A Village Awaits Doomsday by Jaideep Hardikar

Author:Jaideep Hardikar [Hardikar, Jaideep]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184756630
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cry! The Beloved Milkman

Nagpur (Maharashtra)

To his customers, seventy-year-old Keshavrao Kale is simply ‘Kaka’ or uncle. Every morning, for the last five decades, Kale has been supplying milk to them like clockwork.

For the last five years though, Kale has been saddled with worries. He has lost all his farmland to a project, and is now about to lose his home. In a year’s time, he says, he won’t be able to supply milk any more.

Kale ‘Kaka’ has been a milkman all his life. ‘I am about to lose my identity,’ he rues, imminent eviction breathing down his neck. Shivangaon, his village, located on the city outskirts, is about to perish thanks to a multi-modal international hub and airport project coming up at Nagpur airport. Kale will have to shift to a small plot where, he says, it will be impossible to retain his cows and buffaloes.

He is not alone. Ten villages have already lost everything to a special economic zone (SEZ) that is part of this extended project, which comprises a logistics hub at the airport. The state government formed a special-purpose vehicle, the Maharashtra Airport Development Company ltd, to steer the multi-crore project. Not one major industrial unit has come up in the SEZ spread over 2000

Hectares of land. It has already evicted ten villages; Shivangaon is the last to go. Until now, its 10,000-odd villagers put up a fight that held up the expansion of the airport, demanding fair compensation in keeping with the soaring land prices in Nagpur.

Kale ‘Kaka’, though, is unwilling to move out. ‘No amount of money is enough,’ he says. ‘I will have to divide all my compensation among my children and other family members, who have a share in my ancestral land. There is no compensation for losing our business.’

In fact, Shivangaon’s flourishing milk business which sustained its farming families is on the verge of drying up. Ironically, this is happening just when the city’s demand for milk is shooting up. Kale says more than 75 per cent of his villagers used to be milkmen. As the village counts its last days before it becomes history, it is clear that the loss will not just be economic, it will be emotional too.

‘I rarely go to deliver milk these days because age has caught up with me, but my children do,’ Kale says. ‘All my customers are worried about who will get them milk after I’m gone from here,’ he says. ‘I have been a part and parcel of their lives, in good times and bad, just as they have been mine.’ All that is about to end, a realization that Kale is losing sleep over. More than a thousand milkmen of Shivangaon share his worry. As they steadily lost their land and resources over the last five years, they had to cut down their dairy business.

Kale now owns thirteen buffaloes and eight cows, which yield at least 100 litres of milk daily. Ten years ago, production used to be three times as much, he says.

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