Naurangpur is a village in Gurugram district. Loosely, we tend to equate Gurugram with Gurugram district. The two are not the same. Administratively, Gurugram district is divided into nine revenue tehsils (sub-districts). One of these is Manesar, and Naurangpur village is in Manesar tehsil.
In recent times, Naurangpur and adjoining villages have been in the news for issues connected with land acquisition. The village has a population of 2,500 (2011 Census), with 400 houses. It is 16 km from the sub-district headquarters in Manesar and district headquarters in Gurugram. It is therefore at the periphery of rapidly expanding development in Gurugram and Manesar, along NH 48, which explains controversies over process and cost of land acquisition. Who is supposed to take care of development in Naurangpur village? Clearly, the gram panchayat. There are development funds that flow to gram panchayats, meant for drinking water, sanitation, irrigation, health and education infrastructure, and construction of roads and bridges. It is possible such public expenditure was constrained by (1) Covid and its impact; (2) Delays in panchayat elections (held in Haryana in November 2022), mandatorily required for release of funds; and (3) Capacity problems in panchayats. But, with additional funds that enter through the Union Finance Commission, resources should not be a constraint.
Meanwhile, since 2017, the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) has been responsible for development works in the municipal areas of Gurugram, Sohna, Pataudi, Farukhnagar and Haileymandi. In principle, the Haryana government can also declare that part of the geographical area of a panchayat should come under the purview of GMDA. I am not certain, but I do not think this has been done for Naurangpur village. In other words, public expenditure in the village is the responsibility of the gram panchayat, not GMDA.
That being the case, recently, residents of Naurangpur village featured in the news for a peculiar reason. A private contractor and a GMDA team were constructing a road in Sector 78-79 of Gurugram, hardly 2 km from Naurangpur village. Thirty residents from the village turned up, wielding guns and sticks. They seized construction material and machines and, abducting the construction team, forced them to build a 50-metre road on the stretch from Naurangpur to Tauru. The police complaint mentions Hoshiar Singh, a resident of Naurangpur village and a former chairman of Gurugram Block Samiti, as the leader. In a separate incident, this is the gentleman who beat up a toll attendant and vandalised the booth when the attendant dared to ask Singh to pay a toll fee since there was insufficient balance on the FASTag. Allegedly, Hoshiar Singh owns a petrol pump on the Naurangpur-Tauru road, and the 50-metre stretch of road, which was built or rebuilt, was right in front of his pump. One can absolve Naurangpur gram panchayat of the responsibility, because though residents were from the village and individually and collectively responsible for taking the law into their own hands, the Naurangpur-Tauru road is not part of the gram panchayat’s responsibility. It’s a district road. Beyond the inevitable smile such an incident brings to our faces, there are development issues. Anyone who travels or tracks road development in India will vouch for enormous improvement. There are roads and roads.
Antecedents of the classification, which continues, go back to Indian Roads Congress (1937) and Nagpur Plan (1943). Thus, there are expressways, national highways, state highways, major district roads (such as Naurangpur-Tauru) and village roads. Accordingly, construction and maintenance have been divided into silos. Striking developments are for expressways and national highways, including state highways converted into national highways. Middling developments are for village roads, facilitated through the Union government’s Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). State highways tend to be just above middling. District roads are the worst, though they are links between highways and the rest. Perhaps silos are inevitable when deciding levels at which decisions must be taken—Union government, state governments, municipal bodies, panchayats. But in the process, there is no holistic view of how road development should occur within an entire district. At one point, there used to be talk about district-level development plans, but that concept has fallen into disuse. Similarly, a silo has been drawn between constructing roads and maintaining them. In the emphasis on building roads, maintenance and repair are often ignored. Tenders are floated for construction, with maintenance left in a limbo.
The Naurangpur-Tauru road isn’t a new road. Indeed, there used to be a Mughal-era road that passed through the same area. I have read about a famous sarai in the vicinity. Thus, the issue was about repairing the road, not building a new road. When repairs were undertaken by PWD, a 50-metre stretch was left out, or not repaired properly. I don’t know why. A few years ago, near the famous Neemrana fort, I saw a stretch of beautifully metalled rural road, built under PMGSY, followed by a dirt track. When I asked why, I was told the money had run out. A much more likely reason is the fact that this 50-metre stretch is near a petrol pump, presumably frequented by trucks with heavy loads. When construction and repairs are undertaken, through contracts given to the lowest bidder, material used tends to be inferior, not amenable to bearing heavy loads. (With no aspersions in the present case, the system of inspection and approval by PWD engineers is also riddled with corruption.)
Apart from criminal acts by a former public servant and some villagers, there is also the silo of rural versus urban. Across the Naurangpur-Tauru road is the urban expansion and agglomeration of Gurugram, with high-rise buildings (now vacant and incomplete because of other reasons), and on the other side is rural land, with acquisition and conversion of agricultural land issues. This silo is also one that needs to be broken down. Agriculture, as conventionally practiced, is no longer viable, and the label of agricultural land is largely fiction, at least in areas like these. This, too, should be part of a district mapping cum planning exercise. In its absence, arbitrariness becomes the norm, and a private contractor, engaged to build a road elsewhere, is abducted.
Bibek Debroy
Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the PM