Supremely pertinent amenities like food — fish, meat, fruits and vegetables — in India are skinned and sold in unimaginably unhygienic conditions. This has to change
What kind of India we wish to buildIJ A Bharat of Mahatma Gandhi with villages as the reference point, or will it be an India of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar with cities as reference points. Clearly, Gandhiji has lost the race as urbanisation is on the fast track. Most Indians who retire from their jobs prefer building a house in a city. They would visit villages once in few years. Some have in fact completely cut off from village life.
The young generation stuck in the countryside dreams of migrating over to cities. While large numbers of people wish to settle down in the metropolises, a great number of them land up living in small towns — or district headquarters.The notion of citizenship relates to cities. Cities are a key element in the rise of civilisations. India is on the fast track of urbanisation. By 2030, majority of Indians might be living in cities.
In the United States, only 18.0 per cent population lives in cities. In the year 1607, the first ship that landed at present day Virginia and the first village that was set was called the Jamestown.
Japan too was a nation without cities. Towns sprouted and a mega metropolis like Tokyo came into being. India is on the same track. While cities are not agricultural economies, cities would necessarily have drainage systems that villages would not. The present day villages in developed nations do have drainage systems. Also, municipalities came up in cities and towns and the notion of bathrooms and cleaning roads too came. The civility thus begins with cities.
Where is India when compared to the cities and towns of the developed nationsIJ Sure enough, India is a nation in transition but what we expect from a party that seeks mandate to govern this country to have some idea as to how to put India on a route at par with the developed world.
let us test India on certain basic parameters, and take Delhi as a case. Delhi has diplomats and civilians from all over the world. In the southern part of the city, there is a market that is famous for its meet/chicken/pork/fish shops. At any point of the time, one may find many foreigners shopping here.
Now for instance, as one passes by, the idea of cleanest non-vegetarian varieties comes to mind. But, buy a live chicken and watch the way a chicken is butchered. A man most dirtily dressed would take the chicken behind the shops, and would deploy two types of butchering. One way is to cut the throat of the chicken and dip the same in a large pot that is boiling with few chickens already in the pot. The chicken is taken out from the pot after a dozen minutes, and skinned on the ground that is splattered with blood. Even villagers don’t butcher chicken in that kind of unhygienic conditions.
The other method is to cut the throat of the chicken, and dump in drum where few chickens are already dumped. After a few minutes, a man removes that drum that doesn’t have a bottom and one finds dozens of chickens lying on the ground in pool of blood and dust that has taken the form of mud.
East Delhi has fish and chicken mandis. The bunches of fish arrive in the mandi in trucks. Once taken off, the fish are spread on the ground and traded. The ground is as dirtier as one could comprehend. At places, one finds a host of workers skinning fish and making them boneless for hotels. That too is done on the ground. On the eastern side of the mandi, one finds a chicken mandi amidst dust. Some two hundred metre from there is one of Delhi’s biggest land filling where the city’s waste is dumped.
North West Delhi has India’s biggest vegetable and fruit mandi. If you happen to visit it, you would find vegetables and fruits traded in mud. In a debate in Parliament, lalu Prasad Yadav had once joked, “Shoes and slippers are sold in air conditioned spaces but vegetables on streets”.
If this is the situation in Delhi, think of places like Sangali, Dimapur and Bulundshahar. Can India ever become a modern nation without civility becoming part of our DNAIJ I have been to Europe, Africa and North America, and seen how eatables are traded.
Why didn’t political parties promise civility to IndiaIJ