How does the reaction of the ordinary people in China and India differ when
it comes to displacement?
It is very difficult in China for people to know what exactly is happening to the displaced people because there is no free press and no democracy. It is not easy for the people to hear about the downside of the Chinese economic development miracle! But in the aggregate, it is true that China has developed much faster and most of its people would say that they are better off than they were 10 years ago. And, yet there has been enormous
displacement and change.
In India, you know it is difficult to imagine this happening! In India you have a hard time ploughing over one home to build a highway, no matter how many people would benefit, and that kind of opposition has really slowed down development in India. The people are allowed to keep their homes. It is very strange what people will fight for: Often, it is a shed by the side of the road that someone has erected and they will cling to it. The opposition comes partly because the government has not given them good alternatives. If the government offered to build better housing elsewhere people would
consent to move out.
At some point, if India is going to develop fast and modernise (which I think would be for the greater good of its people) it has got to, politically, get past the knee-jerk opposition to change and development. Otherwise, it will be very difficult for India to build the infrastructure that it needs to create the jobs that would actually help the people. You
see, there is a cost in India's approach too -- a human cost with human pain -- in avoiding economic development plans. And that is that more of India's poor people stay poor. That is, the very people who need better jobs the most are kept from them because of efforts aimed at helping them protect the little that they have.
Photograph: Indian policemen grapple with Bharatiya Janata Party activists during a protest against a demolition drive by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, October 30, 2006. Hundreds of shopkeepers protested at the start of a three-day strike against a decision to close shops in residential areas, eyewitnesses said. Thousands of shops were shut across the capital to mark the protests against a Supreme Court order to close businesses deemed illegal under building laws in the federal city-state of 14 million. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images
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