Prosperity Without Progress

Every time I visit Belgharia, I have a sense of despair. Not least because of the potholes, puddles or household rubbish dumped on the roadside, as they are all to be seen in the part of London I live in, especially in this age of austerity, but because the civic life hasn't changed in Belgharia despite signs of prosperity. The number of apartments, private cars and shops have all increased significantly even in those parts of the suburb, which once housed many refugee families like mine.

Public dumping of garbage is an
essential component of the image
associated with Belgharia

I heard from my grandmother, how difficult it was for them to have a bucketful of clean drinking water. The women folk would wait in a queue for hours in front of a dripping tap for drinking water, while the household washing were carried out by water from roadside puddles, created mostly due to lack of drainage facilities.

There was no electricity, she would tell me, and the roads were reduced to arable land, especially during the monsoon and people would have to fold their trousers up to knee height to travel to and fro from the railway station. Not of this proportion though, but even 30 years ago I had witnessed pretty bad roads and water logging near Adarsha Nagar, the vast stretch of land adjacent to what is now known as the Belgharia Expressway.

Things have apparently improved over the years. The disposable incomes of the people of Belgharia, which was once likened with Vitenam by the Communists, have increased manifold. The number of concrete houses and apartments have gone up. Belgharia has now many more shops, schools, a flyover and the number of personal vehicles has gone up substantially. The people of Belgharia are generally much better off than from my grandmother's generation.

Affluence, indeed speaks of the prosperous transformation that this place has undergone, yet every time I have visited the place over the past 12 years, I felt remorse. Despite the flyover, every year many lives are unnecessarily lost while crossing the railway lines, people are exposed to accidents near both ends of the flyover as there are no policemen to control the irresponsible traffic, water bodies are encroached by promoters and other vested interests, polluting vehicles are parked near schools and above all the people in this place are yet to acknowledge and appreciate the importance of keeping their surroundings clean.

Organisations which claim to be
doing public good are stealthily
encroaching communal
water-bodies in Jatin Das Nagar

The phenomenal changes that have been taking place all around the world, it seems, have failed to influence the place, and to me Belgharia still remains a place of the past. Whenever I mention this to my family and friends back home they blame me for being snooty, make oblique references as if I have come from a different planet, but before moving to London in 1999, I have spent most of my life in the dusty suburb. The problems that I see in Belgharia today never struck me when I lived there. I know that proximity, or the lack of it, gives a different perspective, especially when one is more exposed to the wider world.

However, I also notice a sense of resignation among the residents there today. Ask any resident of Belgharia about their travails and the average answer would be 'bole ar ki habe, kono kichhu to hoar noy' (meaning nothing will change whatsoever so what's the point of trying to address the issues or resolving them). What they forget though is that change only comes for the deserving.

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