Fog of Growth
New Delhi, India
This year India’s 60th Republic Day celebration, unlike most years, was different. The capital city, New Delhi, lay shrouded in a dense blanket of fog, leaving a muted somberness in its wake. White, misty cloudlike formations hung low and thick, muffling grand speeches, dimming the brightness of the parade, and softening the sharpness of tight-lipped military salutes. Onlookers were forced to use more imagination than sense to celebrate India at sixty.
Sixty years into her birth, India can confidently boast her status as a growing world power. The mantra of growth and India, particularly of its economic might, has been championed by prominent political pundits, leading party members, and thought leaders around the globe. Turbaned heads held high have declared the end of once laggard India’s infamous “Hindu rate of growth” and the start of a new era: India shining. Camera spot lights glisten off the chrome on tall towers, Bollywood blockbusters pick up the sounds of blaring honks on sprawling national highways, and well groomed lips pay service to seductive stories of growth. India, it seems, is bulldozing its way to success despite the plague of pollution and poverty.
I, too, seduced by these tales of growth, returned to India to become a part of her development. My years here have produced a collection of experiences: some beautiful, some shocking, a few exhausting. I learned that India is not incredible for its glamorous moments alone, but for those moments that frustrate, sadden, and anger. And it is in those moments, the truth of what actually grows and what remains stagnant becomes evident. From moment to moment, these experiences have become a collection of eye witness testimonies of the reality of growth that is happening in India today. The truth is that while India grows in balance sheets and bank accounts there is limited growth within – within the mindsets of the citizens of this country. While towers rise vertically and roads grow horizontally, responsibility remains suspended; responsibility to each other, to goods publicly owned, to land, to water, from the in to the out caste, and from the very touchable to the untouchable. As growth in India creates opportunities economically, materially, and technologically the psyche of India’s people seems frozen. Ambition and motivation are still shackled by the roles of caste and the inevitability of fate; piles of trash still go unseen; young feet, barefoot, still run to beg; the poor vote yet their voices remain mute when promises go unfulfilled, rivers flow filthy and public spaces remain ignored. I have retold some of my own stories; as evidence that illustrates both the elements of change and the elements of stagnation in India today.
Several months ago I was late for a meeting. I jumped into the first auto rickshaw that stopped at the raise of my arm. I asked him the fare and by his response knew that he was overcharging. I was running so behind schedule, even for Indian Standard Time that I decided to haggle en route. I asked him, as I sat in his rumbling green and yellow three-wheeler with the torn plastic red seat and the rusty railings, why he was charging ten rupees more than he should. I expected him to argue with the usual complaints about traffic and the length of the distance. What I heard was the resignation in his voice, instead of the malice of swindling I expected. He told me his auto cost him four lakhs and he had to pay bills. I thought for a moment and then informed him that cars were now available for only one lakh. His response, lacking in curiosity, was, “What is a car to me, madam? What would a poor, uneducated man like me do with a car, madam?” How about a better job I countered. With confidence, he said, “No! No! Meri kismet mai yeh sabh nahin hai”. Convinced that cars, opportunities, new wealth, were not circumstances in his fate; he quietly deposited me at my destination. I paid him the extra ten and walked away.
Last winter, my students told me stories that left me with a permanent chill. I started volunteering to teach English to young children of families who reside in labor camps around Delhi. Soon these young, bright minds became as close as family. One day they came to class with eyes downcast and their usually unstoppable laughter subdued. They sat in a circle on the dusty floor of our classroom, surrounding me with their somber voices, retelling the story of the breaking of their homes. I learned that years ago labor camps had come up throughout the city around construction sites. When the work dried up, the camps continued, families thrived and generations grew. Over thirty years these camps housed hundreds of families under bridges, between flyovers, and behind markets where the naked eyes of the rich do not wander. Water, though illegal, flowed from leaky taps. Electricity was bought, ration cards doled out, and voter identification cards assigned. Then the Government of Delhi, with ambitions to make the capital into a world class city ready to host world class games, became hungry for land. The camps, previously unnoticed by the city’s municipal corporations, except during bill collection time fell victim to the need for world class parking spaces. Overnight, orders materialized in the shape of white, square notices nailed to large poles. The residents, my students and their parents, illegal squatters with no land rights, unskilled and unrepresented, had no claims to the land under Indian rule of law. My kids, along with their neighbors, were suddenly homeless in a matter of days. A lucky few were relocated by choice to a sprawling new slum jungle forty kilometers outside Delhi into plots thirty six square yards in size. The rest of the families scattered and moved on looking for new homes in new neighborhoods that would take them in. The children recounted their tales in broken English, which was not nearly as heartbreaking as the breaking of their unfulfilled dreams. For weeks I combed the newspapers, hoping to find someone who questioned such acts, instead I found stories that chided Delhi for not completing the works for the Commonwealth games in time.
This spring as I sat in a spacious and plush hall listening to a conference on water sustainability in India. The speakers, all Indian, all adorned in various shades of crisp white, were masters in their fields of public policy, business, investment, and social science. One of them, a man bearded and spectacled, rose from his seat as the microphone was passed to his eager fingers. “In India”, he paused, “mass defecation remains a matter of national pride”. The audience sniggered in response as he continued to rail against the government’s inability to provide reliable, clean and consistent supply of drinking water to its masses. Throughout the conference the government was chastised for inaction on several fronts. Recommendations for more institutions and better policies were called upon inside the gleaming walls of the Taj hotel, while outside the rivers Yamuna and Ganga continued flowing bearing the sins of both leaky sewage pipes and mass defecators. The Ganga is India’s holiest river. Nobody questions the river’s spirituality but neither do the defecators question their acts. Legal measures are available, to prevent such acts, like cheap purses, no one takes them seriously. Community toilets and awareness campaigns sprout up throughout the country yet make no lasting changes in behavior. When communities do not know the consequences of their daily rituals, who is to blame? The lawmakers and the politicians or the people themselves? Scientists say that the fecal coliform in the Ganga continues to multiply from the hazardous to the absurd yet little boys in slums learn from a young age that the only place they can release the pain in their bellies is in the storm water drains outside their homes. He has watched his father and mother do the same for years. The stench alone of the sewage that seeps daily into the Ganga’s sacred waters is enough to prohibit human bathing and make consumption of vegetables irrigated by these waters unthinkable. Yet we, unthinking, consume the fruits of these labors every day. And those without an alternative option, without the confidence to demand better, continue to use the same water to both defecate and to pray.
For each story I have told, there are hundreds of stories throughout India that lend hope; hope of a change that is more than numeric and deeper than cosmetic. The top CEOs of major Banks throughout India are all female and have gained prominence not because of who their fathers were or who their husband is. Farmers in India are convincing their daughters to apply to engineering and medical colleges before they get married. In the natural process of development, experts say, Indians will eventually learn civic responsibility and demand more from their politicians while denying their demands for bribes. But is it enough to merely accept that eventually circumstances may change? That eventually Indians will care more for their forests and their rivers than they care for their cars, that eventually the downtrodden will feel empowered to dream the dreams of the rich. Ironically, a Chinese proverb says it best. “If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going”. So what do we make of all this? Is India becoming the global superpower she craves to be? Is growth of wallet sustainable without awareness within? My guess is that the verdict, shrouded in thick fog, is still out.
