I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

[LargoWinch]

A documentary about the economic crisis and its impact on the wealthy community of Gurgaon, India.

Runtime: 49min.

The shining facades of Gurgaon, a satellite city of New Delhi, are symbols of Indias unparalleled economic growth. Gurgaon was built at the turn of this century by the largest project developers in the world. A village 15 years ago, has now grown into a city of 1,4 million inhabitants, but with little or no infrastructure. How viable is this new type of city?

Residents of the gated communities of this privatized society offer insights in their hope, desires, and in the new self-confidence of the Indian middle class. Gradually it becomes clear what the consequences of the credit crisis and the growing gap between rich and poor are for the city and the psyche of its inhabitants.

Gurgaon: a Ponzi Scheme or the prototype for future mega cities as they will be found all over India within a few decennials?

[World Traveler]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

Fascinating. In 1998, I spent 1 week in New Delhi, living with a middle-class Indian family, as part of an inter-cultural exchange organized by a non-profit. Then we spent a week travelling in northern India. At that time, India's market and open economy policies were still in the early stages. What I saw in 1998 was an aging, faded, somewhat run-down city. None of these upscale complexes like Gurgaon had been built yet. I have been wondering how globalization impacted Delhi and now I have some answers, thanks to this video.

India is a fascinating country. The educated class all speak English fluently. They seem to have integrated a fair amount of British customs and values into their lives.

Yet outside these educated enclaves, it's a totally different world. India is an ancient culture with its own deep history, and an ancient religion (Hinduism) whose development was not influenced by the 3 major Western religions, and traditional values and customs are still maintained by the majority, the poor of India. Who also have a pretty difficult life, you don't see overweight people among India's poor. And I have to say that the most aggressive street vendors I've ever seen were in India. If the poor don't hustle, they don't eat.

The video poses an interesting question, one that India will grapple with for the next few decades. How do you integrate these 2 totally differest worlds (the affluent educated and the very poor) in a single country/sub-contitent?

[Rajiv]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

You might get a better idea of what India is currently like by reading th following articles

Something’s gone horribly wrong with India...

Don't look at the shining malls, swanky (leaking) multi-crore airports, or new fancy cars launched every other day by leggy models - the real India lives unashamedly around these garish symbols of new wealth. The stinky slums, over-populated urban clusters, polluted pot-holed roads, people relieving themselves in public, the long faces of despair compounded by hopes crushed by corruption and institutional indifference and arrogance. Don't they clearly prove that India is a transparent story gone badly wrong?

In this case it is not a drafting error by an arrogant bureaucrat, it is a lot more. Something has gone horribly wrong with the Indian narrative, and there seems little desire to countenance it let alone correct it.

The bizarre schizophrenia between two different worlds, between women swishing in diaphanous chiffons or men in Saville Row suits. The relentlessly ecstatic Page 3 hyperbole for collective voyeurism, and infinite, stoic silence of our unwashed millions. Outside the uncanny gaze of modernity, effectively detached from democracy's juicy fruits, Indian citizens, who gape with longing, deprivation and lust at the spectacular parade of the rich.

There is an unbroken thread that runs between the sway of pandemics and the Maoist uprising. Is it not the outcome of the mess that the corrupt, insensitive ruling elite has left behind in their desperate hurry to flourish, and nourish their insatiable Hobbesian appetites? So who will bury the memories of underdevelopment?

There are examples galore of the scam that has been perpetrated on a people who are trying to get used to using political freedom to improve their abysmal lot. Over the years, social scientists have revealed the wide chasm between the rich and poor, legitimised by a resilient caste society loaded in favour of upper castes. And what is it now if not a deadly cocktail of feudal and predator capitalism under direct patronage of the 'liberalised' soft State?
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Sacred shit

The most sacred river of the Hindus has been rendered into a stagnant sewage drain, leading to mass and hidden epidemics. But Hindutva and other parties care a damn.

