Urban Villager: Life in an Indian Satellite Town

291 Pages·2013·7.511 MB·English

by  Vandana Vasudevan

Urban Villager

Urban Villager
Life in an Indian Satellite Town
Vandana Vasudevan
Copyright © Vandana Vasudevan, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form
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First published in 2013 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vasudevan, Vandana.
Urban villager : life in an Indian satellite town / Vandana Vasudevan.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. New towns—India—Noida. 2. Urbanisation—India—Noida. 3. Country
Life—India—Noida. 4. Noida (India) I. Title.
HT169.57.I42N658 307.76'80954'2—dc23 2013 2013031161
ISBN: 978-81-321-1309-6 (HB)
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Contents
Preface ix
PART 1: WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY?
1 A New Town Is Born 3
2 A Mutiny, a Martyr and Some Myths 21
3 Farmer, Farmer, Give Me Your Land 42
4 The Murky Tales of Noida Extension 62
5 Formula 1: Zipping through the Fields 76
PART 2: THE IMPACT OF ACqUISITION
6 Poof! The Cash Is Gone. Where’s My Gun? 91
7 The Cost of Building 110
8 No Home for the Bristled Grassbird 121
PART 3: NEW OWNERS OF AN OLD LAND
9 Isles of Urbania 143
10 The Creation of an Education Bazaar 159
PART 4: THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF THE
PERI-URBAN TOWN
11 The Big, Fat Gujjar Wedding 183
12 Urban Villager 194
viii Urban Villager
13 Art and the City 210
14 Greater Noida Heavens 222
PART 5: GROWTH PANGS OF YOUNG TOWNS
15 The Complexities of Adolescence 239
16 Our Cities, Our Future 249
Acknowledgements 265
Annexures 266
Glossary 277
Bibliography 279
About the Author 280
Preface
Six months after living in Greater Noida, a satellite town of Delhi, it
was starkly evident to me that I was living in a town in flux—where a
new India aggressively intruded into rural India and where apartment
dwellers may have a gymnasium and sauna within their society but
necessarily have to buy milk from the farm because pasteurised
milk in packets is not available everywhere. Fresh, preservative-free
vegetables, though, can be bought directly from tenant farmers,
who anxiously await eviction orders. Farmer clashes about land hit
national headlines, ever so often. Rural landowners make money in
a scale they could not ever have imagined and buy more SUVs. The
Formula 1 track is opposed by villagers because it will block the road
to an old temple. Every day of my life here, I was witnessing a social
and cultural friction that had land at its core. It is a life where India
is forced to coexist with Bharat.
In this book, through the microcosm of Greater Noida, that is a
town in Uttar Pradesh, 25 kilometres from the border of Delhi, I tell
you what it is like to live in a semi-urban city of India. It is not only
a phenomenon restricted to Delhi but also a change sweeping all our
metros where the city gobbles up more and more of what was once
the countryside—whether it is Sriperumbudur in Chennai or Panvel
in Navi Mumbai, Yelehanka on the outskirts of Bengaluru or Rajarhat
in Kolkata. No matter where you live in India, the story of Greater
Noida could be the story you see in your city.
In the course of writing this book, I became aware of the
tremendous amount of research that is being carried out in leading
universities across the world to understand the world’s cities and how
to make them more sustainable and happier places to live in. I came
across daunting but enlightening concepts like ‘urban metabolism’
and ‘urban morphology’. Researchers in the University of Santa