Rural Bharat has undergone tremendous changes from my childhood days. It has witnessed a large-scale exodus to cities, resulting in congestion, pollution and unhealthy living. Rural areas, including forests, are shrinking to pave the way for cities and towns. Multi- and mixed-cropping sustainable agriculture, including the cultivation of millets, which are known as the powerhouse of nutritious elements, has become mono-cropping. Contrary to this, the production of cereals and oil-seeds, especially flaxseed and sesame, has declined. The process of agriculture, from sowing to harvesting, even for small and marginal farmers, has been mechanised using fossil fuels. Overdosing of pesticides and insecticides has become integral to farming; soil-biota especially earthworms (farmer’s friends), have vanished, making soil non-porous and unaerated; by-products from the farm-fields are not being used and are either made to rot or burnt to pollute air, water and soil; khalihans (granary) and bhusaula (stackyard) have vanished, and barter system has been fossilised. All these have rendered the agriculture profession highly uneconomical. Orchards of mango, guava, jamun, jackfruit, etc., have fallen prey to farm-fields; and kitchen gardens have vanished. Domestication of animals is on the decline as bullocks, buffaloes, and cows have become irrelevant in village life; rather they are made free to destroy crops and create menace on the roads, and rearing of goats and sheep have become things of the past.
Nature-friendly means of life-style and livelihood have now become major causes of pollution. Country houses made of mud and thatches are being replaced by concrete ones; nutritious local dishes by the junk and spicy food stuff; gullies by pucca roads; dug wells by tube-wells; compost pits by chemical fertilisers; tooth sticks by brush and toothpaste; country-brooms and ropes by synthetic ones; indigenous khatia-machia by beds-stools; bamboo fans and baskets by ACs, fridges, electric fans; folk-songs and dances by DJs; and morning and evening prayers and chaupals by TV serials, etc. Avian, insect and aquatic diversity has drastically decreased. Worshipping of nature, including plants and herbs of medicinal value, animals and landforms (rivers, hills, etc.), planets, stars, space, etc., have been dumped in the backyard of the memory lane. Community and cooperative lifestyles have become individualistic and divisive, and man-to-man interactions have become things of the past.
Natural resources are no longer used for meeting the needs and are instead abused to satisfy the greed. Social sanctions imposed to check unethical and antisocial acts have become unthinkable; the collective social consciousness that promoted collective well-being is altogether missing now. Water-recharging structures in rural areas, including ponds and lakes, are silted up, and grasslands have vanished.
Community skills transferred generations after generations and remained a major source of rural livelihood will always be relevant. However, all these are on the verge of extinction. Village panchayats have become ineffective, quality of health amenities and education is wanting. Though technology has pervaded all aspects of rural life, leveraging technology for self-reliant village has not become reality.The cost of living in rural Bharat has soared all-time high. As such, exodus of people to the cities for settlement, employment and labour has become common feature, leading to population loss and change in the rural social fabric. From all counts, rural Bharat is struggling to survive from the clutches of India. It is thus apparent that we have forgotten the wisdom enshrined in the words of eminent poet William Cowper: “God made the country and man made the town”.
It seems that India is hell-bent on negating the traditional knowledgebase, wisdom, morals and ethics that our ancestors created, cherished and passed on to generations. It also appears that the veracity, tenacity, utility and other nature-centric attributes of Sanatan culture have gradually lost their relevance owing to the modern Indian materialistic worldview and thus are being obliterated deliberately from the day-to-day practices. The ghost of Macaulay must be laughing at us on learning that we have remained Bharatiya only through the colour of our skin and blood flowing in arteries and veins. In dwelling style, dress, food-habits, taste, action, value system and most importantly in thought process and mind-set, we have become westerners.
Resultantly, villages do not resemble traditional Bharatiya villages in terms of infrastructure, life-style, utilisation of natural resources, social-structure, morals and value system. Practices of Sanatan dharma (=attributes actually practised in real-life throughout civilisational discourse), including samskaras, are rarely performed and practiced. Soil is losing fertility, and farm productivity is declining. All measures of time-tested rural livelihood have become inconsequential. Humans interact more with mobiles and machines than with the grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins and other relatives, as joint families are no longer the norms of society.
Relationships are weighed in terms of gains and loss. Aged parents are left in the lurch to survive at their own on meager resources. Respect for elders is declining, and indiscipline is on the rise. Consumption of alcohol and drugs is crossing all limits. By and large, it seems to be a civilisational downfall. Nature-centric development discourse has become anti-nature, and co-existential mind-frame has become opportunistic and divisive. ‘Less is More’ i.e. guiding principle of Bharatiya culture, has become ‘More is Less’, i. e. western value system. Now, even sky is not the limit in exploitation of natural and manmade resources for satisfying our greed.
The balance between the materialistic and spiritualistic life-style that existed earlier has heavily tilted towards materialism. All by-products of interaction between the villagers and nature have become non-biodegradable and thus are polluting and degrading lithosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere- life sustaining components of earth. Temperature is on the rise unabatedly, and we face the wrath of vagaries of climate change manifested as flood, drought, cyclones, forest fires, land subsidence, glacial and ice-sheet melt and sea-level rise. The recent cases of floods and land subsidence in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are testimony to the fact that mother nature is angry and has resorted to revenge. These calamities, coupled with the cumulative impact of concrete jungles (cities and towns) has wounded mother earth to the irreparable extent and making it inhospitable for all forms of life. If the present trend continues, the reclamation of the ecosystem necessary for survival and proliferation of life would be next to impossible.
In spite of this anti-nature and materialistic worldview, we proudly proclaim that rural Bharat is now privy to all-round development and is the beneficiary of the knowledge economy. The pathetic situations we are in compel us to have a relook on our extant rural development models to arrest and reverse the ongoing faulty civilisational and development discourse for ensuring the survival of all biotic and abiotic components on the planet Earth. And, sooner, the better we mend our ways. Noted social activist Nanaji Deshmukh’s model of zero unemployment, no one below the poverty line, and zero internal legal disputes, which he experimented with in the Chitrakoot area of Madhya Pradesh is needed to be implemented on a large scale. This model is based on the Integral Humanism of Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay, meaning that every human being’s life is embodiment of harmonisation not only in body, mind, and intellect but in all other aspects, namely, sharing duties as well as rights on a individual-to-individual, individual-to-family, family-to-village, village-to-society, and society-to-nation basis. We ought to leverage technology for self-reliant villages through rural knowledge platforms with active collaboration between the public and private sectors for generating newer means of livelihood. For instance, the use of Internet and Artificial Intelligence to facilitate sustainable smart agriculture and harnessing the potentials of youthful population of rural Bharat to innovate, improvise and recalibrate for the good of humanity.
Thus, rural-centric development models embracing essential traits of Sanatan way of life- skills and mind-set are the only answer to all the prevailing problems. In fact, we need to reaffirm our ancient faith that all living and non-living entities are not only the creation of ALMIGHTY but also possess divine energy and are the extension of the self and thus are interconnected. This faith system promotes co-existential life-style and civilisational discourse in accordance with the Vedic culture and can ultimately save us from the deplorable situations we are heading towards with supersonic speed. Furthermore, humanistic education emphasised by Education 5.0 and as already practised in the ancient Gurukul education system has the potential to create such a citizenry with mindsets for ensuring longevity of civilisation. To conclude, I quote Pete Seeger: “I want to turn the clock back when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.” We should use all our wisdom to promote Bharat of the villages as compared to India of cities. Atma Nirbhar villages will only pave the way for Atma Nirbhar Bharat. Therefore, let us all strive to ensure the victory of rural Bharat over India.
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