Abstract
Urban Villager is an interesting reportage on an emerging satellite town of the National Capital Region of India that can easily compete with Lutyen’s Delhi in urban planning, but whose socio-economic milieu remains essentially half urban and half rural. The book is an ethnographic story of the social and economic life of Greater Noida where rural and urban India mingles willy-nilly. It describes the unease in the day to day interactions of rural and urban India, contradictions of implanted urbanisation, and undercurrents of social tensions between the erstwhile villagers and the new city dwellers.
The new town has sprung up, gulping the farms and fields of the villages, which have lost their original character, yet the remnants of the village life are ubiquitous. Uneasiness of unnatural urbanisation is found in the life of the villages, and so is discomfiture on the face of ‘urban villagers’ who experience living rural and urban life together. Inside their gated community, they are part of urban India, but the moment they step outside, they encounter rural India everywhere even though streets, signboards, streetlights, malls, etc., delude them of their urban living. The rural and urban meet every day; they rub their shoulders in the market and other public places; and they have functional interdependence. Nevertheless, the social life of the two is not the same; the distinction is unmistakable. Moreover, a tacit hostility is very much there against each other.
The inhabitants of the erstwhile villages, now urban villages, see the new settlers as encroachers and predators who have benefited by dispossessing them of their land. They live close to the new settlers of gated community who are provided with 24 hour power, water, security around their houses and modern facilities like gym, spa, club, etc. In contrast to that, these villagers are deprived of access to basic amenities like road, power, sewer, which they were promised to get in lieu of their land that they were made to part away with. The villagers envy the easy life of the new settlers of the gated community. A feeling of being cheated by the state authority and a tacit hostility against the new settlers pervades them. The villagers treat the new settlers as predators. On the other hand, the dwellers of the new town consider the villagers as uncouth, uncivilised, uncultured, and sources of all kinds of troubles, evils and crimes. An undercurrent of hostility flows beneath their apparent social relations.
The book raises some other important issues of political economy, urban planning, ecology and environment, and modernity and tradition interactions. A major issue is land acquisition by the state at a very low price and then the selling of the same land at a much higher price. This has become a new source of conflict between the state and society, city dwellers and villagers, farmers and capitalists throughout the country. The book documents the process of predatory acquisition of land by the state, and unravels the murky side of the dealings that have benefitted a few, mostly state officials in connivance with politicians, businessmen, builders, developers and real estate agents at the cost of the farmers. The fortune of a whole new class of people has shot up meteorically, while those, whose land has been acquired, have to face hardship, humiliation and permanent loss of their livelihood.
While dealing with the inside story of land acquisition, the book exposes the divisive policy of the predatory class that has created a chink in the horizontal solidarity of the villagers. How have they done it? The book provides interesting explanation of this. During the process of land acquisition, officials spared the land of some of the most powerful and influential villagers with an understanding that they would sell their land to the private builders later on at a price much higher than what they would have earned through state acquisition. Sometimes they allegedly paid to the officials for this favour; sometimes they were just obliged by the officials so that they would side with the state in case of protest by the farmers. Consequently, when the moments of mobilisation for enhanced compensation came, the most powerful and influential villagers remained indifferent or sided with the state. The small and marginal farmers, who lost their land and livelihood, did not have the resources to fight against the might of the state. This is one of the reasons that only a few villages out of many challenged the legality of the land acquisition by the Greater Noida Authority that acquired it, invoking emergency clause—Section 17(4) of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The murkiest side of the story lies in overnight change in the land use provision from that of industrial to residential uses, which was often done to benefit builders and developers at a big pay off. The acquisition of the land for industrialisation was a promissory to the farmers that they would be provided direct employment in the industries and would benefit through indirect employment as well. The promise was never fulfilled except for one or two industries giving some manual jobs to the local people initially. In terms of indirect employment, they are getting jobs only as service providers mainly transporters to industries, to builders as suppliers of construction materials, and to the residents of new colonies as sellers of milk and vegetables. They have been cheated of their dreams. Contradictions and undercurrents of tensions fly in the face of New India.
Weakness in urban planning is another issue that this book reflects upon. Although Greater Noida is a well-planned city, there are many issues the planners of the city are unable to resolve, and have not been able to foresee. The first and foremost is the fact that the entire plan of this satellite town, which envisaged 75 per cent of the areas for industries and 25 per cent for residences, has been reversed. Now, 75 per cent of the area has become residential and 25 per cent industrial. As a result of this its master plan has gone topsy-turvy. The town is unable to resolve power, drinking water and public transport problem on a priority basis even though it is yet to be fully populated. The planners have ignored the urban villages except for a policy to fence them from the new settlers for the benefit of the latter.
Environment and ecology are other issues which urban planners must address, but they are not able to give adequate attention. The expansion of cities and building of new towns have been at a great environmental cost. This book explains how Greater Noida emerged damaging a number of wetlands which were habitats of a large number of animals and birds including migratory. The Greater Noida authority has taken care of tree plantation, but a number of ecologically harmful trees have also been planted. Also, there is the issue of water, a perennial problem of urban areas. The careful planning of water harvesting would minimise its problem. The master plan of Greater Noida makes water harvesting compulsory for all dwellings above 100 sq. metres, which is flagrantly violated by big and small dwelling units. Ground water is depleting fast, but the authority is toying with a fanciful idea of bringing Ganga water from 100 kilometres at a huge cost.
There are social issues as well. The lifestyle and the world view of the ‘urban villager’, a migrant from the metro city to a satellite town, are entirely different from those of the inhabitants of original villages. The flow of easy money following the sale of their ancestral land for the development of the township and consequently ostentatious consumption of modern and luxurious goods have created a meaningless pursuit of illusionary social life by the villagers. More importantly, the social life of these villages is under serious strain, as structural and cultural roots of villages have been shaken. They repent that they have gained economically, but lost socially. They have bought all modern gadgets and fancy and highly expensive cars, but their society is far from being urban. The anomaly is visible. They live a life of contradictions.
The study of interaction of modernity and tradition in India is not new. The routes of modernisation are often not linear. It negotiates through tradition and in the process absorbs certain elements of tradition. In turn, tradition too incorporates elements of modernity. The Indian experience in modernisation is a saga of tradition negotiating modernity and/or vice versa. The selection of the universe of this study was an ideal material for moving tradition versus modernity debate further, but in this regard the author has left much to be desired. This would have made this book theoretically relevant and of significant contribution to the literature on modernisation in India. The regret is that the author has missed this important opportunity.