Village-friendly cities

NARENDAR PANI
TNN, JANUARY 12

The prime minister’s assurance that the government will come up with a policy for farmers displaced by industrialisation finally recognises the earlier assumption that a new industrial unit automatically benefits everyone in its vicinity was much too sanguine. The repeated incidents in West Bengal have made it difficult to continue to ignore the frailty of this assumption. In the wake of the violence in Singur and Nandigram, though, it is tempting to swing to the other extreme and believe there is no way in which the farmers can be integrated into the industrialisation process and their interests can only be protected by a state-sponsored rehabilitation programme. If the government cannot resist this temptation it could end up with a remedy that is worse than the disease. It does not take much insight to notice that meaningful rehabilitation packages are getting more difficult to implement. We can cast aspersions on those in charge of the rehabilitation of persons displaced by the Narmada dam, and some of it may even be deserved. But there is no getting away from the fact that the rehabilitation package has come up against a very real constraint. An ideal rehabilitation package would give the displaced persons the option of continuing with their old lifestyle in a different location. The large tracts of agricultural land required for this to happen quite simply do not exist. To make matters worse there is no effective mechanism to ensure the beneficiaries share the benefits of the dam equitably with those who have been displaced. And the effort to force the project on the greater-good-for-the-greater-number principle has only created a significant minority that is not averse to extremism. These constraints will, if anything, be even more formidable in the case of industrialisation, particularly if SEZs are implemented on the scale that is now being envisaged. If recreating the rudimentary agricultural practices of tribals was difficult, providing fertile agricultural land for farmers being displaced by industry is clearly impossible. It does not help that in many cases state governments try to attract projects by giving them more land than they, strictly speaking, require. Little effort has been made to get the beneficiaries to share the benefit with those losing their land and livelihood. The ability of the government to step in and meet the entire costs of rehabilitation will also be hurt by the tax concessions being offered to the SEZs. And the West Bengal evidence suggests there is no dearth of extremists, from both the Right and the Left, hoping to cash in on the disenchantment.

Rather than putting in place a rehabilitation package that promises more than it can do, it would be much more rewarding to reduce the costs of displacement. One way would be to strengthen the links between the new industrial unit and the displaced persons. They could be given employment opportunities. The industrial unit could also be asked to take the land on lease from the farmers. But such measures link the fortunes of the farmer to those of an industrial unit over which he has no control. And there are a number of examples across the country of industrial units that were expected to lift a backward region but have now turned sick and taken the region down with them. Farmers then have to be given a route into the process of industrialisation that is not tied entirely to the fortunes of the industrial unit that has been forced upon them. Such opportunities are better provided by a cluster of industries rather than by individual industrial units. Farmers need to find it easier to move into such urban centres than is the case today. In other words, what farmers need is an urbanisation policy that is friendly to potential immigrants from rural areas. Unfortunately, policy makers today increasingly treat the urban in contrast to, and even in conflict with, the rural. There is a tendency to exaggerate the rate at which urbanisation is taking place in order to present a case for greater funds for urban areas. And in non-official circles there has even been an argument that governments concentrate only on the rural poor while ignoring the urban poor. As a result of this perspective there is little official attention to the barriers that have emerged against the rural population finding their way into urban centres. The most significant of these barriers is the availability of affordable housing for the relatively poor immigrant from rural areas. Real estate prices in several urban centres have been booming well out of the range of rural immigrants. Conditions in the slums in terms of violence and the availability of basic facilities like drinking water is so inadequate as to make even the rural poor wary of migrating to the cities. Indeed, even when the rapidly declining share of agriculture in national income forces a rural worker to seek job opportunities in the city, there is an effort to ensure it is not permanent. The sociologist Dipankar Gupta has recorded the phenomenon of rural workers doing stints in the city even as they maintain a rural household. The strong links to the village even as they earn a substantial portion of their income in the city, makes the village land they own a sign of status rather than just another asset that can be sold. The anger at the forced takeover of their land cannot then be overcome simply by ensuring they are paid the market price. This pattern does not also allow the family of the rural worker picking up odd jobs in urban areas to tap the benefits of an urban lifestyle, including access to relatively better elementary and higher education. As a result the next generation will not necessarily be better equipped to migrate from a rural economy under pressure, to a booming urban economy. The challenge then is not one of providing rehabilitation packages to specific groups of displaced farmers, but to develop an urban policy based on an imagination of the city not as something in conflict with the rural, but as a geographical space to which the rural citizen will want to migrate.