The Hindu Business Line : India not shining in villages

Most villages are truly pathetic with no roads, no medical facilities or even good schools. Most houses are shacks; yet, the people are disinterested in development. If our villages are in a sorry state, the reason lies mostly with the indifference of villagers themselves, says P. V. INDIRESAN.

It is a rough road to rural development.

India needs ten million dwellings per year for years and years to come. That is not happening because (a) the government is keen to develop cities rather than our villages and (b) urban costs are too high for most people.

There is also a third reason which most people are unwilling to highlight, namely, political and other corruption.

Any government faced with the prevailing housing situation would have made plans for building more and more houses. It would have simultaneously cut down the cost of housing in every way possible. Unfortunately, that is not happening in our country.

Few cities, very, very few of them have any worthwhile plans for future expansion; our villages have none at all and that is the case with most of our towns and cities. Even where there are plans for development, those plans are full of flaws.

The urban tale

For instance, Delhi has a Master Plan for the year 2021 when it is estimated the population will rise from the current figure of 15 million to 23 million.

The Plan also estimates that, currently, around 2.9 million people are living in slums. Delhi also has what are known as lal dora areas, areas owned by the original villagers, which have population densities as high as 1,00,000 per sq.km.

The Plan has no intention of either removing slums or improving the lal dora areas. It confines itself to the expected future increase in population. That is the story of India’s capital city which perhaps has the best development system in the country.

As matters stand, by the year 2021, Delhi will have many more slums and many more people living in lal dora areas.

The city, whose traffic is already choked, will be virtually impossible to travel. That is the baleful future because the Plan overlooks two important issues in urban governance: (a) housing density increases, traffic management becomes virtually impossible and (b) when total population exceeds ten million, governance becomes equally impossible.

Disinterested in development

At the other extreme, there are villages in the country that have plenty of land to spare but not the ability to invest, which the towns’ people and the city people have. Most villages are truly pathetic with no roads, no medical facilities or even good schools.

Most houses are shacks; yet, the people are disinterested in development. Unlike the people in cities such as Delhi, they are happy with their meagre lot and make no complaints. Many of them are actually afraid of development.

Last week, I went to one such village in West Bengal, and had a long discussion on what villagers can do. Those villagers do not realise that they are sitting on very valuable property. Once a village gets good roads, schools, hospitals and markets, land value will touch at least Rs 40 to 60 per sq.ft or Rs 20-30 lakh per acre. Even if they put together 10 acres of land, they have a potential capital resource of Rs 2-3 crore which they can pledge to get loans worth the same amount — provided they have a scheme of bankable quality. With such a loan they can recycle it again and again to build a complex worth as much as a hundred crores of rupees with over 100 dwellings, a good school or hospital and all its appurtenances.

That is the kind of potential any village has but will not exercise.

Blame it on the villagers

Understandably, any such hospital or school or market cannot be maintained by a single village — it has too few people to do so. However, once it is connected to a large enough cluster of villages, it can do so. We can visualise a situation where one village has an urban quality school, another village has a large market, yet another an industrial unit and one more has a modern secondary-care hospital. If all these villages are connected together by frequent and affordable bus services, each one of these amenities — which villages need badly and none of them can support individually — can be sustained by all the villages taken together. However, that requires cooperation among all the villages. That remains a problem so far.

Not many villagers see the need for urban quality amenities. Even bright children have few ambitions — their only ambition appears to be nothing more than becoming teachers. Most people are unemployed or under employed. That too is accepted as fate and about which nothing can be done. Almost all youth who do study up to high school and are ambitious forsake their villages; few are willing to invest their talents to raise the quality of life of the villages where they were born. If our villages are in a sorry state, the reason lies mostly with the indifference of villagers themselves.

Some tax sops

Villagers do not appreciate either that a good school or a hospital (along with housing for all the staff and for those who serve them) requires at least ten acres of land.

They try to squeeze such developments within an acre or two — leaving the staff and those who provide them with the services to fend for themselves. Usually, that kind of neglect forces the staff, even high school teachers, to live in nearby towns and not in the villages. Thereby, they enrich the towns and make them more crowded, leaving the villages in not much better condition than they were earlier.

There are two options: Select a village and install in it high quality schools, hospitals, markets, state services and the like. That will become a town and will lose all the qualities of a village. Alternatively, distribute all these services among different villages but taking the precaution that each of the services is attached to a housing estate with the minimum amenities such as reliable water supply, power, Internet, bus stops, crèche and the like that are needed to serve the employees. That is why a minimum of ten acres of land is required.

In addition, a correspondent of mine has suggested that the following facilities should be provided by the government.

Exemption/concessions from service tax.

Exemption/concessions from income tax.

Concessions in stamp duty and registration charges.

Electricity connection without transformer and lining charges.

These incentives are useful in a rural setting. They will largely neutralise the advantages cities have at the present time. Then, we will have two alternatives: Either the JNNURM scheme for the top 65 cities or some 5,000 village clusters. The former will make mega cities into super mega cities, large cities into mega cities and smaller cities into large cities. The latter scheme will distribute development over a wider space, minimise rural-urban migration and will also cost much less.

Inspiring instance

However, rural cluster development requires a new kind of entrepreneur who is similar in ability but different in concept from Mr Satish Magar. Mr Magar has built a town near Pune and is building another township as a suburb of Nanded. This new kind of entrepreneur will not develop towns or cities. Instead, he will develop clusters of villages by installing high quality schools, hospitals, markets, even industrial estates. He will also retain employees close to their workplace by providing modern quality houses with quality water and electricity supply. That is not easy but not impossible.

(Concluded)

(The author is a former Director, IIT Madras. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

(This is 243rd in the Vision 2020 series. The last article appeared on January 5.)

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