Rural Revival : India needs to address and broaden Rural Inclusiveness

The world has been converging and converging to the megacities in a big way in Asia, Africa and other regions since last century. As our cities have expanded exponentially, the reality and ugliness of the “growth” of the cities is coming to the fore. Today’s cities may seem glamorous with dazzling shops and malls, gleaming skyscrapers, ultra fast transport and diverse models of automobiles on the roads and attractive airports. However, on the other side, garbage and sewer stinks, dirty and polluted rivers, perpetual digging and construction debris and traffic gridlocks are leading to unlivable conditions. Open spaces are being gobbled up by malls, offices and hotels. Further, the human element in cities is clearly missing. City folks have no time for themselves. Neighbours don’t meet neighbours even in the times of crises now. Accident victims are left for hours without care because of fear of facing too many questions from authorities. No doubt cities are too busy to reach out to problems of rural hinterland. The cities are becoming heartless monsters with no human touch at all. Rural areas are again acquiring attraction because of low pollution, green spaces and more human touch and death of distances caused by great communications set up by telecom giants. The clear solution to the crisis is to stop the downstream migration from hinterland to cities and encourage upstream migration back to villages and towns. But this paradigm can only be successful on the premise that broader depth of opportunities are leveraged, targetted and encouraged to make rural areas economically strong and self sustainable. This paper attempts to give some solutions to the grave problems of 21st century of balancing growing urban rural chasm. Rural Revival, by fostering the growth of rural areas, is a compelling necessity to stop the growing congestion, pollution, crime and deteriorating humanitarian values in cities.