lament about the lost agrarian life-rhythm, thanks to the new found money.
this story is being reported everywhere. in the industrial town outside Delhi where I grew up, you could be in the country - and dusty wheat fields - if you rode the bicycle for 15 minutes. when I returned this year, I found that most ugly feature of urban india - block upon block of garish looking apartments. the farmers have sold their land and now live of rent.
the life of toil - which knit communities together has vanished. now there is talk of a gun culture and cars being held up on the road. middle class communities are moving out. in few years 'progress' will undo itself. but the cost will be high - you cannot grow food on concrete!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/weekinreview/09kapur.html?ref=asia
5 comments:
Well, urban flight was something that all Western countries experienced too. There is a benefit in having some places where people, goods and services can be concentrated in close proximity, and there is a benefit in being able to live outside of that congestion, in a more pleasant rural environment.
In Japan, the rural-dwelling farmers and smaller towns have more electoral weighting relative to their size than the concentrated big cities like Tokyo, etc. That could be useful for India too, to reduce the political influence of the "sinning" city-dwellers, with their more organized crime, their organized labour unions, etc.
In that sense, the cities could be used as dumps to clean the villages of less desirable elements, while leaving the cleaner people to enjoy their lives more. At some point, these city "dumps" could be used as launch points for getting the idiots to emigrate to other countries.
San is right, except that we are way too concentrated for a nation of our size. What we need are 200 Chandigarhs spread across the nation.
BTW, will I be alive to see Bangladesh submerged and Chittagong becoming India's eastern port? Just thinking aloud.
And where do you think the Bangladeshis will go if it is submerged?
They will flood India as refugees thanks to the general cowardice ingrained in most Hindus.
India is sitting on a demographic powder keg that will explode in time.
san, we really dont need to repeat the mistakes of the white guys in creating a city-oriented culture and then a car-oriented suburban culture and then a wal-mart culture. these are all dinosaur models, all dependent on hydrocarbons.
it's not that i have anything against cities, in fact i like being in cities, but i don't think we should force or encourage people to move to cities.
although we invented the modern city in the indus-sarasvati, our cities are even today very different from those of the white guys. ours are more pedestrian-oriented, which we are doing our level best to destroy through various means. our city centers are not (yet) rotting like all the urban ghettos in the west. but we do have our dharavis because we have uprooted all these people from the farms and dumped them there as human refuse to serve the middle class in dirty, dangerous and demeaning jobs.
it doesn't have to be like this.
perhaps what we need are small cities or large towns. kerala has unconsciously built up this model of large towns; in fact the differences between these large towns and the villages are minimal. that part of civil society does work in kerala.
If only I can see this in my lifetime:
Bangladesh faces high earthquake risk: expert
According to a seismic zoning map prepared by the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), 43 percent areas in Bangladesh are rated high risk, 41 percent moderate and 16 percent low.
Bangladesh also faces the risk of tsunami as four active sources of earthquake in the Bay of Bengal can generate tremors with a magnitude of over 7 on the Richter scale in the Bay of Bengal affecting the country seriously.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/003200908120944.htm
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