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| don't waste him |
Rahul joins me for a pint of beer on Holi- the Indian
festival of colours. He jokes and tells me that his life is not colourful. “ I
want to go back to my home town to Darjeeling- I don’t like Delhi.” His friend
Prabhakar agrees with him. They both work for Adidas as salesman.
Priya (name changed), a beautiful girl, also from Darjeeling
works in a beauty parlour in South Delhi.
She probably has other sources of income, which she doesn’t want to
divulge at this stage. She loves clubs and going out at weekends, but life is
Delhi is tough. She says, “ I have to
stand the whole day, and sometimes I am abused by the customers. I don’t want to live here, but I need to
earn. I want to educate my 9-year-old brother. I will do everything for him”.
Every year thousands of young boys and girls make their way to
Delhi from the picturesque hills of the Darjeeling and also the north –east of
India hoping to get decent jobs.
Thanks to globalization: India’s booming retail industry and
glitzy malls have given employment to many of them. “ We have the looks”, says
Sanchita (name changed), who looks extremely smart in her mini-outfits. “ We might be uneducated, but we know how to
carry ourselves. We are
easily employable. ” Sanchita’s bother is disabled, father is blind and her mom
is often sick. At 22 she has to look for ways to support her family.
Darjeeling is known as the Queen of hills and is the home to
one of the world’s most expensive tea, which contributes greatly to India’s
exports. But unfortunately, the locals have benefited little from it. The tea
is auctioned in Kolkata and drained out of the region much to annoyance of the
local population. The locals have been asking for a separate state- Gurkhaland.
The political demands have had fallouts- frequent strikes and bandhs have
crippled the local economy. Tourism has been hit and the posh Anglo- Indian
boarding schools no longer attract students from the rest of the country.
On a wider context, the suffering of the locals and lack of
unemployment in some of India’s most scenic regions shows how exclusive India’s
economic growth has been.
In many ways, the rising prosperity of India’s cities has
given rise to a host of serious social problems- human trafficking is one of
them. Hundreds and thousands of girls from India’s troubled north-east are
directly or indirectly into prostitution in Delhi alone.
As BRICS leaders cobble up in Durban to discuss the
possibilities of setting up a BRICS bank to help sustain infrastructure and
human development, we hope that such initiative will be duly accompanied by a
vision to economically boost some of the backward regions and communities in
each of the BRICS countries.
For India, the priority should be to look at human development
issues, creating more economic opportunities across the country and improve its
defunct infrastructure. Above all it needs to fight corruption to say the
least.
