Authors: Steve Coll

On the Grand Trunk Road (12 page)

Those in Chopta with any ambition—some of the younger men and nearly all of the women—said they primarily wanted one thing: to get out. Nearly a quarter of the village’s families have already done so, migrating to Delhi or other cities to take jobs as factory workers or domestic servants. The conditions may be difficult in the cities, but at least there is some money to be had. Most of the able-bodied young men have already left to chase it. This strain of ambition could be measured in part by the frequency with which Chopta villagers turned up at my office once our reporting project began. They would sit around in the wicker chairs, patiently answering questions about their lives and families before politely inquiring whether we knew of any jobs that would permit them to migrate to Delhi. Back in Chopta, sitting on the slate village walls or squatting out in the fields with the women while they threshed and gathered, we would hear the same themes.

“There isn’t much respect for people working here,” explained Madan Singh, seventeen, a green-eyed boy typical of Chopta’s younger generation. “Look how much respect they give to the ones working in factories. You should see how people surround them when they come back from Delhi. I want them to respect me too. I will do anything in Delhi, even wash dishes, be a servant. At least I will be in a big place.”

One afternoon on the terraced hillside, Kesari Devi, a member of the Rajput caste and a mother of six, whose husband did more work than most, confided that her son had found a job filling water coolers in New Delhi’s federal parliament building. “What is the point of keeping anyone here?” she asked, gesturing toward her plots of wheat and rice, and beyond them, to China. “Slowly and slowly [my son] will take everybody with him. What is there in these villages? Useless. Finished.... My son comes and says there is nothing here. He is right.”

We found Birendra Singh, Kesari Devi’s son, on a rainy day back in the capital. With parliament out of session, and thus no watercoolers to fill, he had found a temporary job as a watchman at a carpet showroom in Hauz Khas, a funky, chic shopping area for the South Delhi rich that has deliberately been made to look like the rural village it once was. This pleases wealthy urban shoppers who have left their villages behind but hold them in romantic memory. As the rain fell in sheets, Singh talked to my researcher, Rama, about what he had learned in the big city. “People here are cunning,” he said. “They are very smart. Even little boys can ride cycles and scooters. Looking at them, I feel Garwalis [hill people] are so simple. In fact, we Garwalis are nothing. When I first began working in parliament, I would get very scared when people spoke to me. I could never go near an officer without getting nervous. I kept to myself all the time.... It’s not the same anymore. I am opening up,” he concluded, smiling shyly.

What Birendra Singh calls “opening up,” replicated countless times among the millions and millions of South Asians who have migrated from villages to cities and towns in search of better lives, sometimes makes the urban elites uncomfortable. They wish to protect the masses from themselves. They restrict public advertising of consumer goods so as not to whet the appetites of the poor. They impose some of the world’s highest tariff rates to protect domestic monopolists and to ensure that only those with serious money can afford the best of modern Western technology. They look out on the sprawling tar-paper slums of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Karachi, review the appalling labor conditions in the city factories (which the elite families generally own), assess the limited spaces available at the best schools and universities, and pronounce that the villagers would be better off staying at home in their villages.

South Asian governments have compelling reasons to invest in their one million villages. The cities are overburdened, sometimes virtually crushed by mass migration from the villages. The state has failed to create industrial employment sufficient to match population growth, so for a time at least it must generate work in rural areas. Above all, South Asian governments need prosperous, efficient farms to feed their people. In East Asia, poor countries that have grown rich have proven that you cannot get from poverty to prosperity without enriching the countryside, the villages. Yet in South Asia the form of rural investment has too often been patriarchal, patronizing, and counterproductive. This is partly because rural policy emanates from the spiritual independence philosophy of Gandhi, whose courage and genius still influence South Asian politics, but whose xenophobia and mystical reverence for timeless village life are sometimes used by the entrenched urban elites to protect themselves from challengers. It is also a consequence of a hackneyed leftist syllogism: The enlightened elite must serve the masses; the masses are in the villages; therefore the elite—and the central government it controls—should be the primary font of village improvement. By this logic, those who control the government not only do what is ideologically correct, they expand their power and access to the state trough as well. This produces corruption and leaves tens of millions in the villages beholden to patronage and bereft of resources.

Beyond all this, in South Asia the villages matter because there is a powerful feeling of rootedness that none of the recent political economies, leftist or imperialist, has yet eroded. And at the base of every man’s or woman’s sense of self is his or her village. In the West, people speak of being “from” somewhere, a word that implies that home has been left behind. In South Asia, you are not from a village, you “belong to” it, even if you have never lived there.

This idea throws light on the views of Bivekanand Dhondiyal, Chopta’s patriarch. He talked of Chopta as if it were a shining Village on a Hill, a beacon of the ideal. He had never lived there, however. He had mainly dreamed about the place.

Before climbing up the ridge to his ancestral village, I went to see Dhondiyal, a thin articulate man approaching sixty, in his expansive office at the federal parliament, where he worked at the time as a member of the Indian Administrative Service, the supreme branch of the Nehruvian civil service. Like many in the South Asian upper classes, he was thoughtful, gentle, well-meaning. He seemed a little perplexed that the reforestation and antipoverty plan he had helped to develop with the World Bank and the Indian government was not working too well in Chopta.

