When switching on the light elsewhere, I had gotten used to the fact that it will stay on. Not so in Noida, although it could be considered a large industrial town. The electricity had even gone off for 2 hours in the middle of a hot and humid night. Delhi is supposed to be moving into autumn, but the heat and dust of India are certainly holding that off.
During my first day of work, we took a small CNG-powered "tuk-tuk". The government had moved into CNG for its public transport in a big way, but it was certainly ironic that the dust that covers the whole of Delhi and Noida did not improve the air quality one bit. Public transport here mainly took the form of overcrowded buses, CNG-powered auto-rickshaws, as well as trishaws. The trishaw riders were lean and wiry, with a number of them having ankles thinner than mine. It is a hard life when you have to ferry 2 to 3 customers at one time using a trishaw with no gears. Their wheels are threadbare, the paint is often flaking off and the trishaw rider's own clothes would sometimes be patched.
The streetlife betrayed the fact that Noida was still much in the third world. Countless beggars slept in their clothes along the streets, while entire families had stretched tents across tree branches. These tents often formed the shopfront where small businesses of selling tobacco, necessities (in satches) and sweets are found. Sometimes, entrepreneurial young Indian men would hawk their wares along stretches of the road, and I saw a stretch of inflatable floats (the type you put into swimming pools) today.
My Indian colleague tells me that the beggars are happy in the street of Noida. A newspaper did a survey of children begging in the street and found out that they could earn more than a worker in a call centre if they just begged 2-3 hours each day before and after school. This was hard for me to reconcile as just last week, I was in the small town of Dankaur, and the villages of Navrangpur and Derin. Although the people there are much poorer, I could see that each of them had a job and had a home to return to. Not so the beggars in the streets of Noida.
Having interviewed the villagers, it was apparent that their life was difficult - they wake up at 4 or 5am in the morning, milk the buffaloes and then work in the fields till the evening meal. Perhaps this is a reason why the beggars would rather beg in the town, then living a laborious life in the village. Furthermore, although all the villagers are sending their children to school because of the incentives provided, they often do not do anything about the education. Once a girl becomes of a marriagiable age, she stops school at about 8th or 9th grade. Sending a girl for further education is frowned upon and there is much social pressures from the other families in the village. Education has not done much to lift the villagers out of poverty, in comparison to industrial development and technology transfer.
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