Churning the Earth by Aseem Shrivastava

Author:Aseem Shrivastava [Shrivastava, Aseem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

‘Rurbanization’

The crisis in agriculture is rapidly altering the shape of the countryside. The drive from New Delhi to Meerut in western UP is about seventy kilometres. It used to take under two hours a generation ago. Today it can take up to three or four. The entire route—predominantly rural and agricultural earlier—has become urbanized. It is cluttered with flour and sugar mills; brick kilns; property dealers; tea shops; kirana stores; truck, car and two-wheeler mechanics; bicycle repair shops, and so on. This has led to an explosion of heterogeneous traffic—from trucks and buses to bullock carts and cycle rickshaws, not to mention pedestrians—which makes the road resemble a city artery rather than a highway.

Does it mean that the entire stretch has become truly urbanized? No. Just a few hundred metres from the highway, the landscape is still entirely rural. Fields are planted with wheat or sugar cane and cattle forage on the fallow lands. More importantly, modern urban infrastructure—covered drains and hygienic sanitation, public toilets, a steady supply of drinking water, a reliable supply of power, good roads and other civic amenities—is conspicuous by its absence in most of the places cars speed by. There is the occasional emblem—with two children riding a pencil—of the Sarvashiksha Abhiyan (Education for All) visible every now and then in one’s peripheral vision, signalling the marginal presence of the state schooling system. But it’s not like schools and colleges are exploding all around. Nor are hospitals. As one observer puts it, ‘The town is not coming out to the country, as much as the country is reaching out to the town, leaving behind a host of untidy rural debris.’ 45

India is not atypical here. The failure of development around most of the Third World is generating what Mike Davis calls a ‘hermaphroditic landscape, a partially urbanized countryside’. It is a form of human settlement not readily classified as either urban or rural. It intermeshes the two in a dense, complex web of transactions which tie urban cores to their environs. Geographer David Drakakis-Smith, writing about Delhi, points out that ‘extended metropolitan regions … represent a fusion of urban and regional development in which the distinction between what is urban and rural has become blurred as cities expand along corridors of communication, by-passing or surrounding small towns and villages which subsequently experience in situ changes in function and occupation’. 46

Cities around the world are defined not just by large agglomerations of human population. They are also marked by a way of life which is organized for a somewhat healthy coexistence under such demographic conditions. Thus, it would be much fairer to describe the stretch from New Delhi to Meerut as ‘rurban’, as some people have suggested. A human settlement pattern of such character is hardly uncommon around the country. On the contrary, between the collapsing villages and the overcrowding cities, it is possible to see them becoming the very norm.

The crisis in agriculture and employment is leading to a dramatic change in the nature and meaning of settlement patterns across the country.

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