The end of Gandhi's dream: India's economic boom and bust

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article352380.ece

The end of Gandhi's dream: India's economic boom and bust

Mahatma's vision
Published: 20 March 2006

For sale - one farming village: 1,800 acres of fertile arable land, 280 houses. All serious bids considered. An intriguing offer.

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Malsinghwala is one of a spate of villages across India that have suddenly been put up for sale. Similar reports are coming from across India. A thousand miles south, in the village of Dorli, in Maharashtra, farmers have painted "For sale" signs across the backs of their cows and on the trees. In another village in Maharashtra, a banner reads: "This village is ready to be auctioned. Permit us to commit mass suicides." In the village of Chingapur, the villagers invited the Indian Prime Minister to preside over a "human market" to auction off their kidneys. Something is badly wrong in rural India.

"It is debt," says Gurjit Singh, a huge Sikh farmer who stands in the hot sun, handing loose fibres to two elderly men who are painstakingly spinning them into a rope. "We cannot pay our debts. If someone else can come here and make the land pay, we're prepared to work for them."

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In his struggle for independence from Britain, Mahatma Gandhi envisaged a panchayat raj, or village republic, to replace the colonial and caste system that held sway across India.

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