Vijay Kumar Gaba: Mandate 2014: Uttar Pradesh

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Mandate 2014: Uttar Pradesh – land of million Grigoryevs

In the final leg of Phase II of our ‘Discover India’ tour, we travelled through 65 districts of Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Chhattisgarh in north and central India. This was the most interesting leg of our journey so far in which we have covered 11 states.

In this leg we commenced our journey from Western Uttar Pradesh and travelled through Brij, Rohilkhand, Awadh and Budelkhand regions of the state covering 11 of the 18 divisions.

Our first impression of the state strongly reminded us of the famous Anton Chekov story “The Malefactor”. Most of youth and middle age people we interacted with, behaved like Denis Grigoryev the protagonist in the story.

"Denis Grigoryev!" the magistrate begins. "Come nearer, and answer my questions. On the seventh of this July the railway watchman, Ivan Semyonovitch Akinfov, going along the line in the morning, found you at the hundred-and-forty-first mile engaged in unscrewing a nut by which the rails are made fast to the sleepers. Here it is, the nut!. With the aforesaid nut he detained you. Was that so?"

"If I hadn't wanted it I shouldn't have unscrewed it," croaks Denis, looking at the ceiling.

"What did you want that nut for?"

"The nut? We make weights out of those nuts for our lines."

"Who is 'we'?"

"We, people.... The Klimovo peasants, that is."

For once everyone appeared to be a free spirit – as if no rule of law exists. They would do whatever suits them – some would do it sheepishly, but most would be audacious in their defiance of rules. “Don’t bother…yahan sab chalta hai” almost appeared to be the state anthem.

On probing a little deeper, we discovered these are 200million people who are in great rush to move forward. The youth in particular is very diligent and eager to grow out of the perennial constraints that have afflicted this historically rich but economically backward state since independence.

We found, in past two decades education is perhaps the only area where the state has made definite progress. Though the standard of government schools continues to be below par, private English medium institutions have mushroomed in every nook and corner and people, especially lower middle class and backward class, are making tremendous effort to afford their children good education.

The American dream is fast catching up with the middle class youth in UP. It is more like Hyderabad and Bengaluru (where youth aspire to get foreign jobs on the basis of their professional skills and training) and quite unlike Punjab and Gujarat (where youth aspire to settle abroad by using their contacts). At current rate in two decades UP may turn out to be one of the largest destinations of inward remittances in the country.