India Today says....

All of us have heard about the two Indias that exist in a single country. India and Bharat.
India is what drives the country’s high economic growth, but it is Bharat where most of the country lives.It is often believed that the bustling metro is dragged down by the backward village.

At one level this is true – particularly across social sectors like illiteracy and infant mortality. Yet these days what most of India doesn’t know is that the Bharat they rarely pay attention to, is being transformed as dramatically as the metros. Change in India these days does not merely mean the growth of malls. Its deepest impact is felt on a section of the population whose livelihood is linked to the land, whose lives depend entirely on nature and whose news usually centres on natural disasters like floods, famines and drought.

Much of the Indian village today does not look like it did a few decades ago, full of cracked earth and farmers in ragged clothes. The panchayat sarpanch carries a mobile, farmers head to work on mopeds and their children are sent abroad to study. If Kalahandi 25 years ago was once a symbol of starvation, today it is a place where there are 150 rice mills and locals run a cottage industry that manufactures washing powder. Across India, villages are growing and changing in varying degrees. In some cases, the change to innovative farming techniques like switching crops or taking up improved irrigation has given farmers a chance to alter centuries-old economic cycles.

In other cases, the use of new technology has played a key role: for example in Bardhaman in West Bengal, the only district in India to have connected every panchayat by the Internet. Or Anksapur in Andhra Pradesh, where water harvesting improved the groundwater table and farmers got a chance to buy 1,500 acres from neighbouring village for profitable cultivation. Villages have benefited from easy access to finace, the ncreasing price of rural land and social welfare schemes that increase the job opportunities and keep youth involved in the villages they grew up in. This is not to say taht poverty does not exist in rural heartlands of India but there are great changes afoot which are transforming rural lifestyles. Nevertheless, they still remain dependent on the unpredictability of nature itself.

Yet, what we are seeing is an astonishing empowerment of India’s villages due to the business of economics and the most simple of sciences in places we have never heard of: like Fatehpura-Pilvai in Gujarat, Theni in Tamilnadu or Dhekalgaon in Madhya Pradesh.

I strongly believe India’s salvation lies in modernizing its agriculture and finding employment for those who move away from the land as a result. The changing face of rural India is a welcome sign that this is happening although it still has a long way to go…before which we need a CORRECTED India and not a CORRUPTED India!!