A Small Town Near Gurgaon Wrestles With Change

Courtesy of Asgar Qadri A residential apartment tower belonging to the Bestech Group in Dharuhera, Haryana, on July 9.

Dharuhera, a small town in the Indian state of Haryana, spreads along National Highway-8, which connects New Delhi with Mumbai. About 40 kilometers south of Gurgaon, Dharuhera is a cluster of half-built and freshly built concrete buildings. Thousands of men and women from neighboring villages descend everyday into its new and growing market.

Twenty years ago, Dharuhera was a quiet village of famers, who mostly worked on the lands of the local feudal lords, the Rao clan. The Raos owned most of the land and controlled the lives of people.

“We fought the Raos like our fathers had fought against the British,” Suresh Chand, a farmer in his 70s, told me.  In his youth, Mr. Chand worked as a laborer on the Rao lands. “It was pure bondage,” Mr. Chand said. “There was no morning or evening for us. We worked on their lands all the time and got almost nothing in return.”

The Raos had collaborated with the British and were given thousands of acres of land by the colonial authorities. The fortune is now divided among the various Rao scions. They continue to be the most powerful and the richest family in Dharuhera.  The Raos too have made a transition like the town they ruled: they have reinvented themselves as real estate moguls.  Daruhera is dominated by buildings carrying the Rao name: Rao Inderpal Shopping Complex, Rao Matadin Shopping Complex, and Dilip Rao Market. Each complex houses 100 to 150 shops.

Dharuhera is now an emblem of the change India’s economic liberalization has brought to the countryside and its socioeconomic life.  In the past seven years, the local market has swelled from about 2oo shops to over 2,000 shops, signaling a complete shift from agriculture to business in the local economy.

A new enclave, Bestech City, named after its developer, the Bestech Group, has come up on the elastic edge of Daruhera. Its four residential apartment towers include several hundred apartments â€" each two-bedroom apartment priced between 3,500,000 rupees ($58,528) to   4,000,000 rupees ($66,889). Bestech City includes a shopping mall, which is not yet functional. A little ahead of Bestech City, two new residential sectors of around 400 modern houses are coming up.

Dharuhera’s population has increased from about 18,000 in 2001 to around 45,000 in 2013. But the small town still lacks a decent hospital. It doesn’t even have a college. It lacks a sewer or drainage system. Heaps of garbage and discarded liquor bottles grow along its potholed and water logged roads. Although dynamism and dysfunction live together in Dharuhera, the social and economic changes it has witnessed are epic.

The feudal world of Dharuhera began to crumble in the early 1980s after the Haryana government acquired a large swath of agricultural land and designated it as an industrial estate. Companies with large operations, like a paper producer, Sehgal Paper Mills, and a synthetics group, East India Synthetics, came and began employing thousands of locals as workers in their factories. A few years later, in 1985, Hero Honda, India’s largest scooter and motorcycle manufacturer, set up its manufacturing plant in Dharuhera. Thousands of jobs were created. Indian Oil, the state-owned petroleum company, set up a plant.

A job in a factory brought freedom from centuries of feudal servitude and bonded labor.  The great transformation of the feudal town also tore through the hierarchies of the oppressive caste system. Tej Kumar, a Dalit now in his 50s, was one of the workers to get a job at the Hero Honda factory in 1990.

“We were forced to wear a piece of shroud,” Mr. Kumar recalled. “Our huts were made to face south to ward off the dirty winds.”

He earned 2,000 rupees ($33) per month in his factory job â€" a princely sum for him at the time.  A few years later, he was promoted as an electrician.  After two decades at the factory, Mr. Kumar, who now makes 22,000 rupees ($367) a month, bought a modern double story house in one of the newly built housing complexes in Dharuhera.  Mr. Kumar’s was the first Dalit family to move into the new residential complex. “I am hoping to buy a car now,” he said.

Scott Eells/Redux Pictures A worker at the Hero Honda motorcycle production facility in Gurgaon, Haryana, on Aug. 3, 2006.

Over the last decade, however, the enthusiasm that the workers of Dharuhera had about factory jobs has been tempered. Hero Honda, like other manufacturers, has reduced permanent workers and turned to employ more contract workers, who are paid much less.

“The plant now has 1850 permanent workers, who make around 20,000 rupees ($334) a month,” said Dal Chandra Lodi, who has worked at the automobile factory for 20 years and served on its labor union. “There are around 6,000 contract workers. There is an enormous difference between what the permanent workers get paid and what the contract workers make.”

After 50 contract workers were laid off, the resentments came to the fore. Workers went on strike and the factory was closed for two days. At the time of the strike, the contract workers had told the press that they were paid a basic salary of  3,500 rupees ($58) as against the mandatory Haryana government wage of 4,200 rupees ($70) per month.

The second major transformation of Dharuhera came in the past eight years, as Gurgaon swelled into a huge city of shopping malls, gleaming corporate towers, and residential complexes. Real estate developers began their search for lands that could be developed as suburbs to the megacity, with new homes for professionals who can’t afford Gurgaon.

The developers drove 40 minutes on the highway leading past Gurgaon to Mumbai and pressed their brakes in Daruhera. In 2003-04, the urban planning agency of the state, Haryana Urban Development Authority ( HUDA) built two residential sectors in Daruhera. And land prices had begun to climb.

“I did my land deal in 1999. I sold one square yard of land for 925 rupees ($15),” said Ajit Veer, a Daruhera resident, who became a real estate agent after seeing his village urbanize. “That patch of land sells for 40,000 rupees ($668) per square yard today.”

The village of clay was quick to embrace the new townscape of concrete. Hundreds of villagers sold their land and bought new lives: houses, cars, renting or buying a shop from one of the Rao brothers for a small business. Sensing the new opportunities in the town, many people from outside came to settle in Dharuhera, aiding the growth of local market.

The changing dynamics of the town also bought along intense pressure to cope with a cold new world. Mr. Kumar developed great expectations for his son Nishant Kumar. He enrolled the younger Mr. Kumar at the local franchisee of the elite Delhi Public School. Nishant dropped out of school after failing his high school examination twice.

“Everything they taught me was in English.  I struggled to understand,” the younger Mr. Kumar told me. He had spent 16 years in a Hindi language school. After failing twice, he was expelled from the elite school. He drifted, frequenting cheap bars in nearby Gurgaon, drinking, smoking hash. “If you paid 200 rupees ($3.3) you could dance with a girl, if you pay a little more you could kiss her,” he said.

In 2008, Mr. Kumar collected his life savings, took a loan from a bank, and bought a shop for his son in Dharuhera market and pulled him back from the innards of Gurgaon’s underbelly. The younger Mr. Kumar has been running the garment store for five years now. He got married and had a daughter. He makes around 10,000 rupees ($167) in a good month. “We have ended up with too many shops and very few customers,” he said.

Courtesy of Asgar Qadri A Dalit section of the old village of Dharuhera, Haryana.

Although the Kumars have been able to move out of the confines of the feudal bondage and the persistent caste system, the old heart of Dharuhera continues to be divided into the upper caste Yadav quarter with spacious houses, clean, wide streets, and the derelict lower-caste Dalit quarter.

“They still refer to us as Harijans,” said Makhan Lal, a shopkeeper in the Dalit neighborhood. “At least now we live in houses instead of thatched huts.”

Asgar Qadri graduated from The Josef Korbel School of International Relations at the University of Denver. He works as a researcher and journalist in New Delhi.