Put 'em in a tree museum...

I took this picture outside of my office towards the end of October. My sole interest, at the time, was the white cloth in the foreground. I didn’t know what it was at first, but it seemed like an odd contraption to find hanging from the branch of a roadside tree. At first glance (this picture was taken later), it looked like there was something inside the cloth, weighing it down. In India, I’ve come to expect almost anything to appear almost anywhere, but I wasn’t expecting this: A baby, cradled in the cloth, hanging from the tree.

The next question was obvious: Why is there a baby cradled in a cloth, hanging from the tree?

The story is straightforward. The people you see in the background are construction workers. Construction on this street means heaving platefuls of rock and sand into the concrete mixer (seen just behind the tree), and heaving concrete from the mixer into the roadside ditch. They do this six days a week as part of the city’s road expansion project.

So the cloth, in essence, was serving as tree-supported daycare for a woman at the construction site. By the time I came back with my camera, she had taken the child, was holding him tight, and had tied up the cloth.

I’m posting this now because the picture hints at another, more complex story that’s been unfolding outside my door over the past two months - a puzzle a bit beyond my grasp. That is, what else happens when the city decides to expand a road?

For one thing, the landscape outside my office has changed drastically since late October. When I look at this photo now, I look as much at the workers, the tree, and the house to the left of the gravel pile, as I do at the empty white cloth. The tree was recently chopped down. The house, too, was demolished. There are huge ditches on either side of the road.

The workers, meanwhile, are still out on the street, earning money over long hours, doing by hand what heavy machinery could accomplish in a matter of minutes. From a simple economics perspective, their jobs would probably have become obsolete if labor weren’t so cheap. I also can’t help but wonder about the woman who left the baby in the cloth. What sort of life does she live? What’s it like, that she feels compelled to return to work so soon after giving birth (and bring her baby with her)?

From what I can tell, anyway, the expansion of the road causes the following: The environment suffers, some people get displaced, and some people get employed (to say nothing else of the socioeconomic situations of those employees). But why widen the road in the first place?

Presumably, they are doing it to accommodate an increase in automobile traffic. According to the local paper (this still requires some fact-checking), India’s automobile fleet is predicted to expand nearly 10-fold in by 2030. I wrote in my last entry about the thick and sooty air around here. It’s bad enough right now with the number of vehicles currently out there. Breathing might not be such a pleasant experience with close to ten times as many vehicles on the road.

Besides, why this particular road? From what I can tell, I don’t live on a major road, much less one that needs to be widened. It’s a mile long at most, and it’s on the outskirts of town. To the north, it forms a T-intersection with a major thoroughfare. What’s more, to the south it bottlenecks and becomes a one-lane bridge across a canal.

Unless the city aims to simply increase the volume of vehicles that can be present on the road at any given time, it’s unclear to me how widening a road that funnels into a single-lane bridge is going to accommodate increased traffic, whatsoever. It’s rather like trying to increase the speed at which water pours from a 1 liter bottle by expanding the bottle to accommodate 2 liters, rather than widening the opening at the top.

So who benefits from this? Do the bicycles, motorbikes, and rickshaws that primarily populate the road need that much extra space? Doesn’t anyone mind if more trees get chopped down to make way for more cars? Are the people doing the work getting a fair deal? What does it say about a city’s development priorities when people are evicted to make space for vehicles?

Unfortunately, that last question is not so black and white. I’m told the occupants of the now-demolished house had on that land illegally. If true, that complicates any argument about their eviction (but to complicate the situation further, there’s this: Fronts of buildings all along the road have been lopped off by the city– which, I’m told, is because the city allowed building owners to build out to a certain point along the road, and then recently said, in effect, ‘Oops. We let you go too far. We’ll have that back now’).

But what I do know is this. Most people in this area don’t drive large vehicles. In fact, it’s more common to see a personal vehicle like a motorbike or bicycle overloaded with people. I’ve even seen a family of five riding on a motorbike (granted – the three children were small). It’s hard to tell who exactly benefits, at least in the present moment, from all this construction. On the other hand, could the city be showing some forward thinking, adequately planning for a systemic shift from scooters to passenger cars, as cars inevitably drop in price and income levels of (some) people in this country rise?

Thomas Friedman makes a good case for why that’s not exactly forward thinking.

Back to the picture. In the end, perhaps the cloth in the foreground is still the main story. Perhaps the story is not so complicated after all. I tend to over-analyze things, yet I have to wonder: As all this development work steadily takes place in the background, as trees fall, people are displaced (rightfully or otherwise), and the landscape changes – who is thinking of the little guy in the white cloth, hanging from the tree?