"The Ganges, above all, is the river of India which has held India's heart captive and drawn uncounted millions to her banks since the dawn of history. The story of the Ganges, from her source to the sea, from old times to new, is the story of India's civilisation and culture, of the rise and fall of empires, of great and proud cities, of adventures of man."
Jawaharlal Nehru

Pandit Nehru's Ganges - a story of Indian civilisation - is dying a definite, slow death. The most sacred river of the Hindus has been rendered into a stagnant sewage drain, leading to mass and hidden epidemics. Half burnt corpses, animal carcasses, vast quantities of human waste and excreta, ritualistic flowers inside polythene bags, muck, plastic, glass, rubber and non-biodegradable substances, can be seen floating in the river. Such is the extent of industrial effluents and sewage pollutants that a recent study concluded that the Ganga is no longer even fit for agriculture - forget drinking and bathing. (Though, the river still has magical preservative/healing qualities at its source in Gaumukh, where the glacier is fast receding. Surely, if the glacier disappears one day, the river, too, must.)

World Wide Fund for Nature has put Ganga on the list of top ten most threatened river basins in the world courtesy dams, industrial/sewage degradation, water extraction and climate change. A recent study by the Uttarakhand Environment Conservation and Pollution Control Board says that the river at one of India's holiest Hindu sites - Haridwar - has an amazingly high coliform level of 5,500. Coliform level of 50 is for drinking purposes, less than 500 for bathing and below 5,000 for agricultural use.

In Haridwar, five drains open in the Ganga adding thousands of litres of sewage and human excreta, according to Dehradun-based People's Science Institute. In Varanasi, another Hindu sacred city - the coliform bacterial count is at least 3,000 times higher than the standard established as safe by WHO. The high level of coliform is due to drainage disposal of human faeces, urine and sewage directly into the river.
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A putrid ribbon of black sludge’

Union environment minister said the Yamuna is not a river in Delhi. If it is a sewage drain, whatever happened to Rs 1,800 crore spent on cleaning the river?

The Yamuna is one of the filthiest and polluted rivers of the world. The river pays a heavy price for passing through one of the dirtiest, most congested (and insensitive) cities of the world - Delhi. This city dumps almost 60 per cent of its daily waste, including industrial effluents and sewage, into the river, and contributes 70 per cent of its total pollution load. Despite numerous attempts to revive it, the river remains a sewage drain, a dirty and stagnant nullah (drain), carrying thousands of harmful bacteria and toxic waste that cause fatal waterborne diseases.

The toxicity directly affects the ground water and agriculture land around it, and thereby enters the food and drinking water cycle. Indeed, fish and vegetables grown on the banks of Yamuna in Delhi are prone to be seriously toxic and dangerous. Most sewage treatment plants are ineffective, either working under capacity or do not have electricity as pending bills have not been cleared.

Meanwhile, the State promises to usher in electricity in every village and widespread progress with nuclear energy. When? And, how? Even when they can't clean up a dead river in the heart of its capital?

Yamuna traverses 1,375 km from Yamnotri, its Himalayan source in Uttarakhand, to Allahabad in UP, and maintains a seemingly good quality of water till it reaches Wazirabad in Delhi. In Delhi, 15 drains discharge their filthy muck and waste into the river, making it the most polluted river in the country with practically no biologically dissolved oxygen. It runs for 22 km in Delhi and what flows (does not flow) is basically stagnant filth, effluents, sewage and pollutants.
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A home-grown drought

Monsoon this year has failed most of India, causing drought in even well-irrigated and rainfed areas. Ravleen Kaur reports how our food preferences are making us vulnerable to drought

Hari Achal Singh has been a farmer for as long as he can remember. And that’s as long as India has been independent. He recalls his childhood when his family depended on rain for irrigation. “We grew arhar (red gram), bajra (pearl millet), maize, jowar (sorghum) and a variety of wheat that did not require much water,” said Singh. In the 1960s the Jawaharlal Nehru government laid a network of canals in Uttar Pradesh; irrigation became easy. “We started growing paddy then.”

