Can India Afford Its Villages?
The answer to the problems of our rural economy paradoxically lies in urban development We have a choice between 600,000 small villages and 600 well-planned, new, vibrant urban centres B Y A TANU D EY AND R EUBEN A BRAHAM T here has been a general tendency to romanticize village life as a return to our roots. What is noticeable, though, is that most people who romanticize village life in India tend to live in cities-in India, or elsewhere. They also seem incapable of noticing the irony implicit in this romanticization, since their forefathers, too, were once villagers -who migrated to cities for good reason. There was no greater proponent of villages than Mohandas Gandhi, who had been educated in London, and had a law career in urban South Africa. Gandhi’s most vehement critic at the time was Ambedkar, who knew about village life as an untouchable. Attacking Gandhi’s view on the republic of villages as overly sentimental, Ambedkar urged his followers to leave their rural persecution be
