And Then My Dreams Started Haunting Me!
Posted : May 21, 2005 at 11:20 pm [IST]
After I made my entry ‘Changing Rural India, I went out for a belated morning walk. My dreams of heavenly Indian villages as read in childhood in our national poet’s creation started troubling me. Why can’t a smart one of the young boys and girls after getting trained in certain skill become an entrepreneur too and set up ‘village maintenance cum service enterprise’? And similar rural enterprises can come up in about 6,00,000 villages. One some of these enterprises may go for manufacturing the simpler parts on the machines installed for doing the maintenance jobs. And then the lust for owning an enterprise will grow in every household. Each will do some thing unique for the consumers in his village or villages nearby. Some may start some ready-made apparel; some may go for knitting or stuffed toys, and some will have expertise in nursery or organic manures.
And then, someone will start an information center and serve the villagers by providing on line or even real time interactions with the outside world for different things, may be for fixing up a date with the doctor or with the advocate in city. The other entrepreneurs or skilled hands in different activities can order for the parts or accessories from the suppliers or retailers. Or the village businessmen can communicate with the bulk supplier. Computer and Internet can help in hundreds of needs. Poor parents will not have to go on searching for the suitable match for their daughters and wasting money and resources in traveling from one village to another. Students will have many uses.
And I hope, every village or a group of them will start its weekly market. Even the poorest of poor can take the vegetables grown in her small courtyard or on the straw roof in the market and sell them and buy some essential things in exchange. And, again, someone will take initiative to transform the open land in the vicinity of the village into a garden or a park. Every village will plant a lakh of trees along the village road and in open spaces. And the dream goes on.
I am sure some enthusiasts must have started on this line or would have been doing that soon. And the lust to go to town and the compulsion of living in slum will vanish from their mind. With electricity and good road connecting every village, the dream will get realized sooner, may be in my lifetime itself.
- Indra
Category: Rural development |
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