Bullock-cart technology

If India itself were a candidate in a world election, its ideal symbol would the ubiquitous bullock-cart. In a school textbook, we had a ...

If India itself were a candidate in a world election, its ideal symbol would the ubiquitous bullock-cart. In a school textbook, we had a lesson which showed an aeroplane in the sky above a cart plodding on a village road, and

moved on to describe the contrast that this country was. Over half a century on, the creaky vehicle must have yielded place to a faster, more mechanised means of transport. But, has it?

The question came to my mind sometime in the late eighties when the President of Germany was our guest and I saw in a magazine some pictures of his visit to the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, described as quot;the largest technical cooperation project by Germany in the worldquot;.

Why hadn8217;t even our IITs, ranking among the best technical institutions in the developing world with all the Western know-how at their back, done something about the indigenous mode of road transport? It was a mere coincidence that, soon after this page of the magazine caught my notice, I stumbled upon a decade-old clipping in one of my dust-laden files. It was a Press report headlined 8220;US offers to modernise bullock-cartquot;, to which was pinned the following handwritten paragraph of an incomplete middle8217;.

8220;So, here is a heartening piece of good news in an otherwise sullen international atmosphere! These Yankies are not, after all, only money-spinning, dictator-boosting villains of piece, lacking in all concern for the lessprivileged. The rep-ort8230;opens up a vast possibility of betterment of their relations with India which may take some time to be appreciated by the otherwise alert observers.

The offer to make a revolutionary improvement in the design of this old and still the biggest mode of transport in rural India may end up with an equally far reaching improvement in Indo-US ties which have till now moved towards betterment, if at all, only at the bullock-cart8217;s pace8230;8221;

I have not been able to ascertain what happened to the American offer if there really was one. But, the question that has been nagging me is: why is it that mysteries of space or the Antarctica engage us more than the progress within our reach and the slums at our doorstep? Why does the world8217;s third largest technical manpower fail to design an improved bullock-cart?

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A couple of decades ago, N.S. Ramaswamy and C.L. Narasimhan of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, had estimated that such carts employed twenty million Indians and proposed a project aimed at its improvement. But, after pursuing the project for years, with the exertions including much travelling in search of expertise and expenditure of lakhs, they ended up with little more than doubts and surmises.

Why is it that we succeed in nuclear research but not in bullock-cart technology? Is it because the objective is too ordinary? Because it won8217;t catch headlines?

The question remained till a friend chanced to refer me to P. Sainath8217;s 8220;Everybody Loves a Good Drought8221; and I read his painfully amusing observations of the total absence of a simple, functioning bullock-cart in Surguja district in Madhya Pradesh. He recalls that a former Prime Minister attacked his opponents for their bullock-cart mentality8217;, and deplores the cart being portrayed to be a useless relic while it saves Rs 4,000 croreyearly in foreign exchange.

But then why does the district with a size three times the average one in MP have almost a silent ban on its use? The causes Sainath found ranged from the bullocks being too weak to pull a loaded cart to the farmer having too little to carry to the market 8212; and the availability of a cheaper means in the form of headload carriers!

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Excessive poverty has thus turned even the bullock-cart into a relatively costly technology. Humans have become the preferred beasts of burden!