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Thursday, March 28, 2024
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The Maha crater

Amid the assembly elections there, Maharashtra is bedeviled by lousy governance, making what should be the richest state in India one of the poorest in its political hinterland.

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This is obviously not my year for catching up with a drought. It is not as if the facts, or rather what the venerable Narayana Murthy of Infosys would call data, do not confirm a drought.

Nationwide, this is the worst drought of the century by far. The overall rainfall figure of 77 per cent of LPA (Long Period Average) is a clear five percentage points worse than 1987, which remains imprinted in our heads as the worst drought of the last century.

I have also not been traveling in the wrong geographies. I went driving through Punjab and Haryana, the states with huge shortfalls the latter being the worst, with a deficit of nearly 60 per cent and reported the somewhat startling findings to you. That sighting of endless green all over the region has now been confirmed by the very strong paddy procurement figures in both states.

And the region we, a motley group of journalists, economists, financial wizards, psephologists and TV anchors, the self-styled Limousine Liberals, have chosen to watch elections in Maharashtra, could have been hand-picked for distress tourism at any time.

And even more so now, when every district along the nearly 500 km between Aurangabad and Nagpur has a monsoon deficiency ranging from 18 to 27 per cent (deficit figures for Aurangabad, Buldhana, Akola, Amravati, Nagpur).

But you can’t find or see distress. At least not so easily as you would expect to do in what has now been written off by the povertarians in the media and the NGOs as suicide country. Remember our definition of povertarians, as explained by the very simple credo of its practitioners and peddlers: poverty is my birthright, but you shall have it.

Poverty you can see in what is, indeed, one of the drier and historically distressed zones in the country. But distress, you don’t. And drought, most certainly not.

Every square foot of cultivable land has bounteous standing crops, from cotton to maize to tur dal to a very occasional sugarcane and, as you get closer to Nagpur, the most exhilarating patches of sunflower, millions and millions of smiling, seed-and-oil-filled bundles of joy bobbing in the breeze and weaving in the path of the sun, a sight to light up the gloomiest of days, and hearts.

But there is poverty and backwardness if not drought and distress. You can see that the farmer is hard-working and knowledgeable. Almost any village of a reasonable size has a seed and fertiliser shop that reports robust business.

And what writings do we see most often on the walls? Rashi 530 Boll Guard, Ajit Bt 12, 13. You know we are talking about Bt cotton. My interlocutor at the seed shop in the village-grown-into-highway-bazaar, Mehekar, tells me no farmer buys any other cotton seed now. Yields are up, of course, but his profits, funnily, have fallen because he is selling much less insecticide.

But if yields are up, and both late rains and irrigation mainly tubewells run with expensive power have saved him from the drought, why is the farmer still poor? In nearly 500 km of driving, we see no more than a dozen tractors outside the campuses of the two agricultural universities we pass, of course. Elsewhere, you see something that’s a rarity in green revolution states: farmers ploughing with bullocks.

The other indicators of bounteous agri-zones are missing too: no new, flashy village homes, Marutis or Santros (motorbikes are there), hardly any writing on the walls selling white goods. One reason for the relative absence of agri-riches is evident: the small size of farmers’ holdings.

But the bigger culprit is poor governance, evidence of which you see wherever you look. Power cuts are murderous, district administrations are not as bad as in the Hindi heartland, but are quite bad.

Mahesh Joshi, a schoolteacher working part-time for Congress-NCP candidate Kailash Gorantyal in Sindkhed Raja village (near the constituency of Naya Jalna, made famous in Vividh Bharati days by its music-loving residents’ domination of request programmes) tells us it is nowhere as good as even in Sharad Pawar’s western Maharashtra.


Also read: That sinking feeling


This, then, is what bedevils Maharashtra: lousy governance that makes what should have been forever the richest state in India one of the poorest in its political hinterland. In fact, if you take out Mumbai, Maharashtra now ranks 11th among our states. The pipeline from the Mantralaya to Marathwada and then on to Vidarbha is far too long and far too leaky for this region to get a fair deal.

That is why you have the paradox here of marginal farming with bullock ploughs and Bt seeds while western Maharashtra booms as a green revolution zone. It is not so close to Mumbai either, but its political capital is Baramati and its de facto chief minister Sharad Pawar, forever.

