A local girl in Singur. Picture by Ashok Majumdar

I write this column on a computer in Rampurhat, in the office of an NGO set up a quarter of a century ago. A class in machine embroidery is in progress downstairs while in another classroom, 25 young women are writing a three-hour test in nursing with fierce concentration. They are the faces of rural Bengal, let down repeatedly by the state and left to fend for themselves. The Development Express, flagged off with much fanfare by the powers that be, does not have room for them.

One of the most neglected sectors in the history of independent India has been that of rural youth. Successive regimes have left them out of the drawing board, providing them with pathetically few avenues of employment. This has led to a vast army of unemployed youth, with no career prospects other than joining the cadre of political parties, and then being kept on a semi-diet of occasional handouts and broken promises.

To all this, the youth of urban India have been serenely indifferent. For most of them, rural India is something seen in Ray’s films. Recently, however, there has been some degree of willingness to engage with the realities of rural India and appreciation of the fact that the interests of rural and urban India are closely linked. This was brought home to me when I recently attended an exhibition called Singur: Under Development, at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, put together by a body called the Citizens’ Initiative.

Citizens’ Initiative is a group comprising mostly teachers and students, and was formed after the Singur-Nandigram protests last year. The exhibition featured photographs of the Tata Motors plant and surroundings at Singur. Most of the photographs are of Dobandi village, which lies just outside the perimeter of the plant. While most of its households are located outside the wall, the lands on which they worked as sharecroppers have fallen on the other side. As a result, the incomes of the villagers have dried up, with few of them possessing skills which would earn them a living wage.

The photographs mostly showed older people and children, the former with deep lines of worry etched on their careworn faces, the latter laughing at adversity in the way only children can. You would not guess from their faces that they lived in a place which did not have a single toilet and only one tube-well for drinking water. Missing from the photographs were the young men and women of the village. Their absence disturbed me more than anything else: when young men and women begin to desert a place, that is the surest sign that one has all but given up hope for the future. For the old live in the past and the young, like Zen masters, exist solely in the present.