Unlocking Opportunities - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 79

ran's shops did change the demand, and the brides-to-be no longer needed to weave them,
the craft that started with the dowries is still thriving.
I found far less progress when I returned to a desperately poor tribal village adjacent to
Kanha national park in the middle of India that I had last seen ten years earlier. Here, in
this rural community, with the nearest city two-and-a-half hours away, the story was one of
change but little progress. A 19-year-old son in the family I knew best had a modern-look-
ing mobile phone, though he only used it for phone calls, and I was told almost everyone
had mobiles in the more prosperous villages nearby. There were telecom towers in every
large village (there had been two in Beejna). Many tribal people, particularly in the 1970s,
had been crudely and insensitively shunted out of their traditional homes inside national
parks. Later, when there was a formal resettlement process, they were cheated and harassed
by forestry and banking officials on the preparation of their land and the handling of com-
pensation. Most of the men had become heavy drinkers of the homemade 'mahua' liquor.
They and the women relied on casual labour for Rs 100 or so a day, working on repairing
roads or in the mushrooming tourist resorts surrounding the national park. But few locals
had the entrepreneurial drive, or the funds, to start small businesses such as roadside res-
taurants and shops. That was being done by people who had moved in from neighbouring
towns. Many of the resorts catered to the brash new rich from the cities of Jabalpur and
Nagpur, 160 and 260 km away, who had little care for the environment or the tribals. The
local village market however had grown enormously in the past ten years, though it was
still selling old-fashioned goods like plastic shoes, ancient-looking torches and religious
posters. In other better-off farming villages, the young had dreams of venturing out to work
in offices and call centres in distant towns, but not here.
The Maruti Revolution
One of the first signs that industry would change came at the beginning of the 1980s, at
the same time that Indira Gandhi instigated the cement control reform mentioned in the
previous chapter. This was when she initiated Maruti Udyog, 4 which became a successful
joint venture with Suzuki of Japan. It will never be as famous as the Model 'T' Ford, or the
Volkswagen Beetle, but the little Maruti Suzuki 800cc car that was first sold in 1983 is the
most significant vehicle ever produced in India. The Ambassador car remains India's most
famous saloon, but it is now a symbol of the manufacturing industry's limitations, where-
as the Maruti has been the catalyst for India's modern and internationally competitive auto
industry.
V. Krishnamurthy, a former top bureaucrat who became the founder-chairman, was told
by Gandhi to revive the bankrupt Maruti car venture that had been started by her late son