“My grandfather came out from that village,” he explained. “My first visit to my village was in 1948, after high school. Later, at the Planning Commission in 1985, I was in charge of the hilly areas. I visited that area as part of my official duties. The World Bank had a project [but] they were fed up with it. I persuaded them to continue and to include new villages, including a miniproject around Chopta.” The idea, he said, was to improve agriculture, the environment, and local incomes by providing support for traditional forms of agriculture. “This is the holistic thinking they have tried to bring into their planning.... [It] is the answer because it is a holistic approach. It restores the forests and the capacity of the soil. If we set up modem industry in that area, whatever the capacity of that fragile environment, it will be exceeded. This whole area is seismically very active. There are landslides. You cannot bring modern industry. Your development strategy has to take into account the fragility of the ecology.”

And yet, he acknowledged, “there was a problem of getting the cooperation of the people. Most of the able-bodied males have migrated. The initiative is very low.” But wasn’t migration to the cities a sign of initiative? The Dhondiyals had migrated years ago. Anyone with the means to do it would want to get off that ridge, wouldn’t they? Why not spend the World Bank’s money to help them, rather than to keep them there, trapped in the ninth century? “The problem is that most of them come to Delhi as domestics,” he answered. “They’re exploited. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to persuade the government to give them training—train them as chefs, try to give them some protection and verify their character. Imagine a twelve-year-old boy coming to Delhi. He almost becomes a bonded slave here.” Urban labor conditions were indeed horrible. But who was responsible for that? Anyway, Dhondiyal went on to talk about how he was optimistic that, in time, government support would generate enough rural income in the hills so that villagers who had migrated to Delhi would want to go back. “Maybe I will take a summer home there,” he said wistfully of Chopta.

Of course, the Dhondiyals keep their New Delhi house full of domestic servants, as does everyone of their station. Some of their servants are from Chopta.

Chopta’s villagers treated the Dhondiyals with both fealty and resentment. Once, Rama and Vinita Dhondiyal, Bivekanand Dhondiyal’s daughter, were huffing and puffing up the ridge to the village when a local named Pooran Singh shouted down at them, “So! You are Bivekanand Dhondiyal’s daughter! When people from the hills go to the big cities and become such big officers and do not even look back at us, this is what happens to them! They can’t climb back to their homes. That’s your punishment, girl.”

In its attitudes and strategies, the World Bank—funded forestry and development program in Chopta reflected the failed patronage of the Dhondiyal family. One of the program’s purposes was to provide resources that would encourage villagers to stay where they are and farm the terraced land as they have always done—but with new, environmentally sound technologies that would turn the land green again and raise agricultural output. The technologies included solar lights, biogas stoves that convert cow dung into cooking gas, special grasses to prevent erosion, superior bulls and cows for breeding, and hundreds of thousands of apple and walnut trees that would allow villagers to earn extra cash from horticulture, apart from their centuries-old subsistence farming of wheat and rice. Together, the donations had the impact of a Gandhian version of the welfare state: charity without sustainable market incentives or follow-through, and patronizing charity at that. For Dhondiyal and other planners, the pastoral village ideal of their romantic memory echoed what Gandhi once said of the spinning wheel. The medieval wheel was a “work of art,” Gandhi said, that “typifies the use of machinery on a universal scale. It is machinery reduced to the terms of the masses.” It is one thing to countenance this approach from Gandhi, who led by example. It is another to accept it from “big officers” whose lives are made comfortable by machinery such as cars, air conditioners, televisions, and electric lights which they consider inappropriate for the masses.

One afternoon in Chopta, climbing the hillside with Dilbur Singh, a barefoot villager with matted hair who earns about twenty dollars a month looking after “superior bulls” supplied by the World Bank, I asked him what he thought was the objective of the program in Chopta. He hesitated and then replied, “Their objective is to keep us here. But everyone wants to go out. To keep us here, you’d have to give us a lot. But that’s not the program. It’s a kind of sop to keep us here and it isn’t working.”

Villagers blame the government for the program’s failings. They say many of the trees supplied to them were dumped on valley roads by delivery trucks and were half dead by the time they were planted. They say many others died because project supervisors were too lazy to climb the mountain regularly and check on how the trees were doing. And, they add, maintaining the trees required techniques they were never taught. Neither of the two solar lights installed in Chopta works. The one biogas stove does not function—specialists say the stoves generally do not work at elevations above six thousand feet, but one was installed in the village anyway, despite its higher elevation. Cement tanks built around existing natural springs are cracked and leaking and villagers say their water supply has declined as a result. Three big cement buildings constructed to house the superior breeding bulls sit unoccupied most of the year because villagers say, their interiors are too cold for the bulls. “They came and made tanks in our fields—didn’t ask our permission, didn’t give us money for this. Now there’s no water,” complained Sudeshi Devi, the women’s cooperative leader, when we asked her on our last visit what she thought had gone wrong. “People come here with different programs, eat the money, and go away. What do we get out of it?”

The government blames the villagers. “They don’t think about the future,” complained S. K. Kala, a frustrated state bureaucrat who lives in one of the new concrete houses built with World Bank funds at the base of the ridge. “The problem with people here is they’re too concerned with what they’re doing today. They don’t worry about what will happen in the next five or ten years when all the trees are gone. They don’t even think about it. If you don’t have the people’s cooperation, it won’t succeed. Where we have had the people’s cooperation, we have had some success. Without it, they just go on cutting trees and letting their animals run. They have no idea what we are doing.”

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