The Hindu Business Line : Urban amenities, rural ambience

The President may be an evangelist for PURA and the Prime Minister may want 5000 of these urbanised rural settlements, but for that the Government needs to reinvent itself. PURA requires the cooperation of various ministries, and policy changes to infuse confidence among investors to shift from large cities to the PURAs, says P. V. Indiresan.

THE President, Mr Abdul Kalam, has been propagating the concept of PURA (Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas), which he has made the core of his Vision 2020, with missionary zeal. During the 50th birthday celebrations of Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), the President told the assembled CEOs: "I explained to her (Amma) the village development strategies of Providing Urban facilities in Rural Areas (PURA) consisting of four connectivities: physical, electronic, knowledge and economic connectivity to enhance the prosperity of clusters of villages in the rural areas. Amma listened patiently and when I finished, turned to me with a smile and told me that something basic was missing. She went on to explain the rich culture and civilisational heritage of thousands of years that our country is proud of; the traditional bonds in a well-knit family system, where love, affection, mutual help and service are the prevailing emotions. Hence, the development effort in the rural area has to have a focus on the spiritual way of life."

Here is a new interpretation of Vision, a new meaning to the idea of Vision 2020. As a matter of interest, the young student volunteer who received me at the Kochi airport listened to my explanation of PURA and remarked that the scheme was essentially one that depends on partnership among businesspersons, social service agencies, the government and the public. For that reason, he suggested that the letter P in PURA should stand for Partnership. Evidently, the philosophy that Amma espouses has percolated down to the level of humble volunteers too.

Taking up his suggestion, in my presentation to the CEOs, I described PURA as Partnership for Urban amenities with Rural Ambience. That kind of PURA appears to be an improvement on a top-down PURA that is visualised as one that merely Provides Urban amenities in Rural Areas.

What is rural ambience? A brief answer would be that rural ambience has two unique characteristics. It is inward looking; villagers have intimate human contact with their neighbours, even with employers. They share each others' joys and sorrows. If they work under an employer, those employers too live in the same environment as the workers do. However bad the employers, there is human contact between employer and employee every day. In cities, organisations tend to be large; most employees do not even know who their employers are. The work atmosphere is mechanical, dehumanised. In consequence, neighbours do not have much to share among themselves, least of all, work experiences.

Above all, the most striking contrast between villages and cities arises in connection with the manner of reaching the place of work. In villages, workers usually walk to work. A few may take a cycle. Even the rich who may have motorised vehicles use them for occasional business or for social purposes and not for daily commuting. In cities, almost without exception, everyone commutes over long distances and for long periods of time, at times, as much as two hours each way.

Commuting imposes the most extensive and pernicious costs on cities. It costs money, as much as lakhs of rupees per employee to run buses and trains, and to build flyovers and metros. Commuting wastes time too. Typically, in metros, commuters spend two years or more of their lives in travelling to work, and do so under trying conditions. That hurts their psychology to the extent commuters tend to become self-centred, more interested in themselves than in others. It diminishes social cohesiveness with long hours spent away at work and in commuting, destroying family togetherness. Even the culture is affected; urban dwellers are less interested in the richness of tradition, in spirituality.

Neither is the existing rural ambience perfect. Cities offer privacy; villages do not. Villagers may know their employers but employers could be inhuman without any opportunity for redress. Cities offer high wages, a variety of job opportunities that cater to every taste and capability. Village jobs pay little, and offer little scope for varied talents. Village life can be stultifying, not rich and varied as city lights are. That is why rural ambience is not enough; we need urban amenities too.

Cities offer wide-ranging job opportunities with such a large variety that virtually every kind of talent finds scope. The numbers too are so large that both husbands and wives can be confident of securing satisfactory employment. Cities offer also better residences, piped, protected water supply, as wells as more stable electricity,

Then, a Vision that meshes urban amenities with rural ambience can be described in terms of a habitat where even the poorest live in modern residences fitted with piped water, modern sanitation, smokeless fuel, and reliable electric supply. There is no technical problem in providing these amenities in villages as well as they are in cities. In fact, the costs will be much less. While urbanisation is not needed at all for assuring any of these amenities, jobs and markets are a different matter altogether. Both of them need large catchment populations — the larger the better.

Then, the problem of combining urban amenities with rural ambience boils down to the question of linking together large populations without the need to commute long distances each day to work, and to inducing neighbours to share their joys and sorrows together. The solution to both minimising daily commuting on the one hand and promoting neighbourliness on the other is simple and the same for both: Make it a rule that every employer gets space both for work and employee residences in one lot, within walking distance of each other.

This solution is not unusual. Many institutions including the IITs, laboratories of the DRDO, space, CSIR and atomic energy establishments as well as many agriculture-based industries have workplace and residences close together. Those campuses attract highly qualified experts offering amenities as good as any in the world. For the reason all residents are linked to the same employer, they share many joys and sorrows together. Though sophisticated, those campuses are essentially villages. They inculcate the kind of neighbourliness that is the hallmark of rural ambience.

Rural ambience means also that green fields should be within sight. For that reason, PURA is confined to a strip no farther then 500 metres of the road that strings the campuses. That will guarantee that residences will be within walking distance, not more than 500 metres, from open fields on one side, and a highway on the other.

That is why PURA is devised as a collection of village-sized campuses, each one enjoying all four connectivities that President Kalam advocates. They are stringed together in the form of a garland with a ring road as the string. Every point will then be urban because it will be within walking distance of the ring road that connects a city-sized population. It is also rural because each is a campus where people have common interests. Further, they are also within walking distance of wide, open fields.

Unfortunately, there are still cultural problems to contend. For instance, in several States, governments have provided lavatories at virtually no cost to the owner. Rural folk take advantage of the subsidies offered to get them built, but use them to house cattle or store material. Governments have provided hand-pumps too; many villagers use them to wash buffalos, and bathe in the unhygienic ponds as before. Schools have been provided, but parents do not send their children, particularly girl-children. Hospitals have been built but doctors never attend them. Villages have many amenities on paper but not in truth.

At the other end, entrepreneurs do not want to invest in the rural areas. As the CEO Summit in Kochi showed, they do not want to have anything to do with the government. PURA needs everyone to participate, not work in isolation. Thus, rural development is not merely a supply problem but one beset with peculiar difficulties on the demand side too.

People misuse amenities because they are very poor. They do not have a couple of thousand rupees to spare to build a storeroom, and so use a lavatory for the purpose. The solution is to get them such well-paying jobs that they can afford not to use bathrooms, toilets and the like for other purposes. That will become possible only when jobs are created in the organised sector. In turn, that requires the cooperation of large entrepreneurs.

Let us face facts: President Kalam may be an evangelist for PURA; the Prime Minister may want 5000 PURAs. Both are going to see many roadblocks ahead of them. It is not enough for the government to build a ring road; it should make it first rate, capable of handling future traffic that could grow to impressive volumes. Preventing encroachment of that road — the bane of all roads in the country — will require a new model of highway management. Policy changes are needed to infuse confidence among investors, particularly to persuade them to shift their operations from large cities to PURAs. PURA is also a complex operation; it requires the cooperation of a number of ministries both at the Centre and in the States. For all these reasons, before PURA can succeed, the government will have to reinvent itself.

(To be continued)

(The author is former Director, IIT Madras. Response may be sent to indresan@vsnl.com)

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