Five rivers and two canals crisscross Pratapgarh district, but water in them has declined over the years. Paddy is a thirsty crop, so 15 years ago Singh dug a borewell in his one-hectare field in Ashapur village of the district. He found water about eight metres below the surface.

He has deepened his borewell several times, and his crops have survived droughts in the past. He is not so sure this time. He has sown arhar and bajra but his borewell runs dry after one or two hours of pumping water. The well is 58 metres deep. “Drilling below this will be very expensive,” said Singh. He blamed decreased rainfall and tree cover for the plummeting groundwater level. Pratapgarh’s soil is non-porous, so water does not seep underground easily.

Unusual drought

Photograph by: Prashant Ravi

This year’s drought is unusual in the sense that it has hit areas that have good irrigation facilities or receive high rainfall. India has seen 22 major droughts since 1891, mostly in dry regions like Rajasthan. But this year, flood-prone Assam was one of the first states to declare drought. High rainfall areas like Bihar and well-irrigated areas like Punjab and Haryana also suffered drought, said J S Samra, chief executive officer of the National Rainfed Area Authority under the agriculture ministry.

Drought and floods happened together. In Assam the Ranganadi and the Brahmaputra breached embankments after Arunachal Pradesh suddenly released water from reservoirs. This caused flash floods in four districts. In eastern Uttar Pradesh the Ghaghra, Sarada and Saryu rivers flooded several places in August.

Farmers are not asking for food grain like in previous droughts; they want more electricity to pump groundwater, said Samra. Droughts are not new to India but people used to grow crops sustainable in low rainfall. The cropping pattern has changed with the use of groundwater and expansion of canal networks, explained Anupam Mishra, head of the environment division of the Gandhi Peace Foundation.

Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh are growing paddy, which was never the predominant crop there because these areas do not receive much rainfall. “We cannot go on extracting groundwater for long,” said Vikram Ahuja, a farmer and agri-services businessman in Fazilka district of Punjab.

A satellite study by the American space agency nasa conducted between 2002 and 2008 shows groundwater reserves in northern India have gone down drastically. In northwestern India the groundwater level is estimated to be going down at a rate of four centimetres a year. Over 109 cubic km of groundwater disappeared in the region between 2002 and 2008—double the capacity of India’s largest surface water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, said the study published in Nature in August this year.
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[World Traveler]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

You make some very good points, Rajiv.

I think that the big issue for India in the future will be water. How does a self-contained sub-continent, with mostly oceans for borders, supply enough fresh water for 1 billion people and agriculture? The Green Revolution of the 1960's did alleviate hunger, but Green Revolution crops require a lot more water than traditional crops. Once underground water is pumped out, it takes thousands of years to replenish. I'm not an engineer, but it seems one solution might be pipeline systems to send excess monsoon rains to drier districts. Only time will tell how India solves this problem, but something must be done, the current situation is untenable long-term.

Re: the Ganges, I had done considerable reading on India before I went, so I was aware of the pollution problem of the Ganges River. We went on a boat ride on the Ganges, and saw the ritual bathers dunking and cleasing themselves in what they believe are holy waters. It was amaing to me - I wouldn't dip my big toe in the Ganges! My thoughts as I watched were the same as in the article. How do these people stay healthy after dunking and washing in such a polluted river!?!

I hope that India solves its problems. It has a unique and and ancient culture with much to offer rest of the world. And who wants to see 1 billion people suffer?

[ST]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

Nice find - thanks for posting Largo.

[KGW]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

Here is a transcript of an interview of Arundhati Roy on "current events" in India. . .(Is our government learning?)


AMY GOODMAN: Well, to help make sense of what's unfolding inside the world's largest democracy, we continue with the Booker Prize award-winning novelist, political essayist, global justice activist Arundhati Roy. She won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize in 2002. She's the author of a number of collection of essays and the novel The God of Small Things. Her latest book is called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.

