A new urban lifestyle lures India's rural poor

Migration brings profound change

By Amy WaldmanPublished: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2005
SURAT, India:This western city has at least 300 slum pockets, with grimy industry, factory-fouled air and a spiraling crime rate. A 1994 epidemic - reported as pneumonic plague - that originated here caused national panic. It is the kind of place where a woman killed by a passing car lingers in the street because the surrounding crowd does not know her name.

The city hardly seems like a beacon, yet for young men across India it shines like one.

In his central Indian village, B.P. Pandey heard that Surat was a "big industrial town" and made his way here to work. Rinku Gupta, 18, one of Pandey's five roommates, came from the north. Hundreds of thousands more have traveled from Orissa, in the east, and from Maharashtra, to the south.

In the rural mind, Surat, in Gujarat State,looms with outsized allure, and its girth is growing to match. In less than 15 years, its population has more than doubled, to an estimated 3.5 million, making it India's ninth-largest city. The majority of Surat's residents are migrants drawn by its two main industries, diamonds and textiles.

Surat's growth spurt is being replicated across an urbanizing India. At least 28 percent of its population lives in cities and many more of its citizens move in and out of them for temporary work. In some southern states, nearly half the population is in cities. In 1991, India had 23 cities with one million or more people. A decade later it had 35.

As the people shift, so does the very nature of India. This is a country of 600,000 villages, each of them a unit that has ordered life for centuries, from the strata of castes to the cycles of harvest. In this century, cities' pull and influence - not just financial but psychic - are remaking society. Less visible than the heated consumerism or Western sexual habits changing India, this slow churning may be more profound and, for a country weaned on the virtues of village life, more wrenching.

Kanpur, Surat and 17 of the other biggest cities sit along the so-called Golden Quadrilateral - 5,800 kilometers, or about 3,625 miles, of national highways that circle the country and are being modernized in an epic infrastructure project.

The highway brings in and out almost everything cities need, including much of the cheap labor that men like Pandey supply. So with the road's improvement, Surat and other cities are surging anew, spreading toward the highway as if toward their life source.

The redone highway is also shrinking distances between villages and cities. In the countryside through which the route passes, the buzz is about places like Surat, and the sense of a country on the move.

Compared to China, whose rural population is also moving, India's urbanization has been a saunter, not a sprint - slower, looser and more haphazard. That is partly because some of India's policies have served to constrict what the cities can offer. Decisions made during and even after four decades of quasi-socialism crimped manufacturing, which has spurred China's urban growth.

Good jobs or not, India's migrants still come. Their presence is creating new challenges: battles for land, competition for jobs, strained resources and religious and political tensions. So diverse is Surat's population that the municipal corporation runs schools in eight languages.

And when the migrants return home, they bring new views and aspirations with them. Their perspectives are combining with the improved highways to open up the closed worlds of India's villages.

Waiting for a bus at the station in Jaipur,Surender Yadav offered his own village as an example. Bypassed by development, it sat down a wretched road off the highway between Jaipur and New Delhi. There was no medical dispensary, and perhaps more galling to Yadav, a 26-year-old doctoral candidate in Hindi, no newspaper delivery.

But the highway's widening and resurfacing meant villagers no longer were waiting for development to come to them. Every morning, Yadav said, 20 or so people rode their motorbikes to the highway, parked and hopped on a bus. They went to New Delhi, 2.5 hours away, or Gurgaon, even closer, and worked as police officers, low-level clerks, or customer care representatives in call centers. India, ever absorptive, had absorbed the highway, and turned out something new: the commuter village.

Brighter prospects

During religious holidays, 200 to 300 buses a day pull out of Surat and head 10 hours north on the highway. Their destination: the rural region of Saurashtra. Their cargo: diamond-polishers returning home to the drought-parched villages they left to work in the city.


Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/07/news/india.php#end_main