SANAND, India — It doesn’t look like he’s won much from industrialization. Take his face, weathered beyond his 30 years, or the earth stuck to his bare ungainly feet.
Jaisar Khan Pathan, one in a long line of farmers, is simply too scrawny.
But Pathan, and scores like him who live in the shadow of a new factory built by Tata Motors to make its ultra-cheap Nano car, are the beneficiaries of the race to transform India from a nation of small farmers to an industrialized power.
They are part of a tectonic shift as millions move off the land into an uncertain future, even as others wage land battles that have blocked some of the world’s most powerful companies from building power plants, mines and factories.
The conflict over land has fueled a violent Maoist insurgency across much of India’s least developed regions. The insurgency, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India’s top internal security threat, claimed 908 lives in 2009 and rebels were blamed for a May train derailment that killed 145 more.
Some say India is trying to industrialize too fast, without the education and infrastructure in place to give the rural poor a fighting chance.
“How long did the industrial revolution take to be implemented in the West? Two hundred years. You want to replicate the same model and squeeze it into 20 years. That’s not possible. The fallout will be massive,” said Bhaskar Goswami, an economist at the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security in New Delhi.
Against this backdrop of strife, Pathan’s story is the ideal of what could be achieved if the more than 50 percent of Indians who live off the land get a real stake in the new economy. It’s a principle that advocates of market capitalism and human rights activists can agree on, but that often fails to materialize across rural India, where stories of powerful business interests and corrupt officials conspiring to throw poor farmers off their land are all too common.
Around the Tata plant in Sanand, in the western state of Gujarat, people have begun to talk of the “Nano effect.”
Go down a narrow lane that runs to dirt not 15 minutes from the factory and amid the gamboling goats of Chharodi village, you will find 25 new homes.
Property prices have risen sharply – from 50 to 400 percent – and men are making fortunes brokering land deals.
The village head says three dozen of the 3,000 people in Chharodi have gotten work from contractors. The Nano factory hasn’t given them jobs directly, but it has offered a toehold in the industrial economy. They remain farmers, but a growing part of their income comes from informal business ventures or work for contractors.
Pathan and his three brothers sold the government one-third of their family farm to make way for the Nano plant. They were paid 20 million rupees ($432,900) – a fortune even in Gujarat, one of India’s richest states.
Ask the Pathan brothers what they did with this money, and they grin like schoolboys.
They bought 2.7 hectares (6.6 acres) of land – more than doubling their initial landholding – three kilometers (two miles) away, where they are preparing to plant their first crop.
They bought seven tractors and three Bolero jeeps, which they use for contracting work at the Nano site, raking in 455,000 rupees ($9,848) a month.
They are rebuilding their family home. Gone is the mud and thatch. Today their angular concrete two-story is the biggest on the block.
Associated Press writer RK Misra contributed to this report.
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