Ambavade, B R Ambedkar’s native village, has seen very little development. Its residents believe that what they need is a college to bring in education and jobs — and they are offering their own land to make it possible.
Between Mumbai and my destination, it’s not just the landscape which changes — rising, diving, narrowing — the layers of development also visibly peel away. Suddenly I have reached, and at my destination there is no development whatsoever. This is Ambavade.
Sitting in his biscuit shop, frail, polio-affected Shailesh Posture looks, paradoxically, undernourished and happy. It is past noon, and hot, when Posture welcomes me in. There is a glint in his eye that says, “Yes, fundamental wrongs have been committed in this land of the architect of the Constitution. It’s time to redress the past. And the responsibility lies with no one but us.”
With no hospitals, doctors, bus station, public toilet, good roads and other basic infrastructure, Ambavade, the native village of B R Ambedkar, is 200 km from Mumbai but looks like it belongs in pre-Independence India. (Ambedkar was named Bhimrao Ramji Sakpal Ambavadekar; his Brahmin teacher Mahadev Ambedkar later changed his pupil’s surname to Ambedkar).
Some of Ambavade’s villagers have chosen to give their land to the government, free. They want a college to be built on that land. Somehow, they believe, the building of a college will usher in other “modern” facilities. It will, they expect, generate employment during construction and after it opens. Villagers say they will request the authorities to give them jobs in the college commensurate with their level of education.
Posture, 31 years old and a 10th-standard fail, has contributed 18 guntasof land for the Rs 8 crore college project (40 guntas make an acre). “I do not want money for my land,” he says. “I’ve given it in a happy state of mind. It’ll be a matter of pride when the college is built. Our children will not have to go outside the village to get educated.” Posture lives on the Rs 2,000 he earns from his shop every month.
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The land donations in Ambavade contrast with two major land acquisitions in Maharashtra. One is at Sahar village next to the Mumbai airport, the other at Panvel village where the Navi Mumbai airport is planned. In both cases the chief stumbling block is monetary. In Sahar village, there is also discontent over the rehabilitation. By asking for nothing in return for their land, apart from the college, Ambavade’s villagers are turning heads in the corridors of power.
Next door to Posture’s shop is postman Pandurang Janu Farate’s mud-and-thatch home. Farate has offered 20 guntas of his land. He has been working as a postman since he matriculated in 1982. Life is stressful for the 50-year-old. He travels 40 km daily to deliver letters. For years he covered this distance on foot. Recently, he bought a secondhand scooter.
“I have been doing the job for nearly 30 years but do you know I’m still a part-time employee?” Farate asks. “The government only recognises postmen in the taluka and not in villages outside it. Therefore, I only get Rs 7,000 per month, out of which I send Rs 2,000 to my son, who is studying engineering in Mumbai. There is neither provident fund nor pension. Every two years, I get an umbrella. That’s not much use when I retire.”
His daughter quit her studies after failing to clear the 10th standard examination.
I notice a touch of relief in Farate’s face. I probe, and Farate explains, “With the salary I earn, I can afford to provide money for education to only one of my children.”
The thought of building a college first occurred to Ambavade villagers in May this year, when a Marathi paper published a Central Government advertisement stating that the University of Mumbai (UOM) intended to build a model college, under a University Grants Commission (UGC) scheme to build campuses in 374 districts “where the gross enrolment in higher education is lower than the national average”.
Although Ambavade met the criteria, the government refused to build the college here on the grounds that it did not have land to spare. “They have a piece of land here, which is about eight acres, but they said the site is too far from the main road and that it is at an awkward angle,” says Sudarshan Sakpal, great-grandson of Ambedkar and the main co-ordinator between the villagers and UOM. “And then there were also talks that they didn’t want to destroy the temple which falls inside the land since it might outrage people — even though we were ready to destroy it for the college’s sake.”
That is when Sakpal asked the villagers to give land. He says he did not have to repeat himself. Farmers lined up to offer land.
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Ownership of some portions of the contributed land is ambiguous since the original owners have died. Fearing government rejection, Sakpal, with others of the family, offered 13 acres of land in case the first option of 17 acres did not work out.
The decision about which size of plot the government will use will come in a week. The villagers are careful about backup plans. They want the government to run out of excuses to not build the college.
Sakpal takes me to the place that has been the training pitch of his life, where he learnt to have a back-up plan for every plan: Ambedkar’s house.
The 8 km stretch, once tarred, is now a gravel path. There is dense jungle on either side. Sakpal works as the president of the local party Bharip Bahujan Mahasanga Taluka (Mandgaon), 17 km from the Ambedkar house. He says he comes across tigers every other night while returning home along this path. “They haven’t harmed anyone here,” he says. “When the light of my bike falls on them, and if they’re sitting on the road, then they get up to make way.”
This is credible. After all, in the early 1960s when there was no road through the jungle, an American researcher named Eleanor Zelliot would walk this 8 km stretch every day to Ambedkar’s house. She was studying the roots of the movement of the Untouchables led by Ambedkar. “If Zelliot could come,” argues Sakpal, “then why can’t the elected politician come to our village and see what state we are living in?”
After several requests from the Ambedkar family since 1975, in 2005 Ambedkar’s room was expanded into a community hall with a budget of Rs 30 lakh. A small hospital was also built, but is yet to receive a doctor. The dilapidated walls — crevices, faded paint, empty wooden picture frames — testify to the short shrift given to Ambavade’s residents. Inside is a small room with a bust of Ambedkar. It is placed beside his ashes, which are held in a silver jar.
It is said that Ambedkar, as a boy, would stay in this room with his father, subedar Ramji Sakpal, and his siblings Balaram, Anandrao, Tulsa and Manjula, whenever the family had to offer prayers to the goddess Bhavani Devi.
“Anandrao got married in Ambavade,” says Sudam Baburao Sakpal, a grandson of Ambedkar, recounting an old, favoured story. “On the day of the wedding, when everyone was getting ready to go to the ceremony in the nearby village they couldn’t find Bhimrao [Ambedkar]. After an hour of searching, a woman who had been collecting firewood informed the Ambedkar family that she had seen a boy sitting in a temple reading something.” (The same temple that sits on the government-owned land.)
The villagers of today’s Ambavade, one senses, are attached to this striking image: of a youngster who had his nose irretrievably buried in a book even as all his relatives were looking for him high and low.
