Two Andhras

Andhra Pradesh has got itself a new measurement of development in the Lambada hamlets of Nalgonda district: the baby-selling one. A recent report, carried in this newspaper, highlights that this horrendous transaction is once again a fact of life in this region. What has just been reported is a bigger scandal than the one that broke out last year about Lambada tribals selling their children to adoption centres in Hyderabad. The even bigger scandal, however, is the manner Hyderabad has chosen to gloss over these developments. Although nothing has changed in the hinterland, Andhra Pradesh continues to proclaim the great advances achieved through its information revolution. It claims to have left the rest of the country far behind in the race to the future, with even Karnataka yet to catch up.

Despite all these developments that have had foreign investors flocking to Telugu Desam country, if parents in villages are once again haggling over the price of their children, what does it mean? That the more things change, the more they remain the same? Or that the more things change, the more other things must change? The Lambada child bazaar has not been the only reminder that Andhra Pradesh cannot live by IT alone. Despite Naidu’s video conferences with district and taluk officials, it took many a farmer’s suicide before the administration acknowledged a major cotton crop failure as an issue at all. All the high-tech at its command has not enabled TDP rulers to tackle the Naxalite problem in long-suffering Telengana, either.

The number of murders and assaults on police stations and public installations, reported so regularly from the affected districts, does not exactly make up a picture of a rapidly modernising state of computerised efficiency. Nor, indeed, do the none-too-infrequent reports of persisting communal tension in the headquarters of AP Inc and of raging caste conflict in the countryside. Clearly, there are forces and factors of a social kind that the famous Naidu formula does not reckon with adequately enough. It is time to face this fact if two Andhras are not to be created in pursuit of Andhra Pradesh’s singular progress. Time, too, to draw wider lessons since this southern state has increasingly come to be accepted as a role model for the rest of India.

It will be cheap rhetoric, indeed, to blame the Lambada plight, the cotton farmer’s problems, and the travails of Telangana on the IT initiatives of Naidu. There is also no denying the impetus for social change that the information revolution can impart the state. But there is a point at which the attention of an IT-savvy administration is in danger of being diverted from people who don’t figure on the Net and their problems, particularly the kind that involves the selling of children. This can lead to the greater danger of the information revolution itself acquiring an anti-people image. It is not merely in order to enforce the law that the Lambada children must be saved, but to ensure that an important developmental exercise is not discredited.