The Broken Development

As so rightly said by Mahatma Gandhi, that we don't inherit the earth and it's resources from our ancestors, but we borrow them from our children. Which means that, we are on a lease period where we are bound to use our resources judiciously. The whole issue of climate change would not have emerged had there been any attention given to this ideology by any one of us before. While we always just “believe” that there is a lopsided development, where we see the urban rural divide in many aspects, we can actually see it existing even today in many parts of India. Infact to be more precise, in many parts of even the so called "progressive states" of the nation.

While I was on travel working to understand the impacts of climate change on water availability and quality in Pune last week, i could manage to discover a new concept of 'Broken Development'. Very unusual facts are revealed sometimes, when we visit some of the unexplored places of our state, which are unfortunately a part of the same piece of land, where we easily earn our living from.

In some interiors of Pune district, the IT hub of the state, where money and education are the inseparable better halves of each other, one may not believe that some few kilometers away from such a hub are areas, which are merely surviving and are highly vulnerable to collapse at any point of time. 

Especially at this juncture when climate change is the biggest challenge for countries to tackle, India is still struggling hard to set right some basic algorithms pertaining to development.

One of the villages which I visited, did not have drinking water facilities at all and the communities were compelled to survive on the waste water released by the Pune City, which is further released in to the nearby river.  The same water, after some basic treatment was consumed by one entire village.

The most disturbing fact is not that someone's waste water is someone's life, but it’s indeed disheartening to know, that the communities are well versed about this fact and resort to this option "by choice of having no choice", despite being aware of all the forthcoming ill-effects. What kind of development do we think we are aiming at, if deep somewhere we are so poor and helpless that we cannot even address some of the most visible issues ?? 

On one side, people have modern amenities like television and refrigerators, and on the other they are devoid of some basic necessities. Isn't this a broken development?? Or rather a virtual development? Or may be a selective development? Where only few sections of the societies are becoming the drivers as well as the beneficiaries of the development.

Thus, the new government should attempt to join these broken pieces to see the whole picture in first place and then try to take up the massive challenge of national development. The "perceived development" cannot be ambivalent with it's fruits absorbed by only one strata of the nation but should be widespread and based on the principles of equity and generality.