individuals caught in a grand fiction

anoop saha (read his full comment on my previous post) says:

Large numbers of migration occur not just from Bihar, but also from Chhattisgarh, MP, UP, Orissa and West Bengal.

yes, there is also large scale migration from andhra pradesh and other states in the country. i'd also consider the migration of a significant portion of kerala's working age population to the gulf a similar sign of distress. perhaps, anoop had read p. sainath's article: the bus to mumbai. you'll find it on many liberal sites on the net, but it was first published (in june 2003), i think, in the hindu wih this introduction:

Chandrababu Naidu is India's most celebrated Chief Minister. But parts of rural Andhra Pradesh, like Mahbubnagar, not 100 kilometres from where the seat of power is, are in big trouble. The crisis is driving large numbers of people to leave the State in search of work. The government though, does not concede to a major exodus. P. SAINATH and two others tour the villages in Mahbubnagar district and join migrants on a bus to Mumbai. Is the problem just drought? (italics mine).

yes, the article does portray a major exodus, or a major distress. mr.sainath and a lot of other liberal journalists in the country would like to pin the blame of these migrations from mahbubnagar and other telangana districts on politicians like naidu and the evil neo-liberal policies followed by governments at the centre and in the states since 1991. but the truth is: they have been happening from long before naidu ever entered politics and mr.sainath became a journalist. labourers from nizamabad and other north telangana districts, reportedly, had worked in the building of the victoria terminus station in mumbai more than a hundred years ago. the migrations haven't stopped since.

i've seen construction workers from mahbubnagar in mumbai more than twenty years ago, tamil restaurant and hotel workers in bangalore, banarsi taxi drivers in mumbai, workers of all kinds from bihar and u.p., in delhi, oriya brick kiln workers outside hyderabad- and none of these migrations actually started after 1991. they had been happening for a long time- and even now, many liberals find nothing unusual about these migrations.

it's not just lack of access to land- many farmers in mahbubnagar, with holdings of over ten acres, can't generate, individually, an income equivalent to a 12 year old hotel worker's annual earnings in hyderabad. things aren't much better in the neighbouring district of nalgonda. most farmers in nalgonda too do not have access to canal irrigation- that might not be seen as a major problem unique to the district- 70% of india depends on the rains, anyway. neither nalgonda nor mahbubnagar and a few other districts can depend even on the rains- they fall in a rain shadow region. many districts in india fall in rain shadow regions- that isn't a major problem? well, farmers in these districts mainly depend on underground sources of water- farmers in large parts of nalgonda, mahbubnagar and other districts in andhra can't depend even on groundwater now. the fluoride content in the groundwater has been steadily rising over the past two decades and is now so high that groundwater, which was found unfit for drinking purposes some time ago, can't even be used to irrigate the fields now- whatever grains or vegetables that are produced in those areas now contain unacceptable levels of fluorides. sometime in the foreseeable future many parts of these districts would've to be emptied of people by a decree of the state, perhaps, if the migrations hadn't completed the job by then.

large parts of anantapur and parts of other districts, in the rayalaseema region, have been slowly turning into a desert. there have always been steady streams of migrations from rayalaseema into bangalore and chennai over many decades. there have also been migrations from south coastal andhra districts and the north coastal andhra districts too- to hyderabad, chennai, bangalore and even bhubaneswar.

and it's not just the illiterate, landless agricultural labourers or the farmers from the dry, arid regions who are migrating: semi-literate young people from not so dry regions are also migrating. around 70,000 unemployed young workers from andhra pradesh were deported from the u.a.e., a few months ago because they did not have valid work permits. they were mostly from the relatively prosperous north telangana districts of nizamabad and karimnagar. when i say relatively, i mean that those two districts receive much better rainfall than mahbubnagar and nalgonda- rural distress in those areas is of a slightly different variety. farmers in those two disticts are killing themselves in large numbers not because of low rainfall but because of low returns from agriculture.

