Haves and have-nots: the great divide

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Noida: Nithari is just one of the hundreds of urban villages in Delhi and its suburbs. Often they exist within upmarket areas. The relationship between the multi storeyed buildings and the small huts has been one of interdependence. But post Nithari, that equation is changing.

Sector 22 - home to Noida's upper middle class. Across the road is a huge multinational software company and less than 20 metres away is Chaura Raghunathpur village - home to those who don't matter in this developing suburb's social structure.

Here people like 20-year-old Bachan Singh, who came from Bihar five years ago to try and earn Rs 200 a day by driving around his rich neighbours.

In the middle of this affluent neighbourhood Bachan and his 70 odd friends live in their island of poverty - a life that doesn't even count.

"What to do. Such is life. We are poor people and we don't really matter," says he.

For a one-room kuchcha house, these people pay about Rs 500, plus another hundred for stolen electricity that the owner of the plot charges.

The relationship between the big houses and the small huts is one of interdependence since the people from these villages get work in the big houses.

But it's also a relationship of mutual and undisguised distrust.

Says a villager, "These are the people who live in big houses. We depend upon them for money. Can any one ever imagine that rich people would do this to poor people? Look at what happened in Nithari. Here we go to work in their house and this is what they do to us. Every one is terrified now."

A Sector 22 resident has an opposite point of view. He says of the villagers: "They are all bad people, thieves; they make this place a mess. It's unsafe because of them."

The story of urban villages rubbing shoulders with huge multi storeyed buildings is not new.

Across Delhi and the National Capital Region, there are 300 villages like this. It's an uneasy equation that has now become even shakier after the Nithari scandal that has brought the rich and the poor living in such close proximity - under the scanner.

Says Urban Affairs Consultant, Sudhir Vohra, "We like them in our periphery but yet we pretend they don't exist. We need them yet we will not do anything for them."

It's an uneasy calm that is slowly reaching boiling point. A relationship so long ignored that it is now staring every one in their faces. Nithari has thrown up too many questions that no one wanted to ask.

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