Does India Need Smart Villages To Sustain Smart Cities?  

While scholars of political philosophies can write volumes on the contrast between the two, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has many things in common with Father of The Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. This similarity goes beyond the fact that they both hail from Gujarat.  In his speeches, Modi often invokes Gandhi and the PM seems to have found a great source of wisdom in the Gandhian philosophy that India's soul lies in its villages. (Not to mention Modi is a great admirer of khadi too.)

Data, on the other hand, show people are migrating fast towards concrete jungles of cities, leaving the “soul” empty. According to government estimates, “about 25–30 people will migrate every minute to major Indian cities from rural areas in search of better livelihood and better lifestyles”, and “with this momentum, about 843 million people are expected to live in urban areas by 2050”. This will certainly happen and rightly so. After all, we as a nation are promoting urban living for all the benefits that it offers to a citizen. The Centre's Smart Cities Mission is an attempt to achieve this.

Now, what happens to the villages? If all of us shift to urban landscape looking for white collar jobs, what happens to the agricultural economy of the country? You may be able to earn the bread for your family with the money you earn in cities but what happens if there is no one to grow wheat in villages? The answer to this is that we do need smart cities but we would be in dire need of smart villages to support them.

To achieve this, Modi recently announced his government would develop 300 smart villages across India and provide them with a city-like infrastructure, from better access to health care and education to a digital connectivity.

"Facilities available in cities must be made available to villages … The idea is that the soul of a village is retained while amenities of cities are provided," the media quoted the PM as saying.

How could this turn out to be a game-changer not only for Modi and his government but also for the entire nation?

We have to be mindful of the fact that the basic necessities of all human being irrespective of where they live remain the same. People moving to cities would certainly need food that is grown in villages. By making available new-age technology, the government will enable village farmers produce better. But making available better health care and education facilities, it would make sure large-scale migration to cities does not end up emptying the country's villages. Most farmers would not like to leave their land and move to cities if their children have better educational institutes in the vicinity. Most of them would stick with their land even more if they found good hospitals close by. On the other hand, if villages are developed as growth centres of a city, there would be a lot of incentive to remain there. Developing smart villages will be actually a tool to balance the skewed urban-rural population ratio of the country.  

However, much would depend on how efficiently Modi and his government implement this. If they succeed in doing so, 300 is not the number at which they should stop.