Development and Resistance

Development is a funny word -- it's a word that you can't argue against. How could anybody rationally be against such a positive concept? But resistance to development can be seen all over India, perhaps most visibly in the protests against the acquisition of land for building what are known as special economic zones, clusters of export oriented industry for which the government provides infrastructure services and tax incentives.

Last week, I attended a meeting about the process of land acquisition for special economic zones in Tamil Nadu. Dozens of these zones have been approved for the state, and the Tamil Nadu government claims that the process of land acquisition in the state has been completely without dissent. However, the experience of villagers has actually been very mixed. Many people have faced problems with the process of land acquisition: they have been forcibly evicted from their lands, they are arrested and harrassed for protesting against unfair treatment by the authorities, they receive far less than the value of their land from the government. They also lose their job security: after they sell their farmland, people find that they do not have the skills to actually work in the factories that are built there.

The more I listened to the stories of these villagers, in which the state appeared to be a villain that used the Land Acquisition Act as a weapon, the more I wondered -- why were so few people at the meeting? Only about 200 to 300 people came from the villages, surprising at a meeting which was supposed to address land issues for a wide range of SEZ projects all over Tamil Nadu, from Ennore port to Sriperumbudur. If the state had been iron fisted in acquiring land, why was there so little resistance in Tamil Nadu?

After talking to some attendees, I think I found the beginnings of an answer to this question.

Firstly, the pattern of urbanization in Tamil Nadu is such that the state is both highly urbanized relative to India as a whole (40% versus 27%) and that urban centers are spread out throughout the state. This means that most villages are within a one or two hour bus-ride of a major metropolis. As a result, even most farming families have one foot in urban economies -- they own a roadside stall which benefits from traffic to and from urban areas or they have one or two family members working in urban areas. So that means that there are few villages, or even few families, that end up as clear losers as a result of losing valuable agricultural land. -- There are no clear sites of resistance to land acquisition.

Secondly, this meeting was also entirely attended by landOWNERS. But apparently Tamil Nadu has the largest percentage of landless rural people in the country. These landless rural poor may not have any clear gains from agricultural land being converted to SEZ's, but they certainly also have nothing to lose.

These two factors are unique to Tamil Nadu, and may help to explain why the process of land acquisition for SEZ's here has been relatively smooth. Economic development is a positive phenomenon, but its benefits are highly unequally distributed in India. The meeting made clear, however, that the government still has not found a way to redistribute the benefits of development so that everyone wins.

You know you've been in Chennai too long when...

... the sight of a woman with dark brown skin and a bright yellow face doesn't make you blink. Women here often wear turmeric paste on their face, because it is good for your skin. But what about the number it does on your complexion?

Language in south India

A piece by Vijay Nambisan in the India Foundation for the Arts' magazine made some interesting points about written and spoken languages in South India:

"... Malayalam is a highly diglossal language, much more so than any of its northern sisters. The farther south you go in India, I think, the further apart grow the written and spoken languages.... I can barely comprehend the newspapers, and most literary texts are closed books to me." (32)

I feel his pain -- as a near fluent speaker of one variety of Tamil (spoken in one place among one caste), it is a source of constant frustration to me that I have to concentrate to understand the news on Tamil Doordarshan or political speeches.

The world's most perfect junk food

I thought the south Indian tiffin couldn't possibly get any better. I was wrong. The forces of globalization have created in Chennai the world's most perfect junk food: the cheese dosa. A paper thin rice flour crepe folded around a salty cheese filling. Served with sambar and three kinds of coconut chutney (!!!) at the Sangeetha Hotel near my house.

Bombay on the mind, but not in Chennai, and V. P. Singh

The rains finally let up in Chennai, and today, except for the occasional stubborn puddle or whiff of sewage from a pipe that overflowed, it feels like they never happened. And even though Bombay is on the front of every newspaper, I don't feel the weight of that incident on the people of this city. Certainly, there is no fear, not even much conversation about it. Could it be that Tamilians feel that anywhere north of Bangalore is part of "North India," and, therefore, not part of the local consciousness? Or perhaps that the struggles of daily life here are so engrossing for the majority of the population that there is no time to fret?

In all the attention on Bombay and the weather in Tamil Nadu, one important event was almost entirely forgotten. The former Prime Minister of India V. P. Singh died on Thursday afternoon after a prolonged illness. He is best remembered for radically expanding India's caste-based affirmative action program during his eleven months in power. But I remember Singh for something much more recent. During the spate of slum evictions in Delhi between 2003 and 2006, Singh was the only political leader who consistently spoke out in favor of the slumdwellers. Even as the Delhi government bulldozed thousands of homes along the Yamuna River, Singh allowed the newly homeless to camp on the grounds of the house that he was given as an ex-Prime Minister. I think he was one of the last of that breed of gentlemen politicians who truly believed that an independent India would create a more socially just society.