Split Personality

It’s easy, zooming down the pothole-free roads lined by colourful hoardings and electric poles, to be taken in by the obvious improvements. Want to travel to Patna, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore or Kolkata? Catch a direct flight from Ranchi airport. Trains, too, connect the city to the four major metros. Then there are air-conditioned shopping malls, bars, restaurants, jewellery stores, multi-storeyed apartment blocks. And Ranchi’s first five-star hotel.

All of which adds up to a city still in the throes of change forced by its new status way back on November 15, 2000. Official records show an increase in the state plan outlay from Rs 500-600 crore in 1999-2000 to Rs 2000 crore in 2002-03. All the investments and improvements have doubled land prices, which had plateaued over the last decade. Commercial land rates have increased by over 100 per cent in the last 31 months, from Rs 1000-1500/sq ft in 1991-92 to Rs 4500/sq ft in June 2003.

Instead of putting off private investors, it seems to be spurring them on. At least one private bank is planning to shift headquarters from Patna to Ranchi. And Ramnagina Singh, owner of a Patna hotel, wants to set up another establishment here. ‘‘The hotel and transport sectors in Patna are almost dead, that’s why I want to set up shop here,’’ he says.

Simultaneously, the number of registered private hospitals and clinics has gone up from 376 in 2001 to 407 in 2003. There are plans to set up a top-end hospital too. ‘‘Ranchi has always been regarded as a health resort because of its salubrious climate and greenery. A five-star hospital will make it complete,’’ says Randhir Kapoor, a physician.

But to a large section of the city’s populace, all this is window-dressing. ‘‘It was never so bad even during Laloo Raj,’’ says Anuj Chatterjee, an octogenarian born and brought up in the city. ‘‘The civic facilities are abysmal. Filth and garbage lie about everywhere.’’

Indications, some would say, of a city aiming high, but having a tough time with stragglers. ‘‘We have a 20-year plan. Implementation will take time. After all, heaven can’t be built in a couple of years,’’ says State Minister for Urban Development Baccha Singh.

Even the new capital project — the foundation stone was laid by DPM L K Advani on November 15 last year — is hanging fire, with CM Arjun Munda reluctant to okay it. ‘‘Our priority is to build villages,’’ defends building construction minister Raghuwar Das.

If the Greater Ranchi Development Agency was set up with a seed capital of Rs 10 crore and remains non-functional to this day, life is no better inside Chadri, a slum of 50-60 Dalit families. Each hut has an electricity connection, but untreated sewage flows in front of the houses. None of them have any land, though each of their ancestors owned 3-4 acres, which they cultivated for a living, according to a RRDA report.

The decline of Ranchi’s tribal population coincided with the rapid industrialisation in the post-Independence s years. Even as the urban populace jumped from 76,994 in 1941 to nearly 12 lakh in 1991, the percentage of the tribal population fell from 26.1in 1941 to 15.12 in 1991. The reason, says sociologist Zaffar Alam, was because the unskilled and illiterate tribal could not compete with the influx of outsiders who came to man the offices and industries.

The other factor was the mass displacement triggered by the hunger for land. Government notifications made the land available to the industries, but the tribal owners were rarely compensated. Consider HEC. A recent survey by the Jharkhand Tribal Research Institute revealed that 6,600 of the 8,500 tribal and Harijan families from whom the government had acquired 3,89,261 acres at Dhurva village for HEC in 1960 are yet to be compensated.

Of course, industrialisation and urbanisation required land. But even as Ranchi tries to make the grade today as a capital, the original inhabitants of the land find themselves being marginalised all over again.