Actually what is developmental backwardness and how does it come into being?

This is a question that has been round and round in my brain (which is a very small one and therefore the question must have a very high speed RPM) and causing me great inconvenience.  With this question whirring around inside my head, not only aiming feeling dizzy but also unable to behave like a normal human being (whoever that maybe).  I do not like to get too anecdotal and bring my family into it but of late, thanks to the nature of my employment and the nature of the institution that I work for, classes are things that are no longer in  not only the real realm but also in the imaginary realm, and that means I am home everyday for lunch and that has become a reason for my discussions with my octogenarian father.  Please indulge me a bit here, when I say something very personal.  My father has always been my hero and has been the one friend who has been constant through out my life.  Most of the things that I learnt early in life were due to him and when we were in the districts of Telangana and where there were no sports facilities, he was my coach for cricket and badminton apart from being a sparring partner in those games.  He even played along with my friends.  It is therefore not very illogical that I have grown confidently about his wisdom and his advice in most things in life.  These days during and after lunch we spend a great deal of time talking about the past.  The past not only includes mine but his (my dad's that is) and that of his hero - his father (my paternal grandfather).  A few days ago, another octogenarian who happens to be my father's childhood friend joined us in these discussions.  Talking to them was fascinating.  They both hail from Hanumakonda (I consider myself a Hyderabadi and Hyderabadi alone and I have said that the only place where I want to live and die is Hyderabad my one and only home) and lapsed into how my grandfather was a great teacher who could teach chemistry in Urdu without taking recourse to even a single term in any other language (this was pointed out by my father's friend).  They were talking of how in those days teaching happened wonderfully in Urdu thanks to the efforts of the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan and to a lesser extent but significantly the efforts of his father Mahbub Ali Khan Pasha.  They heaped praise on the Nizam for taking up developmental activity and making his Hyderabad State and the City of Hyderabad pretty developed.  My father in fact pointed out that except for Hyderabad till the 1970s, the only other developed cities in India were the once that were developed by the British.  Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras fell into that category and Bangalore was then only a retirement paradise for the British.  He also said that Mysore was also developed but not to the scale of Hyderabad.  This maybe apocryphal but I continue to narrate it for a reason.

You must be wondering by now as to why I am talking about my father and his friend and the Nizam of Hyderabad in a post whose heading is "what is developmental backwardness"?  I promise you dear reader that there is a connection.  Those of you who are regular readers of my blog know by now that my father is a bit of a fan of the Nizam (Osman Ali Khan) and credits to him the development of Hyderabad City and State.  This time around in this conversation with him and his friend a stunning argument came out with reference to the notion of development.  While the two friends were extolling development in the Hyderabad State (Telangana was one part of it), I butted in and asked them as to why people consider Telangana to be a backward region. My father's friend was a retired teacher of economics and he pointed out that economic growth and development are not always co-terminus.  Despite having lesser revenues the culture of Telangana according to him (and my dad) was far superior to the Andhra counter parts.  Telangana farmers, my father contends (he is an agriculture graduate and worked in the Dept of Agriculture, so hopefully he knows what he is saying) are very adept at dry land cultivation and knew how to exploit the land to maximise its productivity.  He says the difference between the Telangana farmers and their counterparts in the Coastal Andhra region was that the latter had access to alluvial soil and also had access to greater amounts of water and that led them to grow crops like rice and also due to the abundance of black soil, cash crops such as tobacco and cotton were grown and the farmers there became rich.  Here he said that that does not make the coastal farmer superior.  My father who knows my love for automobiles gave me an analogy.  He said the Telangana farmer was like the person who built his own car and drove it.  It may look crude, but it is the result of a know how and if it needs fixing, that could be done in a cinch by its builder-driver.  The Andhra farmer according to him was like the chap who goes to a showroom and picks up a car and just drives it and if it breaks down he has to rely on a mechanic to fix it.  I thought that this was a poor analogy and told my father so.  He contends that it is not and that development should be measured in terms of the complexity involved in producing something.  He also said Telangana appears backward from a capitalist point of view since the farmers here were more into subsistence agriculture than commercial agriculture.

I can see the point he is making.  Our mindset is so skewed in the direction of bounties and riches and the acquisition of things that those facilitate, we easily overlook the fact that the philosophy of the region was very different.  People were living peacefully in the resources that were available to them without entertaining notions of grandeur.  This is of course not deny the terribly negative role that feudalism played here and the oppression that it unleashed on the farmers and the miseries it created.  If all things are considered equal then the Telangana farmer showed greater gumption and ability to deal with adversity than the coastal farmer.  Well the argument is an argument and therefore I suppose it could be contentious, but the question is how did Telangana get the badge of a backward region?  This has everything to do with the nature of politicians once India became independent.  My father worked in blocks as he was sent on deputation to the Panchayat Raj department and he says by the early 1960s already structures of corruption had come into being in a big way.  According to him the Samithi President, the Village Sarpanch were all in cohorts to distribute the money given for developmental purposes, among themselves.  Very little went into projects properly and given the fact that this was a region that was not having abundant water, a comeback from setbacks was that much more difficult.  Hence for my father and his friend, Telangana despite having farmers of superior skills and understanding slowly regressed into the backward mode thanks to local level and state level politicians.  Both of them once proponents of a separate Telangana state are now a little sceptical of how things can change even if a separate state is created, because politicians have gone from bad to worse.

This is a story that I have told not to prove my point that Andhra Pradesh should remain as it is.  My father and his friend still do not agree with me.  The only point I am making is that how in the name of democracy people of the country have been dis-empowered and how we are going backwards.  This for me is a story that says that politics should change and for that politicians should change.  Now comes the crore rupee question "how is that going to happen"? especially when more lumpenism is entering politics.  How indeed? I have no answer, but perhaps if we all put heads together we just may find an answer.  So can we think collectively on this?  Let me know.

P.S:  This is NOT a post about the present Telangana movement.  I have invoked the region because we have only ever lived here and because I was drawing mainly on my father's extensive experience about politicians and politics at the grass roots level in this region.  There could be similar stories about many other regions, but I do not want to make generalizations.

P.P.S. Not proof read.  Sorry about that.