Can you make sense, Arundhati, of what is happening inside India for an audience around the world?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, let me just pick up on what Anjali was talking about just now, about the assault that's planned on the so-called Maoists in central India. You know, when September 11th happened, I think some of us had already said that a time would come when poverty would be sort of collapsed and converge into terrorism. And this is exactly what's happened. The poorest people in this country today are being called terrorists.

And what you have is a huge swath of forest in eastern and central India, spreading from West Bengal through the states of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh. And in these forests live indigenous people. And also in these forests are the biggest deposits of bauxite and iron ore and so on, which huge multinational companies now want to get their hands on. So there's an MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] on every mountain, on every forest and river in this area.

And about in 2005, let's say, in central India, the day after the MoU was signed with the biggest sort of corporation in India, Tatas, the government also announced the formation of the Salwa Judum, which is a sort of people's militia, which is armed and is meant to fight the Maoists in the forest. But the thing is, all this, the Salwa Judum as well as the Maoists, they're all indigenous people. And in, let's say, Chhattisgarh, something like the Salwa Judum has been a very cruel militia, you know, burning villages, raping women, burning food crops. I was there recently. Something like 640 villages have been burned. Out of the 350,000, first about 50,000 people moved into roadside police camps, from where this militia was raised by the government. And the rest are simply missing. You know, some are living in cities, you know, eking out a living. Others are just hiding in the forest, coming out, trying to sow their crops, and yet getting, you know, those crops burnt down, their villages burnt down. So there is a sort of civil war raging.

And now, I remember traveling in Orissa a few years ago, when there were not any Maoists, but there were huge sort of mining companies coming in to mine the bauxite. And yet, they kept'all the newspapers kept saying the Maoists are here, the Maoists are here, because it was a way of allowing the government to do a kind of military-style repression. Of course, now they're openly saying that they want to call out the paramilitary.

And if you look at'for example, if you look at the trajectory of somebody like Chidambaram, who's India's home minister, he'you know, he's a lawyer from Harvard. He was the lawyer for Enron, which pulled off the biggest scam in the history of'corporate scam in the history of India. We're still suffering from that deal. After that, he was on the board of governors of what is today the biggest mining corporation in the world, called Vedanta, which is mining in Orissa. The day he became finance minister, he resigned from Vedanta. When he was the finance minister, in an interview he said that he would like 85 percent of India to live in cities, which means moving something like 500 million people. That's the kind of vision that he has.

And now he's the home minister, calling out the paramilitary, calling out the police, and really forcibly trying to move people out of their lands and homes. And anyone who resisted, whether they're a Maoist or not a Maoist, are being labeled Maoist. People are being picked up, tortured. There are some laws that have been passed which should not exist in any democracy, laws which make somebody like me saying what I'm saying now to you a criminal offense, for which I could just be jailed. Even sort of thinking an anti-government thought has become illegal. And we're talking about, you know, as you said, 75,000 to 100,000 security personnel going to war against people who, since independence, which was more than sixty years ago, have no schools, no hospitals, no running water, nothing. And now, now they're being'now they're being killed or imprisoned or just criminalized. You know, it's like if you're not in the Salwa Judum camp, then you're a Maoist, and we can kill you. And they are openly celebrating the Sri Lanka solution to terrorism, to terrorism.

ANJALI KAMAT: Arundhati Roy, can you explain a little bit more about how India has so successfully hidden this side of it, this underbelly of democracy that you bring out in your book'murder, disappearances, torture, rapes, thousands'millions of people displaced, whether it's for development projects or in the process of fighting wars, tens of thousands disappeared in Kashmir, the insurgency that's being fought, the military that's fighting the insurgency in the northeast? How is India, on a global stage, continues to be seen as this successful democracy, a place where investors are flooding to?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, precisely because it is a democracy for some of its citizens, you know? And so, in a way, it has'this whole system has somehow created an elite that is now suddenly enriched in the last, you know, twenty years since the advent of the corporate free market. We have a huge middle class that is hugely invested in this sort of a police, you know, a police state that isn't acknowledged as one. So you have'it's not just a small sort of coterie of generals, like in Burma, or a kind of military dictatorship that's supported by the US in America.. You have a huge constituency in this country that completely supports this whole enterprise, and you have a free media where 90 percent of the turnover of those media houses comes from corporate advertisements and so on. So they're also free, but free to also embrace this particular model, in which, you know, a small section of people'well, not a small section; there are millions and millions of people, but they are not the majority of the people of this country. The light shines upon this rising middle class, which is, as I said, such a huge number that it's a very, very attractive market for the whole world.

