Sathupalli
Last Thursday was Dasara holiday, and an Indian friend of a friend kindly took us to his home village to watch the celebrations. The village is 300km from Hyderabad and the closest big town is Sathupalli.
Knowing that Andhra Pradesh is a backward agricultural state where people can't read, roads are bad, electricity is cut off regularly in those places lucky to have it and malaria kills people, we didn't know whether to expect modern farming or something out of stone age. They turned out modern.
The place where we slept had electricity, A/C (air coniditioning), running water and even water toilet. All roads there were paved with various materials.
The house had been recently renovated to the taste of two brothers who had been in offshore assignments to first world though, but still it demonstrates that the peak of civilization is just as high in the countryside as in Hyderabad.
In Finland, farmhouses are surrounded by farms and farms are very distant from each others. Near Sathupalli there is a village every 5km and people live in those villages. This village has about 6000 people. Almost all people who live here are farmers.
One consequence of close living is that, just like in Singapore, it is possible to watch people and enforce more conservative attitudes. That's more difficult in sparse population. For example, the brothers didn't smoke or drink in front of their parents. But it was difficult to distinguish famously conservative Indian attitudes, not knowing the language and being "white niggers" in a village which had not seen foreigners before.
Next, I'll show pictures about farm crops and animals. Then, I'll write about land ownership, labor and such things.
Crops
Rice is the main crop. In Sathupally they get one crop of rice a year. In the summer it is to hot to cultivate rice, they don't have enough irrigation water. (In a river delta in the same Khamman district there is enough water to get 2 crops.)
The roots are immersed in water. In Finland, farmers fear big rains in the autumn, becuse it turns fields muddy and prevent tractors from entering. The rice fields are usually drained and harvested by machine, but if it rains too much they have to be harvested by hand.
More rice paddies
Sugar cane.
Palm oil.
Mango garden.
Corn.
Wells
In the mango / palm oil garden, water comes from borewell, powered by passing power line.
Earlier, much bigger wells were used. The rotting biomass indicates that the well is not used anymore for anything.
During the rainy season, the area gets heavy rainfall. This well collapsed due to rain, taking part of the street with it. I don't know if borewells can collapse, but at least they won't suck surroundings with them.
Animals
Every house has some water buffalos for milk. In the morning they are taken to fields to graze. In the dusk, it's slow to drive by car when packs of water buffalos are herded back to villages.
Also lambs are common, and are herded to graze in the same way. I don't have a picture.
The two main meats in Hyderabad are mutton and chicken. The family owns a big chicken farm. The chickens eat corn feed.
In Sathupalli, they own a corn feed factory. It produces 15 tons of corn feed a day.
They grind the corn and mix it with other ingredients.
Land ownership and labor
Bandi and his family cultivate the land themselves. This means that they hire servants and supervise their work. Altogether around 50 servants work in their farms, gardens and factories. Land ownership is also power over people.
The price of farmland is really high, 6000e / acre (acre = 0.4 hectare). This is higher than in Finland. According to this article, in the most expensive district Finnish farmland only costs 3200e / acre.
Farmers don't pay taxes, and government supplies free electricity for them.
The expected lifetime is 10 years longer in the countryside than in the big cities, so I guess that even the landless have it reasonably good in the countryside, by Indian standards.
"Population is ruining India"
In Finland a few hundred years ago government wanted to expand population and granted long-term tax amnesty for everyone who moved to the north and made a new farm in the middle of forest. Indian land prices being what they are, why don't they do the same?
When I asked the question from Bandi brothers, I was told that they used to make new farms earlier but then Indian goverment got tough on deforestation. Also, Bandi said that while India has huge landmass, it has way less arable soil. The fact that they use the word deforestation to describe new farms tells something.
In India, it is common for middle-class people to have servants, and there are lots of service employees everywhere who seem to do little. Manoj commented about these people that "they have to go somewhere" as one justification for the servant tradition.
So it seems that even the locals think that India simply has too much population. One of the brothers commented that population is ruining India.
Small steps towards a much better future
Road connections must have been really bad 30 years ago. The roads of Sathupalli had not been paved when Bandi was young. You saw what monsoon rains did for the well. Imagine the same for roads. And without electricity, A/C isn't possible.
Bandi told that when he was young, they still used tow animals instead of tractors. We saw a long road where trees were planted on both sides to cast shadows: The government had planted this shadow corridor to make it possible to transport rice plants with bulls and wheelcharts despite scorching sun.
One sign of past underdevelopment was the fact that the family lived so closely, parents, uncles, sons and cousins in the same village. The parents had not gone to foreign countries, and had not seen foreigners before us. There must have been really big obstacles to moving and looking for marriage further away when they chose to stay in such close proximity. In the current generation, all 3 siblings (2 brothers + sister) have moved to Hyderabad, and both brothers have been in foreign assignments.
In the village we met a local politician, and I got the impression that they have every intention to keep kicking the progress until it moves its fat ass further, and they have relatively good goverment (by Indian standards) to work with.
Common background
Our host and guide, Bandi, was one of two brothers. Both brothers had gone from farming background to IT industry. They had been good at math from young age and had first gone from village school to Sathupally school and gradually to bigger technical insitutions. None of their cousins went to IT.
2/3 out of the Finnish participants had similar background. I'm a programmer by occupation. My brother graduated in chemistry, specialicing in datateknik, applying computing to chemistry. His Master's thesis was about mathematically modelling some process in a copper factory.
Juha-Matti had gone to databases from young age while his brother had done demo coding.
It was amazing how similar our background could be, but there was also a big difference: Bandi brothers were factory owners and local elite, they managed things and had power over people. We were middle class people, who don't have underlings but have reasonable independence: Our parents had independence working in their own farm (part-time), we have notable independence in professional roles.
I'm not sure whether the servant families had chances to similar social rise. Maybe they had, maybe not. I just know that in Finland everyone has the same opportunities, if genetic and environmental lottery gives enough mental ability, stability and work ethic.
Dasara celebrations
I asked Bandi what the celebrations were all about. He gave a bit messy description about big god Rama and some tree where he hid weapons before going to forest, and then admitted to not being a religious person.
In the village, we saw a religios procession. The people were playing some tune which bordered on noise, I'm not sure if it was improvised or just composed before modern multitonal music could set high standards. They paraded the god around the village and then took him to the temple for some ritual. We didn't follow.
Next to temple, within the same wall there was a volleyball field, and Bandi brothers and their cousins and friends had a tight volleyball match during the procession and rituals. The game and the procession had equal number of participants.
In general, visiting all the relatives in different places was the core of Dasara celebration. Religious rituals were secondary, just like in Finnish Christmas when people don't go to church.
