I took a day out of my India trip, on December 8th, to hike through the Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary near my home town of Bhopal. It was good to get out of the noise, dust and smog that blight many Indian cities (although Bhopal is better than most). I was accompanied by a couple of rangers because the trails are unmarked and traveling solo is not recommended in tiger country!
We started out next to a cave complex called Bhimbhetka that contains prehistoric cave paintings and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Along the way, we traveled through rolling parkland occupied by broad-leaved teak trees, forded streams while following the pawprints of tigers, glimpsed blackbuck, gaur (Indian bison) and langur monkeys, and encountered no other humans. But the highlight of the trek was undoubtedly the hour I spent in a remote village on the outskirts of the sanctuary.
The village, Bhutpalasi, is only reachable on a dirt road, is off the power grid, and the inhabitants are Gonds, one of the indigenous tribes in India. Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi are the external face of India, at least to visiting VCs, but villages like Bhutpalasi represent the heartland. I'd been here twenty years ago, when it was a poor isolated backwater inaccessible during the rainy season, and wanted to see how things had changed.
The first thing I noticed was that my BlackBerry actually had reception in this little village off the beaten path! And many of the tenant farmers and landless laborers living there had managed to scrape together the money to buy a cell phone. Who knows how they charged the phones (presumably on their visits to town), but these are people getting by on a dollar or two a day - buying cell phones!
Twenty years ago, the villagers had seemed beaten down, devoid of optimism and sustained by a fatalistic acceptance of their fate. Their only expectation of progress was through the efforts of a largely neglectful government.
Bhutpalasi today, on the other hand, is a village on the move. Metaphorically, because people who had been resigned to the status quo for fifty years can sense the quickening pace of India's economy. And literally, because young people are leaving the village to work in the pharmaceutical and other manufacturing plants springing up near Bhopal.
People from this little village are not migrating to Bangalore to work as Java programmers. But the real economic engine of India's progress is not the talent of the tiny minority earning Silicon Valley salaries living in Bangalore and driving Mercedes sedans - it's the energy of the hundreds of millions of poor Indians that has finally been unlocked by a deregulated and diversified economy.