So, when India opens its markets, you know, because it has opened its markets, and because it's, you know, international finance is flooding in, and all of that is so attractive, it is allowed to commit genocide in Gujarat; it's allowed to commit civil war in the center; it's allowed to have a military occupation in Kashmir, where you have 700,000 soldiers, you know, patrolling that little valley; it's allowed to have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the northeast, which allows the army to just kill on suspicion. And yet, it's celebrated. It's allowed to displace millions of people, but yet it's celebrated as this real success story, because it has all these institutions in place, even though they've been hollowed out.

So you have, for example, a Supreme Court in which there are very erudite judges, and there are some very erudite judgments, but if you look at how it's actually functioning, it has hollowed out. To criticize the court is a criminal offense. And yet, you have judgments where a judge openly says something like,you know, that,I've forgotten the exact words, but how corporate�you know, a corporate company cannot basically commit anything illegal, cannot commit an illegal act, you know? Or you have a judge in court openly talking about, let's say, Vedanta, which is mining in Orissa for bauxite. And the Norwegian government had pulled out of that project because of the human rights violations and so on; and, you know, for a whole lot of ethical reasons, they pulled out. And in India, you know, the company was taken to court, and a judge openly, in an open court, says that, ,OK, we won't give this contract to Vedanta. We'll give it to Sterlite, because Sterlite is a very good company. I have shares in it, omitting to mention that Sterlite is a subsidiary of Vedanta.

You know, but there's so much fancy footwork. If it was a military dictator, they have would have just said, "Shut up" and "Vedanta will get the project." But here, there are affidavits and counter-affidavits and a little bit of delay and everything; everyone thinks it's democracy. You know, you have the Supreme Court hearing on, let's say, the Parliament attack, where openly the Supreme Court of the world's greatest democracy says, you know, on the one hand, "We don't have evidence to prove that the person who was charged belongs to a terrorist group," and a few paras later says, "but the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if we sentence him to death." And it's just said so, blatantly, out there, you know? And you can't criticize it, because it's a criminal offense.

[LargoWinch]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

Nice find - thanks for posting Largo.

You are most welcome steve, glad you liked it.

[meechpod]

Re: I am Gurgaon. (49min.)

Implications of (massive) upcoming water problems alluded to ... here:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...897#post126897

You make some very good points, Rajiv.

I think that the big issue for India in the future will be water. How does a self-contained sub-continent, with mostly oceans for borders, supply enough fresh water for 1 billion people and agriculture? The Green Revolution of the 1960's did alleviate hunger, but Green Revolution crops require a lot more water than traditional crops. Once underground water is pumped out, it takes thousands of years to replenish. I'm not an engineer, but it seems one solution might be pipeline systems to send excess monsoon rains to drier districts. Only time will tell how India solves this problem, but something must be done, the current situation is untenable long-term.

Re: the Ganges, I had done considerable reading on India before I went, so I was aware of the pollution problem of the Ganges River. We went on a boat ride on the Ganges, and saw the ritual bathers dunking and cleasing themselves in what they believe are holy waters. It was amaing to me - I wouldn't dip my big toe in the Ganges! My thoughts as I watched were the same as in the article. How do these people stay healthy after dunking and washing in such a polluted river!?!

I hope that India solves its problems. It has a unique and and ancient culture with much to offer rest of the world. And who wants to see 1 billion people suffer?