Jungle City
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Palod's villagers are worried. The village is an example of rural India's success story: brick and concrete houses, rooftops flaunting television dish-antennas and new malls with multiplexes a drive away along National Highway 6, India's east-west artery.
No signs of the poverty or isolation that has enabled Maoists to gain a stranglehold on India's mineral-rich heartland, in which Palod lies. But the village is located just 20 km outside Raipur, a district town that has been masquerading as a capital since Chhattisgarh was formed 10 years ago - and that's why the villagers are worried. The state is building a new capital almost touching Palod, and it could mean the end of farming and fishing. The first residents of Naya Raipur, or New Raipur, will move in by 2013, two years after the government shifts into India's first "green" secretariat. And farmers ploughing the iron-rich red earth for paddy could find themselves next to a special economic zone for information technology.
"We don't know what will happen to us…the government has given us fair compensation for land but not before some arguments. But we are all paddy farmers, we don't know anything else," says Ram, a village elder. Back in Raipur, at the office of the Naya Raipur Development Authority, CEO S.S. Bajaj is a relaxed man. Land acquisition problems had delayed the project by two years till the promised compensation was raised.
"Our chief minister intervened to give the villagers a much higher compensation than the value of the land," says Bajaj. To get reluctant farmers to move, Chief Minister Raman Singh raised it to Rs 6 lakh an acre, six times the NRDA rate. Of the 20,000 acres needed for the project, only a fifth had to be acquired from private owners; the rest was already in government hands.
"The villagers should not worry," says Bajaj, adding, "There will be paddy fields abutting the city in a green strip where we have banned commercial development. We will also build a dairy zone where we'll process milk." Unlike today's urban sprawls that eat up adjoining farmland and have to depend on ever-lengthening food supply chains, the new capital will get most of its food from its suburbs. P. Joy Oommen, the state's chief secretary and chairman of the NRDA, says: "Naya Raipur attempts to create a modern and livable city that will be economically, socially and environmentaly sustainable."
Among the goodies: a gravity based water-supply system, with a ban on bore-wells, recycled sewage water for use in construction and watering the greens (a quarter of the city's area), a bus rapid transit system, and even a light rail system. Naya Raipur will be built and populated in three phases, with lessons being learnt primarily from Chandigarh, built in the 1950s. The first phase will be ready in 2013; by the third phase, in 2031, the city will have 560,000 residents and a workforce of 200,000-plus.
The City and Industrial Development Corp of Maharashtra, or CIDCO, which created Navi Mumbai on the outskirts of Mumbai in the 1970s, has done Naya Raipur's planning. The Chhattisgarh Housing Board will look after housing. "We want this city to reach out to all sections," says Bajaj.
"We do not want urban slums." The first phase is expected to cost Rs 3,000 crore, which the NRDA has borrowed from the state. It hopes to pay it back by selling development rights and with revenues from public-private partnership (PPP) models for utilities, transport, an amusement area, a sports arena and an IT zone. "The right development model is to get the private sector involved," claims Bajaj.
None of the PPP projects have been tendered yet; the water and sewage systems projects could be tendered next year. Naya Raipur will also be the location for several educational institutions offered by the Union government. An Indian Institute of Management will come up near the capital, while the Hidayatullah National Law College is already functioning.
"The idea is that the children of villagers will have access to the same schools as the city's residents," says Bajaj. "We will give them the facilities that they have lacked for decades...we want development." That seems to be the only glimmer of light the villagers can see through the concrete sprawl rising up around them. "I hope my grandchildren have a better life in the new city," says Ram, the Palod village elder.