But politicians could turn around and tell you how difficult this zone, too far from just anywhere, is to govern. If you have doubts, ask the Great Mughals, whose empire finally lost its way here, trying to subdue the region, collect its tribute and taxes, quell the defiance of natives, rebellions of loyalists. Aurangzeb himself moved here to sort things out, failed, died here as an emperor defeated by the elements.

But that is no excuse for the neglect now. You want to see how bad it is, take a 30-km detour from National Highway 6 to Lonar, again an overgrown village no different from a hundred others.

But that is not what you come here for. You come to look at what you may have seen in your Class VI geography textbooks, one of the largest meteorite craters in the world. And one look, and you know the crater is the real thing.

You have seen nothing like it unless you’ve been to the more famous one in Arizona. It is 1.8 km from one end to the other at the top and the meteorite that struck this part of the Deccan Plateau, probably 50,000 years ago, sliced out a perfect circle.

Accumulated water has formed a permanent lake which, shallow this year, can hold a lot more water after a better monsoon. But this water, a bit like the Dead Sea, is heavily salt-laden and supports animal, bird and plant life that is unique for any part of India.

There are wonderful walks around and into the crater, and two 10th century temples at its base, one with a reclining Hanuman said to have been cut from the meteorite.

And yet, how many tourists come to see this marvel? There is a circuit house built by the British at the rim of the crater. A peek inside its jammed doors tells you nobody has been around for years.

You may fault governments for a million things, but picking the right real estate can never be one of them. Just two minutes away, on a hillock providing a stunning view of the crater, the Maharashtra government has built a tourist complex. It is an impressive building with a spread of tourist cottages bristling with split air-conditioners.

But walk around it and you know few have visited since Chhagan Bhujbal inaugurated it in 2002. The place, in fact, could at most times be as desolate as the very meteorite that fell here 50, 000 years ago.

Its reception is in a rotten state, its gardens filled with just weeds albeit some nicely flowering ones and its toilets have been vandalised in a way toilets can only be vandalised in India.

Seats have been yanked off, and the entire flushing units, tank chains and handles, taken away, leaving just the stumps of what once used to be plumbing. The staff is still wonderfully warm, happy to see customers and conjures up a wonderful lunch for our group of nearly thirty.

But think of the waste, not just of this facility but of this celestial gift. The Americans would have built facilities and created 50, 000 jobs around it. The Chinese would probably have done twice as well. All we have created here is one more colossal missed opportunity, a real monument to sarkari apathy and incompetence.

One other, though more modern, monument to poor governance lies next to this tourist complex. From a distance, it looks like a tin-shed compound for stabling horses or sheep. But get closer and you see children in school uniform playing kho-kho inside and a signboard proudly introducing Gyandeep Convent.

Why convent, you ask? And you will be told that that is because it is English medium, something government schools are not, and so people beg, borrow and steal to send their children here so they might have some future.

This, when three different sets of political leaders in Mumbai fight over who is doing more for the Marathi language while, of course, all their own children go to real convents, not some Gyandeep in the middle of nowhere in tin-sheds.


 Also read: Mumbye


It is only when you reach Amravati that you see some electricity in the campaign. President Pratibha Patil’s son Rajendra Shekhawat is contesting here, and so is the incumbent MLA, now a formidable Congress rebel, Sunil Deshmukh.

Rahul and Sonia avoided the constituency, but Narendra Modi is arriving today. The Shekhawat-Patil residence is a kind of landmark here, a replica of a haveli from Shekhawati, Rajendra’s father’s native place.

Sure enough, none of his supporters knows him by his first name; he is simply called Chhote Rao Sahib. Chances are, not many of them know him at all.

But this is now a life-and-death contest. The stakes are so high, the prestige of Rashtrapati Bhavan and the Congress party is on the line, and that tension shows in Chhote Rao Sahib’s chubby baby-face that belies his 42 years.

I am up against everybody, he says, the BJP-Sena, Sunil Deshmukh and the media. Like a schoolchild he has rehearsed hard the answer to the most obvious question he is asked: he points out V.V. Giri’s son also contested while he was president.

