Scam Andhra - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 251

Karnataka (mining and land), Tamil Nadu (national telecoms), Jharkhand (mining), Orissa
(mining), Uttar Pradesh (land and infrastructure), and Delhi (Commonwealth Games).
Andhra Pradesh, however, is worth special study because, as a microcosm, it shows how
a city and a region have been corrupted by a newly rich community impatient to boost its
wealth and power. People who have known Hyderabad for decades talk about how old tra-
ditions and attitudes have been swept aside in the rush for instant riches. 'I find today's new
Hyderabad vulgar, obsessed with money and without any social conscience,' says Anvar
Alikhan, a senior advertising/business executive, who lives there. 5 'The amount of money
sloshing around is astonishing. At a business meeting where we were discussing socio-
economic segments, a client told me, quite straight-facedly, “Upper Income Group means
someone with a net asset value of Rs 100 crore. Anything less than that is just middle
class.” A banker said that his wealth management department in the city was being shut
down because of a lack of business opportunities. “Sure, there's lots of money, it's just that
none of it is available for investment in things like shares, bonds and mutual funds, because
it's all in cash”.'
Irrigation in the 1800s
The story begins long before India's independence, with a British irrigation engineer, Sir
Arthur Thomas Cotton, who wrote himself into the region's history in 1844 so memorably
that there is a Cottonreddypalem village, plus many statues, and a Cotton Museum that was
opened as recently as 1988 by the then Andhra chief minister, N.T. Rama Rao. Cotton's
contribution was to produce a report in 1844 that led to giant barrages being built across
the state's massive Godavari and Krishna rivers, plus other irrigation works. Together these
projects turned the coastal delta region into the grain bowl of Andhra, which it remains
today.
The main beneficiaries, as Harish Damodaran, a journalist, recounts in a well-researched
book India's New Capitalists , 6 were the local Kamma peasantry, who later became the
leading businessmen in Hyderabad. The Kammas, writes Damodaran, had a 'pronounced
commercial bent' and cashed in not only as farmers but became canny traders, hoarding
stock and watching market prices to decide when to sell, moving on later to run small rice
and oil mills and rural money-lending. 'By the early decades of the twentieth century a
stratum of agriculturalists had emerged who were looking at new avenues for investing
savings accumulated from intensive farming of paddy and high value cash crops such as
Virginia tobacco, turmeric and chilli.'
This created considerable wealth and also bred a generation of contractors who became
accustomed to doing deals with politicians and government officials - a skill that would