No Developer Is Complete Without His Excavator

 

Since Narendra Modi came to power in India in 2014 a few hundred thousand upper caste Indians not only acquire Audis, Ferraris and Mercedes Benz vehicles to prove that the loans for their real estate businesses translate into private luxury. No developer in India is complete without a picture of himself next to an excavator these days.

Whilst the female heiresses devote their social media time to fake fretting about lack of lavatories in Government schools and enjoy the home life in the Family Residence, the male demonstrates his prowess with machinery that registers a noise level of 80-90 dB at 50 metres distance.

These machines are designed to whack any neighbour sufficiently out of joint to make him sell up to the developer with his excavator next door and move away to the same developer’s Golden Spring of Happiness Valley down the road.

The trouble is there are at least five problem with this form of American dream development that is taking place in Bengaluru: it crushes the people living on Rupees fifteen thousand a month in the vicinity of the development with the noise, dust and vehicle movement, – including the very school children the Heiresses are so concerned about -, secondly it is a form of jobless growth that takes away jobs from slow but steady manual workers, thirdly the sector accounts for more than 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in India and the world, fourthly it caters for people whose lifestyle depends on emitting and not sequestering carbon dioxide, thus exacerbating the pressing problem of global warming, and fifthly it depends on a large increase in vehicle movement during the excavation, demolition, construction and operation and maintenance phase of the new Green Valley Spring Dreamland that also contributes to runaway global warming.

The Karnataka State Level Environment Impact Assessment Authority is of course aware of the fundamental incompatibility between the 64 plus, – often up to more than 100, – conditions subject to which any one of Karnataka’s more than 900 developers are given so-called approvals, and the development model espoused by them. But the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board and the Police are under-staffed, under-educated and under-motivated to arrest violators under sections 15 and 16 of the Environment Protection Act 1986. The educated residents and citizens of Bengaluru are too lazy to take noise polluters to court under section 19 (b) of the Act. They are all too busy dreaming of a green paradise in the future perhaps to bother with using existing legal remedies to curb global warming. And they have all given up on politics.

And yet of course it is impossible to build a Golden Dream Paradise without violating the 55 decibel Leq ambient air standard for noise level for residential areas that is of course a mandatory condition subject to which all these so called approvals for developers are dished out.

The mood of the country seems to be for the State and the upper castes to join together pretty gleefully to crush the living daylights out of any living being and to hell with the law.

This is a pity. The Environment Protection Act 1986 is the only law standing between Indians and our exponentially increasing ill-health of 99% of the people. The animals and biodiversity are already gone. Now they want us too, so that the country can be given over to the Stepford Wives of the Virwani, Kirloksar, Ambani, Jindal, Tata, Birla and Adani and other clans as the planet heats up and wipes us all out.

No gentle non-violent mode of life is available to us all as we pass away from this Earth. What the developers have in store for us till the bitter end is excavator noise, vehicle movement noise, machine noise, air-conditioner, diesel generator set, ready mix pump noise and power station and mining noise.

It is difficult find a quiet place to meditate and escape our feelings whilst all this goes down. Noise reduces helping nature and makes people more aggressive. As the human species is wiped out in the coming decades violence between and within families is programmed by the developers to increase. For every new Lakeside View Development or PelicanIsland View and for every new Logistics Hub at 150 plus Airports across the country, there are many several hundreds of thousands of families broken by low wages, the violence of construction site noise and displacement, unable to afford to live anywhere, unprovided for, destroyed by development.

Police stations in Bengaluru are overrun with women and men members of the 2 million construction worker and their families unable to manage their daily lives and seeking refuge in police cells away from each other and from the noise of their workplace, just for a night. As a car dealer so elegantly put it recently, get used to it, no one gives a shit about you.

Anandi Sharan was born in Switzerland, lives in Bangalore and last year worked in Araria District Bihar, India. She works on trying to find the best money system to help people adapt to climate change especially in India.

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