Click to play videoNew Delhi: The countdown to the Delhi polls has begun. As residents of the Capital prepare to vote this Saturday, CNN-IBN brings you a special series on the different kinds of people who have come to call this bustling city home. Over 40 per cent of Delhi's land is registered as a rural area. For many of the voters living in these villages, their land is their only stake in the city - land they are now having to give up for roads, malls and flyovers. CNN-IBN gets the poll picture from the Capital's hinterland. Read on...
Dalel Singh shows us his prize possesion: 10 acres of land in an ancetral village that dates back to the 14th century. Pooth Khurd is infact a fertile wheat belt not in Punjab or Haryana but within the national Capital.
Delhi is home to over 100 rural villages. They are not slum clusters, but places where properous Jat farmers still harvest their crops each year. But an expanding metropolis is slowly closing in .
Dalel Singh says, "This land here was also part of the agricultural land once. Now the State Industrial Development Corporation (DSIC) has taken it, and they will be acquiring more land very soon."
Farmers like Dalel Singh have made millions selling their land bit by bit. But despite the prosperity of the villgers, Pooth Khurd remains a world apart from the prospects of the city.
While a majority of youth here have given up farming, many of them still fail to study beyond school finding employment in land dealing among other things.
A resident of Pooth Khurd, Rambir says, "No one likes to study, we are attached to our land."
This situation weighs heavy on the elders like Dalel Singh. Once this land is gone, it's all over for the next generation he says.
It's a familiar story of land acquisition, but what is striking about these cases is that they are happening within the boundaries of the national Capital - a place where real estate is at a premium. And that is perhaps one reason why farmers are no longer happy with what they are being offered. Even the Government is offering as much as Rs 50 lakh per acre.
At Kisan Sabhas in the Alipur and Khanjawala rural blocks in North-West Delhi, men and women demand that they be given permanent royalties on the acquired land.
Khanjawala Kisan Sabha member, Naresh Dabas says, "Let them build the Metro but not over our bodies."
Ironically residents of Pooth Khurd were the first in India to get a special MNIC - Biometric Identity Card - by the current government.
A MNIC cardholder, Umesh Dabas says, "They said it was like they have in America."
But what was promised to be a green card to new opportunities has failed to make any difference to their lives.
"People in governnment offices don't even know this card exists," says Umesh.
Villagers in Pooth Khurd might have the largest land holdings in the Capital and the bustle of the city may be getting closer every year, but at a social level many remain just as far as they were 600 years ago.
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