Six Decades of Freedom

I went back to Katrasgarh last month after fifty years. It was the same small dusty town with narrow lanes and the week-end bazaar spilling on to the streets. Population growth had increased the congestion & filth. Horse drawn ekka garis jostled with the Hero Hondas. A shiny new ICICI Bank branch incongruously announced the arrival of 'Shining India' in that dilapidated townscape. Poverty was as rampant as when I was born, with the majority of people continuing to eke out a living like the previous generations.

The hospital was run down and disused. The area is infested with poisonous snakes yet the hospital did not carry anti-snake venom serums. Age old potions and pujas to Sitala Devi still provide the only succor. The current CMO, a middle-aged Muslim, is from ancient Nalanda, which is now crime-infested. He was looking forward to retirement to safer areas of Jharkand, now that his son, alumni from my School, is established as an engineer in the US - the same time-tested paths to well-being followed by middle class families for the last sixty years. My elder brother who also spent his childhood in the same house in Katrasgarh is now a retired engineer in the U.S.

When we got off the station at Dhanbad, a young criminal smartly dressed in jeans & T-shirt with a brief case in his hand was leading the two policemen, who had him on the old fashioned rope leash tied around his waist (seen only in this part of the world!). Fifty years ago, on a dark moonless night a band of dacoits carrying flaming torches in their hands tried to attack the hospital at Tisra where we were posted. The chowkidar loaded the Second World War issue double barrel gun and fired a warning shot in the air and the bandits melted away.

Not much has changed in the big district town of Dhanbad, other than the Bank Street where you have branches of the 'new generation banks' & ATMs, a brightly lit Café Coffee Day and some 3-star hotels. There is a hoarding announcing the imminent arrival of a multiplex and shopping complex. The roads in Dhanbad have craters which would make a good training track for moon-bound astronauts to practice their buggy run. In the Fifties most of the mining was done underground through shafts. In the last fifty years open pit mining has taken over, ripping out the landscape without any environmental remedies. Coal mining was nationalized by Indira Gandhi in the sixties. But a very small number of the trucks and rakes which transport coal from the government owned mines of BCCIL generate revenue for the government. I visited the only privately owned mines belonging to the Tatas for the coal supply for their steel plant at Jamshedpur. It was immaculately managed, with high levels of productivity and safety, the hall mark of all Tata Companies.

Time stands still in Jharia a commercial town situated on top of unsafe underground fires. For the last fifty years the government has been trying to relocate the town population sitting on this condemned land. As one drives around Jharia one still sees the smoke spewing from these under ground fires. Yet the residents are unmoved and suspect that it is all a ploy to access the enormous coal deposits under the town.

Late in the afternoon we drove past the great Sindri Fertilizer factory, one of the 'Temples'of Independent India built by Pandit Nehru. I remember as a six-year-old, standing on the roadside waving the Indian & Soviet Union flags as the convoy of cars carrying Bulganin & Khrushchev, the Russian leaders whizzed past on their way to marvel at this industrial ratna. Now five decades later, the enormous defunct factory complex was just a dark shadow eerily silent with only the red warning lights burning on the tall chimneys. I live in Bangalore and often have to suffer long traffic jams as every international dignitary makes a bee line for the Infosys Campus. I wonder what fate lies ahead for this modern day star.

The purpose of our visit to my place of birth after fifty years was the inauguration of a beautiful auditorium at the school which I attended, De Nobili at Jealgora. The School started in 1956 with 15 students in a three bedroom residential quarter of the Fuel Research Institute of India. Today De Nobili School and its branches in the coal fields of Jharkand provide education to 15,000 students. It was founded by a young band of American Jesuits who came to the newly Independent India to set up educational institutions. The coal fields of Dhanbad may be the bad lands of India and may not produce adequate revenue for the government, but De Nobili continues to produce multi millionaire entrepreneurs who own IT companies in the US, coal mines in Australia, ports & refineries in Gujarat; professionals who are doctors, psychiatrists, engineers, accountants, bankers, teachers, business executives, government & police officials, heroes of our armed forces………… the builders of the Resurgent India.

Samit Ghosh has been an international banker for thirty years and currently is a founder & CEO of Ujjivan, a microfinance institution.

Content Source: India Syndicate