A wide-ranging program has been undertaken by the government for an expansion of roads in the nation’s rural regions. At the upazila, union, and village levels, roads will be widened for a good number of reasons, specifically over issues pertaining to the dilapidated nature of many of these roads, as also the need for faster vehicular movement through the rural communications network.
In the process, a good number of homes will come, at least partly, under the hammer, and families will need to surrender part of their land to the development process. It is also understood that in certain villages, old graves containing the remains of the ancestors of many inhabiting those villages will need to be relocated. How that can and will happen should be a preoccupation of the local authorities in consultation with the families to be affected.
Over the last couple of decades, Bangladesh’s villages have been subjected to development, in that tongue-in-cheek sense of the meaning. That is an idea which must, for now, be kept aside now that this rural communication network has been undertaken as a serious project.
There is no gainsaying that in this day and age, communication through the interior of the country is an imperative. But there is too the paramount need on the part of the authorities to ensure that development of the rural structure does not lead to the imposition of urban problems, those we have lived with and suffered through in the towns and cities of the country.
Now, when all these roads coursing through our villages are broadened to allow not just faster movement but also a ubiquity of movement by such heavy vehicles as trucks and buses, do we have the guarantee that there will be no noise pollution coming in to disturb that pastoral clime?
Villages have been part of historical tradition everywhere across the globe, and especially in Bangladesh. Our literature, our adherence to faith, our social mores, our education, and our economy have all been based on that heritage.
But when such traditions are pushed aside, as has been experienced through the gradual retreat of land given over to the growth of rice and jute and other crops and their commandeering by developers cheerfully planting boards announcing an impending, ominous rise of structures related to industries, private universities, residential quarters for government officials, brick kilns, et cetera, there is legitimate cause for concern.
In an agrarian structure, it is a dangerous proposition to have villages recede into memory, slowly but surely, in the face of urban onslaughts on the values they have always represented. It ought never to have been government policy to sanction the kind of ravaging large numbers of our villages have been going through. When a poor peasant is persuaded into giving up his land, for a pittance or even perhaps for a hefty sum, it is one step more in the painful extinction of a village. When a foreign firm seeks to build a car assembly plant right in the midst of a historically pastoral landscape, it is development which informs us that crass commercialism has replaced old values.
Villages can surely be developed without their having to be consumed by banal urbanity. Turning villages into mini-towns and towns brings in its wake the very grave prospects of environmental disaster. The old trees, planted by people long dead and now in the proprietorship of their descendants, are uprooted. Factories come up, belching out all the smoke and resultant health hazards that endanger life.
That should not be the story. What should be the story is for the authorities, at the central and local levels, to devise plans for a revival of traditional cottage industries, those that will employ rural youths. Cooperatives, based on a principle of meaningful land reforms -- and land reforms are an absolute necessity today given the emergence of a class of nouveau riche intent on creating a plutocracy in the country -- will be a much more sophisticated way of ensuring rural development than have pseudo-capitalism insinuate itself into a structure upon which Bangladesh’s social history has for ages been based.
Developing roads in the rural regions is fine. But with that must come all those other issues which call for remedies. Thousands of schools at both primary and higher stages are in need of refurbishment. Students in the villages remain, in a very large number of instances, deprived of digital facilities, a difficulty which holds them back from pursuing education in these times of the coronavirus pandemic.
There is too the matter of the health services that not only must be strengthened through an infusion of new machinery and treatment facilities, but also demonstrate a guarantee that doctors and nurses will be available in the health complexes at all times. It is a travesty of rural development when ailing individuals need to be rushed to a nearby town rather than be treated in their local union or upazila.
There is a paramount need today for a re-energizing of our rural structure. The village needs to be revived in all its dimensions. Mosques, temples, and churches will need support in the form of grants to play their socio-religious role in the community. Members of parliament must be instructed by their parties to make their presence in their constituencies on a weekly basis, the better to acquaint themselves with the grievances of people who voted for them and who did not vote for them.
Every lawmaker is elected to serve his or her community. It then becomes his or her responsibility to ensure that in the guise of development, villages are not swamped by urbanization or swallowed by predatory elements pretending to be agents of change.
Let those fields of rice and jute remain part of our collective life; let that pond gleam in the sun, as it always has; let those palm trees, those mango trees, that surfeit of bananas have the winds whistle through their leaves; let the monsoon rains turn the land soft in their rhythm; let winter mists remain an occasion for pithas and date juice to add substance to happiness early in the day; let those ducks and hens cluck around in our homes and those cattle graze and pursue their contentment undisturbed.
Let libraries be set up for the rural young to glean knowledge from. Let the educated young be inspired to teach in village schools, to set up their individual as well as collective agricultural projects.
Our villages must be independent identities where traditions will be upheld and reinforced. That will be development, not their captivity to the whims of rural planners in whose minds images of mini-towns displacing villages play around in ugly delight.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
