Imagine the nightmare.
What used to be rice fields now display billboards pointing to a future housing complex there. Where farmers once grew jute, the creeping image of an oncoming invasion called a private university rears its head. In what used to be a pastoral Bengali home is now all the hint of a high-rise about to emerge as a boil on the traditional beauty of a village.
Real estate developers, unfettered and unaccountable to no one, ferry trucks loaded with sand and bricks and mortar and dump them on land they covet for themselves. Huge tracts of agricultural land, once lush with crops grown through the seasons, have vanished under such monstrosities as officers' quarters meant for the powerful and the influential.
Look into the distance as you walk by and notice that ugly board informing you that all that land you once saw teeming with rice, with jute, with vegetables, with fish flowing in through the monsoon rains, is now in the possession of a class of nouveau riche intent on building there an elitist school or an expensive hospital.
They --- and we speak of those who are ready and willing to kill off nature and heritage in the name of development --- are impelled by crass commercialism in their aggression. The old pastoral paths, the homes which have been our roots to history, the trees and the birds and the breeze we grew up with are being commandeered by a new and widening class of parvenus. That is our sadness. And our tragedy is that no one in authority seems to be there to stop these incursions, these invasions of our villages.
And yet we must reassert our belief that Bangladesh's villages need to be saved from 'development'. There must be laws, those which civilized societies observe everywhere, that will ensure that no individual or group will mar the traditional structure of the village through steps that are a clear extension of lopsided urban planning. In simple words, the villages of Bangladesh, historically the underpinning of our heritage, a spur to its societal, philosophical and literary expression, must be preserved. And that can be done through keeping every negative developmental initiative at bay.
Yes, of course we would want our villages to develop. In a post-modern world, you cannot expect a village to remain detached from civilization. Over the past three decades or so, a fairly large number of our villages and hamlets have been connected to the communications network through new roads being built and through old mud paths being transformed into paved pathways.
Travel anywhere in Bangladesh these days. Chances are that you will not rack your brains about the best way to go about your business, for there are highways and roads and reasonably good pathways that will take you to your destination.
That is development for us. Development is not in reducing the village into narrow slivers of land housing a few hapless families through buying up their land and stripping it of its natural elements. It is in making it possible for people in the villages to improve their standards of living through finding employment in places that matter to the economy.
In recent times, young women and men who otherwise would have been compelled to work as house help, at outrageous wages, in insensitive urban homes, have come by self-esteem and self-reliance at the many garments industries set up in the rural interior. It is development because garment factories do not pollute the atmosphere; and because they contribute to a certain enhancement in happiness for the families of those working in these factories.
At this point in time, the risks to Bangladesh's villages come not merely from brick kilns and the like but also, and in a hugely dangerous way, from the myriad housing schemes undertaken by equally myriad firms in our villages. Everywhere you travel, away from the nation's capital, it is the threat to the traditional rural structure that lands as a slap across the face for you.
Development which espouses the principle of life being an essentially city-based affair, to the detriment of the roots which yet hold us in thrall and in faith to old values, is really a menace. On those billboards, stretching for miles on end along the highways and away from them into the rural ambience, comes news of the slow, painful death of the village.
The village must be saved from predatory business instincts. In Britain, in Europe and in other global spots, the village is sacrosanct. It is not defiled. It is not humiliated. History has consistently accorded respect to it. Bangladesh ought to follow that precedent, unless it is willing to fall prey to a new, formidable environmental disaster.
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