gandhi's constituency Pilibhit. It was one I had not travelled since the 1991 election. It took me through the towns of Moradabad, Rampur and Bareilly in that most real Indian province of all, Uttar Pradesh. The horror began in Moradabad. I remember it as a disorderly, typical Uttar Pradesh town whose claim to fame has been its prosperous brass industry. In the past 10 years, that Moradabad has disappeared beneath a vast, terrifyingly crowded, urban settlement which seems to rise out of a sea of uncollected garbage. The garbage spills out of the town and lines the national highway so that along miles and miles of it you see pavements that seem to be made up entirely of human faeces, rotting food, plastic and industrial waste. On this particular day it was raining heavily so these pavements made of garbage became mobile and spilled into the roadside restaurants licking at the legs of the tables and chairs. Oblivious to the vile smell and the filth, people sat and ate their meals, clearly reconciled to the fact that squalor was a way of life and to expect better was madness. Rampur, once famous for its library and its Islamic architecture, is today only marginally better than Moradabad and probably only because it has not attracted the attention of as many job-seekers from the villages. In its unplanned ugliness, though, it matches Moradabad and almost nobody remembers any more that it once had a library that was believed to have the finest collection of Islamic manuscripts in Asia. Between these two towns, we passed villages, rain-washed and set in lush green fields, but their squalor was equally unspeakable, with children, pigs and stray dogs all scrabbling around in the same filth. When I got to Pilibhit later that evening and met Maneka, I asked her how she, as our first environmentalist politician, reacted when she drove down the highway to her constituency. She said, "I think of it as the road through hell and when I drive through Moradabad I cover my face." She believes that the vision of hell that the real India has become is mainly because development has happened before urban planning. Towns in Uttar Pradesh have been overwhelmed by an influx of villagers seeking work and the lack of municipal facilities and proper housing has reduced every town in the state to a virtual slum. This is probably true but how long can this situation be allowed to continue? And, has anyone thought of the consequences of human beings living like this? In the cesspools that the small towns and villages of Uttar Pradesh have become it isn't possible to expect people to nurture dreams or aspire to better things. It isn't possible to talk of civilisation or our vaunted culture to people who live with untreated sewage seeping into drinking water and whose children go to school, if they do, through streets paved with rotting garbage. Ironically, all our major national leaders get elected from Uttar Pradesh. Astoundingly, none of them notices that they have allowed their home state to become a vast, squalid wasteland. Could it be that they haven't seen just how bad things have become because if you are a big leader you never need to drive from one town to another? If our busybody Election Commission really wants to do some national service, it could ban the use of helicopters and aeroplanes for campaigning. In any case so much flying should be well beyond the permissible budget of a candidate. Unfortunately, degradation in India's largest state is not simply the problem of the government of Uttar Pradesh: it is very much the problem of cities like Delhi and Mumbai whose slums are populated with Uttar Pradeshis desperately fleeing the hopelessness of their home state. If we haven't so far done anything about the horrors of unplanned urban development in states like Uttar Pradesh it is because of the conviction that most of our political leaders claim this is an inevitable consequence of poverty. This is not true. Moradabad is a reasonably prosperous middle-class town. Its squalor is the result of a complete breakdown in urban planning and not of poverty. It is also the result of everyone closing their eyes to the importance of town planning and empowered municipalities. If we continue to do this, there's a risk that Delhi and Mumbai may end up resembling Moradabad and Rampur in the next few years. As it is, half the population of these cities is believed to be living in slums. In Delhi you see acres of them on the other side of the Yamuna; in Mumbai you see them everywhere. The real India is spreading its tentacles slowly but surely and it brings with it decay and despair not temple bells and the cowdust hour. |
||||
| Top |
 © Living Media India Ltd |