But there is neither excitement, nor defiance in his face, it is some kind of a fear, almost as if his eyes are trying to tell you, hell, did I really have to get into this? The skin of his face, he complains, is burning and peeling off from campaigning in the sun.

He may still win, who knows, given how hard the Congress will work to salvage its name in Amravati, but he is lucky he is contesting in genteel Vidarbha and not some nastier place up north. Or he would have been called not Chhote Rao Sahib, for sure, but Pappu, and the rest, on whether he can dance or not, would have naturally followed.

There must indeed be something in the air of Vidarbha that even the lion of Gujarat presents a pappu-fied image here, talking development, growth, increase in water bodies and, most interesting of all, his state’s success in collecting carbon credits.

Muslims, Pakistan, terrorism are not mentioned even in passing. Nor is there any mocking of anybody, Sonia, Rahul, or even junior Shekhawat, no vitriol, none of the juicy innuendo that makes crowds flock to his meetings.

Is he scaling down his ambitions, redefining himself as Gujarat’s Vikas Purush rather than building the image of a new all-Indian Lauh Purush, the Chhota Sardar? He won’t engage in conversation on anything other than the local campaign. That, for you, is a new Modi, or may be just the Modi-in-Vidarbha. But that is a space worth watching.

You would normally not associate anything genteel with the headquarters of the RSS in Nagpur, and certainly you will not say that for the sizzling upma that its national spokesman and veteran of nearly 90, M.G. Vaidya, serves us.

He talks happily about his recent acquaintance with a lady called Angina, whom he has now decided to keep close to his heart. Vaidya, one of Vajpayee’s oldest and closest colleagues, sits under the RSS map of Greater India, which encompasses almost the entire subcontinent, and makes a valiant, but hopeless case for the RSS as a non-communal organisation, of Hindutva as a secular concept.

You talk to the RSS people, and they remind you of the Chinese, not people in denial, but people fervently believing their own myths and half-truths and so disappointed when others do not get it.

The only thing Vaidya would not talk about is the BJP, though he does repeat his chief’s advice that its new president will be between 50 and 55. That would rule out almost anybody you and I know including all the senior BJP leaders, Modi, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh and Gopinath Munde, that the Limousine Liberals meet during this romp.


Also read: The wisdom of fools


For a bit of a reality check, meanwhile, stay overnight in Akola which, in so many ways, looks and feels like an eternal depression town: rotting, stinking, full of uncleared garbage, with shells of old but beautiful little houses and buildings, and the most awful new construction.

The power goes off so many times during the night that I decide to take a walk from our hotel at 2 am. The railway station is just five minutes away and it is both alive and dead, buzzing and depressing. In a tiny Hanuman temple by its side, a dozen poor, poor men are chanting the Hanuman Chalisa with sheer joy on their faces.

On its platforms and outside, in what is supposed to be its parking area, hundreds of people sleep on the floor, men dressed in near-tatters, women with small children, nobody bothering to even swat the mosquitoes which swoop in their thousands.

I talk to someone who is awake. Everybody, he says, wants to go to Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur for a job, a living, an escape from that half-acre of land that cannot even produce subsistence income and, in the case of many others, to escape caste. An Indian village is a cruel place, too small and too intimate for you to disown your identity, whether defined by your caste or your family history. So you head for Mumbai, the slums and yet a breath of fresh air!

Postscript

The brilliant American humorist, P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that it seemed anybody who failed architecture school somehow reached Saudi Arabia, so awful was the new architecture there.

What would you say about the architects who are building in our cities now? Probably that anybody who failed in Class X somehow got himself an architect’s licence and started building these sad, sad new monstrosities.

Our cities now must have the worst architecture in the world, and you see it most starkly in Aurangabad, a boomtown, and home to wonderful Mughal architecture. It seems the harder a modern architect tries, the more disastrous the results.

Drive in from the airport and you see a PVR multiplex built in such a way that it is totally slumped on one side, as if a tsunami had flattened it. Somebody has worked hard at it, but if you call it imaginative or creative, you must really be imaginative and creative yourself!

But my favourite signboard pick from this journey is indeed from Aurangabad: the so-aptly named Pyaasa Wine Shop.


Also read: Who’s afraid of the bulldozer


 

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