Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee may not have imagined that his pet project Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna (PMGSY) to connect villages would end up hastening urbanisation of the rural areas, with multi-storey apartments coming up on fertile multi-cropped agricultural land much to the concerns of the food security, as has happened in the Pipli block in the Puri district in Orissa.
In few years time, the road connecting Gudiyapokhari Chhak to Laxminarayanpur has quite evidently changed a secluded cluster of villages to an area dotted with multi-storey apartments, including a large number of people living there in the midst of paddy fields all around. This was after the 5.5 km long PMGSY road was sanctioned in 2007 and completed in 2011, following which all the known names of the realty sector have come here to raise apartments, after getting connectivity to the Bhubaneswar-Puri highway, said Mr Anadi Charan Sahoo, exceutive engineer of the state rural development department.
Local sarpanch Sujata Nayak, who proudly states that she has done double masters in Sociology and Psychology, says that hundreds of people living in the cluster of villages in the Laxminarayanpur gram panchayat are constantly lured by brokers in their attempts to outbid their peer in getting their pieces of land to raise multi-storey apartments. “The price of land has gone up more than 50 times in quick time here. Before the road was built, the villagers used to raise paddy and pulses in the land made fertile by the waters of the Bhargavi river, a tributary of Mahanadi,” adds Ms Nayak.
However, the paddy fields deep into the rural areas are now mostly parcelled into plots the realty development.
The roads can change fortune of the people could further be gauged from the fact that the gram panchayat now boasts of an ash-brick factory thriving on demands from the upcoming apartments and a number of poultry farms, which have strong demands in the vicinity, states Ms Nayak, who adds that the villagers no longer seek jobs under the MNREGA.
“Labourers here get wages in access of `250 a day in the upcoming apartment constructions, while the wage rate under MNREGA is just `146. So, no one comes seeking MNREGA jobs here,” adds Ms Nayak.