The Cow Belt

I was in Pondicherry last week and am in Kanpur now. Every day, I go to a couple of villages and see how rural sales happen. More importantly, I see what the rural way of life is. Strangely I feel at home. But that’s another story.

Villages are no longer what they used to be. Lives have improved in the past few years, is my first impression. Roads have been built, they are being built. Places that used to be inaccessible in the monsoons due to huge tracts of muck, are now not so. There are schools - private schools and government schools and there are colleges on the highways. Although a person would have to travel around 20 kms to study in one of them. There are organizations that provide teachers to schools on a contractual basis. There are hand-pumps, which have made the bore-wells obsolete in many places.

There is easier access to loans. Quite a few banks around to lend money and waive off some part of it too. The disadvantage here is that, while earlier stringent checks would happen before the money was released; now sometimes, due to reduced red-tape, the Presidents and Secretaries of the Panchaayats pocket it.

Don’t get me wrong. There is huge scope for improvement. There need to be more schools, colleges, more awareness of what these children can do with their lives after that. Better sanitation facilities, more exposure for women, better reach to towns around. Pukka houses, better farm equipment, more emphasis on health and hygiene. The list is endless.

But in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh, as I zip across the many many lovely dancing-in-the-sun-daffodillian mustard stalks, the cabbage patches and the pumpkins on the roof-tops, I think to myself - these people aren’t woe-begone and destitute, I have seen worse. I have seen worse expressions on the faces on those kids who lunge at every car at the traffic signals - to sell something or wash windows or simply beg. That haggard look of malnutritioned-grief or cunning which comes from living and surviving on the streets. Children with injection marks on their arms, children with broken bodies - possibly broken by the local gundas who push them into begging, children who scavenge in the dumps for their daily meal.

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.