Telangana - Whose Cause is it Anyway

Seven years ago, on a cloudy but warm winter afternoon, a bunch of sophomores barged into our class. They finally managed to snatch a time to get themselves introduced to us, en masse in our classroom, in the typical engineering college way. A short bespectacled guy ordered us to introduce ourselves giving details of our school, intermediate college, academic aggregates and our future aims. We were a class of 60 and I am sure on that day there were atleast 50 of them in the class. At the end of the session, I found except for 5-6 students, the rest professed their ‘aim’ to be ‘MS in US’. They all echoed each other just as if they were doctored in a community school of a communist state. It didn’t require great brains to decipher that most of them were not using their brains. They were merely repeating what the society instilled in them. And there lies the greatest curse of Andhra Pradesh in general and Telangana in particular.

High industrialization, and subsequent development, of neighboring Tamil Nadu is often attributed to their colonial advantage. But strictly speaking, the British never bothered beyond the ports of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay. Yet, I was pleasantly surprised when a decade back I found the best of stationary stocked at Walden, which was targeted, both in its pricing and packaging, at the upwardly cosmopolitan, being produced not at Chennai, Bangalore or NOIDA but an interior town in Tamil Nadu, Sivakasi. And that’s not a lone example. You find towns like Erode, Thiruppur, Dindugul etc booming with various small and medium scale industries. And these don’t lie in the Kaveri delta, which can be the nearest analogy to the Andhra Region, if and only if, Karnataka releases water that year. One reason I could figure out is the entrepreneurial streak in them. The will to create and do something on their own rather than work under someone, even if the pay isn’t quite appealing. Self-pride, something that is synonymous with the Tamils, looms large in them, though often it turns into jingoism. Even the politicians there chip in their bit. The country’s only steel plant which has neither an iron-ore mine nor a coal mine in its proximity is the Salem. The politicians from Tamil Nadu managed to force the Centre to invest in something that defies economic logic, just to ensure there would be regional development. What has been the contribution of the TRS in this regards? It is more than two years since the party has been in the Union Government. It holds two portfolios which directly deal with fate of poor and downtrodden, Labour Ministry and Rural Development Ministry.

Some of you might site the examples of numerous ITES firms being started by NRIs. But, investing in a booming sector with seemingly perpetual rosy prospects can by no means be called entrepreneurship. It is being plain opportunistic. Just the way people are making quick bucks out of the booming real estate business. Those NRIs who profess their ‘love, admiration and concern’ for their ‘home’ and its ‘development’, would do well to invest in ventures that are more locally relevant, that would help in the development of entire region and region does not mean the boundaries of Cyberabad municipality. Start projects which would be able mitigate the plight of displaced and deceased farmers, whose land is being given to the gyms and pool rooms of your offices. Whose MSPs are kept stagnant so that you get subsidies to take your spouses to exotic locations on the pretext of visiting industrial exhibitions. Who would have to wait for a generation to get power and water, so that you can run your premises with uninterrupted power supply.

So, my fellow classmates/ batchmates - turned-NRIs, I guess it should be pretty clear to you now why Telangana is backward. If you can do something on these lines, please do. Else leave it us. We have enough politicians out here and we don’t plan to outsource our politics to you.

This post may be very similar to what Kuffir posted. But what I am trying to say is that the attitude of people hasn’t changed much. Those who leave the shores today aren’t very different from those who left during the time of Kuffir’s graduation. Atleast, I wish that the present lot doesn’t indulge in distorting the facts in the guise of representing of people, of whom they know little.