India is all set to cross the $2 trillion GDP mark and the most
vital contributor to this development is the lower middle income group. It is
an very interesting to note that the economic output of the state of
Maharashtra at the present time is what it was the economic output of the whole
county during the early 1990’s, when the economic reforms as the new economic
policy was just launched in the year 1991. The statistics suggests that Chennai
is the beat metro and that Vadodhara is the fastest emerging city. The growth
is very much visible in the survey in most of the Indian cities today and yet
the cities in India remain unrecognized, underdeveloped and underinvested.
Here the India today ranking of India’s best cities tries to
highlight this point and hopes to reverse it. The point is that India has spent
nearly two decades of enjoying a 5 percent and above growth but the people is
still trapped under the unnecessary dichotomy. Here we find two India one we
may call “Bharat” which is still struggling to gain proper sanitation, power
supply into the homes, proper connectivity, to the odd 830 million people
dwelling in the 640,000 villages and the other India with a population of an
odd 400 million resides in the countryside in the 8,000 cities who have moved
above the basic things for the better life and a social mobility of created by
the educated youth.
What is described above is an incomplete picture as the divide
created by the political interests, the historical differences and the
differences of public expenditures in the urban and the rural areas is and
artificial one. the two India that we are talking about are intimately
connected to each other. In the states of Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh and
areas of Krishna and Godavari delta the growth of the cities and the towns is a
result of the rural and the agricultural prosperity. Again in the states of
Kerala and Goa the towns and the villages have developed with common phenomena
of “rurban” development and the difference can hardly be seen. The rapidly urbanizing states like Gujarat
and Tamil Nadu and the development around the metros is a sign today that the
political calculus needs to include the changes that are seen in the changing
occupations, lifestyle and the aspirations of the people belonging to the
peri-urban spectrum.
it is a fact that India is different from other big countries and
including contemporary China where we have over a half million people living in
the villages. Majority of Indians will continue to dwell in the villages and
this fact is surely not going to change for the next few decades. But the
question to be noted here is that why we privilege our rural demographics above
our urban demographics that are the main creator of income.
The answer to this lies in the pre-independence thought of our
free India which still governs our though and the culture. The lines of Mahatma
Gandhi beat express the though- “India lives in its seven Lakh villages not in
its towns... We are inheritors of a rural civilization... To uproot it and
substitute it for an urban civilization seems to me to be impossibility". Post independence the Indian cities grew up
own their own without the link to the rural parts as sites of colonial and
capitalists exploitation which was totally contrary to the path followed for
modernization by the soviet states, the Latin American and even of some of the
south and South East Asian economic giants.
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