Development!!!

Our Society is going for redevelopment. The chawl structures will be demolished and each one of us will have a flat / apartment of our own. The policy makers in the big house and the business men in neatly ironed suits say its ‘free of cost’. I would like to have an opinion of someone who has shifted from a chawl to a so called ‘free of cost’ flat.

All the big cities in our country seem to be drifting away from these types of Community living arrangement. The flats, apartments and high raise towers have stated to define the cities in our county.

If we do not plan it well and exclude the environment; I am afraid the cost we pay for this migration, will be much more that the benefit we get from it. The few trees that are left in the populated areas of the cities are being cut down for the sake of development projects.

Our environmentalists are not very effective either. The irony is, every day we see corporations cutting down a whole mountain into plateau’s for commercializing it and planting very few trees around their office as compensation. We are so blindfolded by greed that we can’t see that we are cutting the branch on which we are sitting.