A year before the economy was liberalised, I relocated to a small town in Uttar Pradesh devoid of modern conveniences such as regular electricity, roads, newspapers and piped water. Located in the middle of three large villages, this was a relatively new town that had emerged in the early 20th century around a station on the Delhi-Calcutta railway. A massive ancient contraption used for refilling steam engines that lay abandoned near the railway tracks is part of my earliest memories of the town.
Until the late 1980s, the town was mostly confined between the Etawah branch of the Upper Ganga Canal and the Delhi-Calcutta railway track. There were a handful of other large and small qasbas in the neighbourhood, some of them dating back to the Mughal period if not earlier. This small-town ecosystem was characterised by a largely stable population including a few “ancient” families with substantial land holdings in nearby villages that sustained the cultural calendar. In fact, one could see agricultural fields from most rooftops in the town and most of us were identified with this or that village that supplied a large part of our consumption. The daily flow of men and materials between the two realms rendered their boundaries imprecise.
In the late 1980s, the Union government laid the foundation of two public sector units near the town. Known together as the ‘Plant’, they carved out a few square kilometres of modern urban amenities and added newer elements – including roles and aspirations to the railway town’s small universe. The most desired role, though, was that of a petty civil contractor. The ultimate goal being the acquisition of more agricultural land in one’s native village, “modernising” the ancestral home, and buying commercial property in the town. A house in the nearby Kanpur was not yet among the cherished goals. Those who dreamt big aimed to match the jalwa of mafia don-cum-contractors of distant eastern Uttar Pradesh. The other impact of the Plant on life choices became evident only in the mid-2000s, when the generation that went to school after liberalisation joined colleges, but that is a story for another day. Let us rewind to the early 1990s to follow the decline of the town amidst its physical expansion.
Dibiyapur (outlined in pink) in Auraiya district of Uttar Pradesh. Photo: Screengrab via Google Maps
By the time I reached the town, people had already abandoned the public health system to which they, ironically, turned only when the private system failed them. But government schools held out until the late 1990s before collapsing, partly, due to the Plant. The PSUs brought a Kendriya Vidyalaya to the town, which expanded and added dynamism to the public school system. Everyone from the security guard to the director of the Plant sent their kids to the same school. After they realised that they cannot stop “outsiders” (especially, children of retired soldiers and families that gave land to the plant) from joining the Kendriya Vidyalaya, the Plant management abandoned it. Instead, they promoted high-fee private schools to ensure that their children need not mix with the “locals.”
But some locals were determined to follow the “Sahebs,” as the plant-wallahs were referred to. (The social and cultural construction of the character of Saheb will require a separate discussion.) They invaded the Plant’s private school too and the Sahebs shifted their children to metro cities. That is when the quality of schools in the town ceased to interest the Sahebs. At a young age, I learnt an important lesson. Most of our public infrastructure and services including schools, health centres and transport are poorly managed because their administrators/regulators are often not among their users.
There is another way in which the Plant (and private schools supported by it) wrecked the educational ecosystem. Together they catalysed the craze for Angrezi medium, which derailed the existing schools without offering affordable alternatives to the masses. The best-known Sanskrit teacher in the town enrolled his youngest child in a private school. So did a renowned Hindi poet, who was an excellent teacher of English but could not speak the language well. He wanted his grandchildren to learn spoken English.
A few years after the old school system became moribund, other public infrastructure such as the town’s colonial-era watermill powered by the Upper Ganga canal fell into disuse and eventually turned into a forgotten archaeological relic. In a parallel development, the town’s private “industrial” infrastructure too fell apart. The town had five rice mills, including two established by Sindhis, which predated the Plant. These too shut down one after the other even though the production of paddy in that area did not decrease. The owners moved to other states after cannibalising the mill land that they had obviously accessed on concessional terms. The mill owners who stayed back sold the land and reinvented themselves as dealers of goods manufactured elsewhere. The other petty manufacturing around the town, say, of brooms, too stagnated if not unravelled. Dairy production continued but sans any innovation.
By this time, it had also become clear the Plant will not expand due to, among other things, the rapacious extortion and lawlessness unleashed by strongmen close to the leadership of one of two main regional parties of the state. The idea behind bringing the Plant to the area was to use its infertile side (to the south of the railway track) to spawn a larger industrial ecosystem around the PSUs. (The Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited played such a role in Trichy, where it supported a whole range of ancillary units and a variety of institutions of higher education.) In the end, the haphazardly renovated and expanded south-facing Hanuman mandir might be the most enduring legacy of the Plant through the contribution of its civil contractors. The Plant was, in fact, always selfish and never made an attempt to contribute, let alone integrate with the qasba. It was not like BHEL in Trichy, which saw the town as its home.
So, a decade and a half after liberalisation, the once promising town was in some ways worse than it had been in 1990. The ‘plant town’ transplanted onto the ‘railway town’ failed to mature. Now a large dusty concrete jungle, the town lost whatever little internal coherence and sense of community it possessed earlier. Contractors who eclipsed the traditional notables did not have the same attachment to the town, let alone its cultural calendar. No longer the cultural and economic hub of the villages around it, the town now serves as a cheap sarai for Bharat en route to (urban) India. Most of the able youth abandon the town for good in their late teens, which means the place struggles to find good quality teachers and doctors giving further push to outmigration.
The baithak of an erstwhile landlord who was among the notables of the town, November 29, 2010. Photo: Author provided
The government too failed to realise the full return on its investment in the PSUs. The private mills it had subsidised disappeared in thin air as the owners liquidated their investments and left for greener pastures. This is the story of other towns of Uttar Pradesh, too, that were centred around mini-PSUs. In fact, most towns of the state have not done well due to a variety of reasons including the collapse of major urban centres in their neighbourhood. Reviving towns is key to the future of Uttar Pradesh. However, experience suggests that top-down attempts to build towns are unlikely to succeed. Their revival is not possible until the towns reimagine themselves as an organic part of the system of villages around them and emerge as hubs of the local agricultural economy rather than wait for capital-intensive interventions controlled by outsiders or hanging on to the coattails of bigger towns.
Vikas Kumar teaches economics at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He is co-author of Numbers in India’s Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics and author of Waiting for a Christmas Gift: Essays on Politics, Elections and Media in Nagaland.
