Dark patches in the fabric of shining India
SANDEEP KRISHAN
On August 15, I left for the city 45 km away from my village to get the special Independence Day issue along with old copies of The Hindu which I get on a weekly basis.
I had to take the same private mini bus back to the village for there is no other means of transport to my village except these mini buses which run thrice a day.
Luckily I got back to the bus stand in time and got room on the roof of the bus. The guys sitting next to me were also from my village. I asked them why they had come to the city when their colleges were closed. They reluctantly told me they had come to buy the seesis (the bottles of cough syrup used as cheap drug).
Their faces were a mirror of the plight the border villages of Punjab are going through. Marred by a high rate of unemployment, village boys are caught in a drug net spread in border areas. The narcotics smuggled from West Asian nations via Pakistan are sent to Indian markets through the unemployed youth of villages. As the population is rising, land sharing among the villagers is decreasing. As their main employment being lost, the youth have turned to drug smuggling.
The newspapers which come to the village seem to have forgotten us. They keep on teasing us through Bollywood stories and the economic boom of shining India when we are in a state of jeopardy.
We as a nation we take pride in the Kargil war. But the deadlock created at that time ravaged the conditions in villages on the border with Pakistan. We were the ones who were asked to leave our land and migrate to safer places along with our cattle. We had to leave our belongings and green crops under no one’s custody.
Government compensation was always like a distant dream. When it reached us, it could not recreate the opportunities lost by that generation. While the shining nation celebrates in big cities the 60th anniversary of Independence, we the forgotten child, the border villages, still are the dark nation.
We still lack basic amenities necessary for survival along with education, healthcare, transportation, farm credit. We still suffer under debts, casteism, racial discrimination, thanks to illiteracy prevailing among us. What kind of the global village is this when a villager has to travel 90 km every week to a city to get a copy of a national newspaper?
(The writer is from village Khippanwali, Abohar, Punjab. He can be reached at sandeep_krishan29@yahoo.com)
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