Boomtown Blues

Jewar, UP, is the latest in a long list of Indian village settlements suffering birth pangs of town-making

India’s newest airport in Jewar, UP, has made millionaires – dollar variety – of many farmers near Delhi. A few have got more than ₹20cr for their acquired land, which is $2.1mn at the current rate. And all of them have been living it up. TOI has reported how car showrooms have sprung up in the region. Premium SUVs, not hatchbacks, are bestsellers. As more land is bought for industrial parks and homes in the vicinity, more millionaires will be made. That’s been the boomtown template since Potosi, Bolivia, at least. Silver turned the tiny settlement into a city rivalling London and Paris, in the 16th century. San Francisco grew 25-fold during the 19th century Gold Rush, making many fortunes, including those of Levi Strauss – of jeans fame – and Henry Wells and William Fargo, of the famous bank.

Indian boomtowns are different in one crucial way. Instead of gold, silver, or oil, they are founded on the need to urbanise. Be it highway, power plant, township, or IT park, land is the first requirement. So, landowners – mostly farmers – are the first millionaires. But there’s more than money at stake here. Every boomtown is a society in churn. A centuries-old community – the village – is uprooted. Ties between residents severed. Some landowners become millionaires, yes, but their landless tenants are left without livelihood. There’s also the crisis of work. Farmers enriched, but deprived of land, mostly don’t know what to do with themselves. They are now too rich and proud to be factory workers, or cab drivers, and not qualified for white-collar work. It’s easy to drift then. Imposing SUVs, and helicopter weddings, become social needs, when family status passed down with land is lost. Studies show that farmers whose land is acquired, struggle to blend in white-collar neighbourhoods, despite their wealth. Also, their wealth is soon splurged.

Boomtowns have another face, too – slums. The labour that moves in to build an airport, or houses and offices, comes with its own sense of displacement. Workers and residents, who later come to occupy these shiny towers, are displaced too. Nobody belongs. The largely male labour force, and crowding, raise crime. Civic infra is lagging – the state is always last to the party, be it in Noida, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, or Chennai. You’ll say all of these are birth pangs, preliminary to a boomtown. Yes, but this is the 21st century. Why does town-making still have the frontier feel of the 16th, or the 19th, century?