INDIA’S UGLY RURAL SPRAWL IS A RESULT OF BAD PLANNING
In tribal villages of Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, I found housing development comprising building ugly standard brick and concrete boxes under government housing schemes. But at least there women were retaining the tradition of beautifying their houses by plastering the wall and painting pictures on them. They were repainting the walls every year. This tradition was being encouraged by an NGO.
On a visit to the Kumbhagarh fort in Rajasthan, I saw unplanned tourism development at its worst. Hotel after hotel lined the road approaching the fort. They were peppered with chattris to give their otherwise wholly undistinguished architecture a Rajasthani flavour. Standing on prominent sites, painted in garish colours, the hotels were indeed a blot on the landscape of the magnificent Aravalli mountains.
The Aravallis bring me back to a subject I have brought up in earlier columns – the deforestation that mars the beauty of so much of India. I saw how beautiful the Aravallis could be driving through the reserved forest to Ranakpur but for most of my journey, I saw bleak brown deforested mountains. In Hazaribagh, I saw the wound inflicted on the reserved forest by the construction of a highway. I was told that the renowned beauty spot, Tiger Pool, where I had picnicked as a child was now a stone-crushing site.
Visiting Auroville, I was reminded that the beautiful forest it is set in had been barren deforested land when the first Aurovileans arrived there. Auroville now has foresters and horticulturalists whose innovative methods could be applied to other areas of barren land. Auroville isn’t alone. I have written about the NGO Development Alternative’s successful forestry. The work of Laurie Baker, the architect of low-cost, sustainable housing built with local materials, is well known. But India’s lethargic bureaucracy is content to build standard PWD housing, live with bare mountains, and take the easiest route to construct highways. The ugly rural sprawl so evident throughout India is the inevitable outcome of lethargic planning.