Next stop Haryana

As of tomorrow morning I pack my bags and kiss Lucknow goodbye (for now).

Having just enjoyed a luxurious evening with an extremely gracious Indian Administrative Service Officer and his family, I feel my feet just briefly touching the ground in this strange city of contrasts. The Bhagavad Gita (2.45) councils freedom from the sorrows of contradiction ("the sorrow of the pairs of opposites") but that implies a detachment I have yet to achieve.

I returned from discussions of government regulation, EPZs, communist politics in West Bengal, and Calcutta's famous rasgoolas in a jasmine-scented Ambassador, with 3 forms of air conditioning , 3 types of pillows and at least 3 degrees of separation from the outside world. It's not that I feel guilty about the comfort I just enjoyed. I can accept comfort.

What unsettles me is the fact that I just effortlessly tread a bridge between a successful, hardworking government servant's abode and a small but elegant hotel. This bridge actually spanned a wide breath of broken road, open sewage, and lives too different and difficult to sketch here. It's easy to call such bridges 'modernity', 'progress', or 'development.' This is unsettling part - the strong desire to make these lofty bridges over continuing poverty count for something more than they are. I'd rather not equate progress with a comfortable shortcut, and yet it is a tangible metric, for me at least...

So on to Haryana. As one of the wealthiest states in the country and cradle of the Green Revolution, its capital, Chandigarh, is a gem: the wealthiest city in the country (income p.c. approx. $1,500), relatively high literacy levels (73%), and a pinnacle of modern design (architecture thanks to Paris's Le Corbusier). Yet progress has its own unique form in Haryana. Despite its great wealth and education, it has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the country (777 women to every 1,000 men).

What piqued my interest today was the new state policy providing incentives of Rs. 50,000 for inter-caste marraiges. This holds as long as at least one partner is from a Scheduled Caste. Yet the same papers that discuss this drive for increased tolerance report honor-killings in neighboring Punjab and shootings just East of Haryana in Uttar Pradesh due to inter-caste marraiges. Is Haryana really prepared for change?

The optimistic side of me says Yes, Absolutely! thanks to hard evidence of Haryanavis' willingness to hold state officials to their word. Apparently, as the weather gets hot villagers are making sure government power officials deliver on promised power provision:

While an electricity department officer was recently tied to a tree, another was bullied into standing in the blazing sun until he swooned.

Power was quickly restored after both the incidents, but that is not the point. ''The point, really, is that we are increasingly being targeted,'' said a fearful RC Jagga, deputy general secretary, All Haryana Power Corporation Workers Union.

''There have been incidents when villagers made electricity employees run around in the sun or house arrested them. Locking up power stations and electricity offices has become routine. There is a huge gap between demand and availability of electricity and it better get addressed fast.'' ("Akhada Tactics," Sukhbir Siwach, Times of India)

WOW. Now that's government accountability.

So I'll spend about three days in Chandigarh - as much time as it takes to meet several High Court Justices, lawyers, journalists from the Hindustan Times, and an IAS officer who used to be the District Magistrate of the Haryana district I'll study: Yamunanagar. Hopefully I'll also assemble a team of bright-eyed RAs who will shortly follow me to Yamunanagar district. Then it's a simple hop, skip, and a jump into the gaping abyss that is Field Research. Wish me luck!