backwardness or distress or widespread despair isn't unique to bihar- i'm aware of many continuously distress-prone regions in andhra pradesh. many others, i'm sure, are also aware of similar situations in other states. and maharashtra isn't a stranger to backwardness and distress either: think of all the suicides in vidarbha in recent times. and i repeat what i said in my previous post: u.p., and bihar are much better endowed, in terms of natural resources like water, than many states in central and peninsular india. governance or lack of it is also a major cause of migrations.

every one of those migrations represents a world scale disaster, in my view. the overcongestion in mumbai or bangalore is a minor consequence of those disasters. so why the extreme focus on what raj thackeray says or does (instead of discussing the causes of those disasters and not just their effects) when he isn't, directly, the cause of those migrations, or disasters? it's like blaming the vultures for the famine.

anoop goes on to say:

I guess you should also take into account at the kind of central assistance and public investments that were made in Mumbai/Western Maharashtra earlier and New Delhi now. So harking on Mr. Lalu Parasad Yadav for proposing public plants in Bihar is just not very smart. Being ignorant is not an excuse of being stupid.

ignoring anoop's intemperance (if it was someone else, i don't think i'd be discussing the comment at such length), i'd like to focus on the flaws in this argument: are national public investments an issue to be settled between a couple of states like maharashtra and bihar? if they aren't, can a union minister from a particular state or region use his powers to divert a major portion of the national resources at his disposal to his own state at the cost of many other backward states? especially when the union minister's home state doesn't lack any resources of the kind he is showering on it?

professor chitta baral of arizona state university has been conducting a campaign of sorts on the neglect of orissa, with particular reference to the koraput-bolangir-kalahandi region, for the past few years. he's written extensively on the skewed distribution of public invesments, among states, in a number of fields. discussing railway investments in one particular post on his blog, he says:

There is a great disparity in terms of railway density -- Route kms per one thousand sq km -- across various states of the country. Using the 2004-05 figures, the average rail density for India is 19.13. The rail density is highest in Delhi (138.2) followed by West Bengal (43.4), Punjab (41.6), Haryana (36.1), Bihar (35.9), Uttar Pradesh (35.8), Tamil Nadu (32.1), Assam (31.9), Kerala (27), Gujarat (26.9) and Jharkhand (24.3). Among the major states outside Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir the lowest rail density is in Himachal Pradesh (5.1), followed by Uttarakhand (6.4), Chhatisgarh (8.6), Orissa (14.6), Karnataka (15.5), Madhya Pradesh (15.9), Rajasthan (17), Maharashtra (17.9), Goa (18.6) and Andhra Pradesh (18.9).

anoop's justification of laloo yadav's actions probably stems from an urge to emphasize the importance of devoting special attention to backward regions, considering, such special attention had earlier been focussed on now prosperous regions, like mumbai etc., we'll never know for sure whether any special attention had actually been focussed on the prosperous regions, earlier, but i'd accept it for the moment- if special attention is to be justified on the grounds of tradition, or precedent, it's even more imperative now that such traditions be given up. because special attention creates not just prosperous regions but it also gives birth to backward regions. if greater investments, earlier, in mumbai had created prosperity they had also resulted in backwardness in bihar.

on the modi-thackeray scale, i wouldn't like to offer my judgment on how big a fascist laloo yadav is- there were enough hints in my previous post to indicate that i wasn't talking of just a couple of always-in-the-news political personalities or regions. my intention was to convey the message that mr.yadav's actions speak louder than mr.thackeray's words. and the indian liberal should recognize the fact that mr.yadav's secular posturing doesn't mean that his regional chauvinism needs to be overlooked. and also that mr.thackeray isn't being purely a regional chauvinist when he talks of the mumbaikars' rights.

think of it this way: if most of us didn't believe in this grand fiction called the indian nation, or to put it more simply, if there wasn't any india, wouldn't you see large migrations from bihar to mumbai in a completely different light?

more on this later.