Building India at the cost of Bharat

The conflict is poignant, the exploitation is downright. India has started rampaging Bharat in a more unrelenting manner ever than before. From Niyamgiri to Dhinkia and from Jaitapur to Bhatta-Paursal, the war of land acquisition has finally turned ugliest. Farmers and landholders brutalized, state went berserk on agitators, many fled away from their ancestral homes, and many were killed in the tug of war between India and Bharat. How long will this desperate war continue? And for what reason? Why is that every time the people of Bharat are stripped off their marginalized property to help build a modern India? Why is that they turn victims in every episode of development that they never relish its fruits? Why is that the modern India becomes so callous in exploiting the resources of Bharat? Perhaps, nobody has a rational answer to all these queries, but the fact remains that every time India makes a visible progress, the farmers, the tribal people, and the poor people living in JJ colonies become the inevitable sacrificial lambs. Because these people are helpless, gullible, and maybe have no access to power.

Let's look at how Posco with support from the state administration of Orissa tries to destroy the livelihood of thousands of betel farmers by offering them a miniscule compensation. Calculate this: a normal betel farmer earns somewhere between Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 20,000 a month from an acre of land whereas the onetime compensation for the land hovers around Rs. 250,000. Is this justified? Now the moot question is if the same farmer who can earn the compensation amount within a year or two from a perennial crop, why would he settle for such a lower amount? Moreover, given spiraling inflation, the same farmer can achieve even higher returns from the crop in future. Isn't this a clear exploitation of gullible farmers? Is there any future dividend even Posco will skyrocket its profit margin once production gets started? No. Everybody from state administration to company board will forget the fact that the plant which is built on thousand acres of land was once an economical, social, and emotional storehouse of thousands of farmers. And if this huge economic progress has been possible couldn't have been materialized without the utter sacrifice of these farmers or local people. No one does care how a piece of Bharat metamorphoses into an enlightened India in such a short span and some elites of that modern India will take credit for what they never had sacrificed even few moments of their life.

How long this exploitation will continue? When will the growing hiatus between Bharat and India be put on a reverse gear? Here we are forgetting a glaring fact that so long as we continue exploiting Bharat, we are pushing India to a stage of unsustainable development where progress would be there, but without sustained prosperity.