Fwd: [SP(I)] Fwd: Write for New CC Campaign on Urban Vs Rural divide
Rosamma Thomas
From: Editor <edi...@countercurrents.org>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2025 at 13:50
Subject: Write for New CC Campaign on Urban Vs Rural divide
To: S.R. Darapuri <srdar...@gmail.com>
Dear Darapuri Ji,
Countercurrents.org is starting a new series on India's Urban Vs
Rural divide. We think this is one of the greatest historical
injustice done to rural India in the decades of governance and
it is approaching apocalyptic proportions. We invite you to join
this campaign by writing about this. What we need is not band
aids like reinstatement of programs like NREGA but more radical
systemic changes. You can raise demands and propose ideas for
systemic change.
You can send your articles to edi...@countercurrents.org. We
will also conduct a series of Webinars with activists,
academics, intellectuals and specialists on this topic.
Here is an insightful article on this topic
The Great Betrayal: The Colonisation of Bharat by India
by Satya Sagar
https://countercurrents.org/2025/12/the-great-betrayal-the-colonisation-of-bharat-by-india/
Below is a concept note about the campaign.
Concept Note for a series on: ‘Decolonising Bharat’
India today lives with a deep, structural fracture between its
villages and its cities—a divide that shapes economic
opportunity, political power, access to health and education,
and even life expectancy. This proposed series of articles seeks
to explore that fracture not as a temporary imbalance or policy
oversight, but as a long-term system of inequality that
increasingly resembles an internal form of colonisation, where
rural India subsidises urban prosperity while remaining
chronically deprived itself.
At the heart of this divide lies a paradox. Nearly two-thirds of
India’s population still lives in rural areas, and agriculture
employs close to half the country’s workforce. Yet rural India
commands a shrinking share of national income, public
investment, and political attention. Policies are routinely
framed and justified in the name of “national growth,” but their
benefits accrue disproportionately to urban centres, corporate
interests, and metropolitan elites, while the countryside
absorbs the social, economic, and ecological costs.
The recent dilution of MNREGA—once the most significant
rights-based employment guarantee for rural households—serves as
a sharp entry point into this broader story. The weakening of
what functioned as a wage floor, a buffer against distress
migration, and a tool of women’s economic participation
highlights how rural livelihoods are being steadily
de-prioritised. This retreat contrasts starkly with the state’s
willingness to forgo massive public revenue through corporate
tax cuts, loan write-offs, and urban-centric incentives, raising
uncomfortable questions about whose welfare is considered
fiscally responsible and whose is expendable.
Beyond income and employment, the rural–urban divide manifests
most brutally in health and education. Rural Indians live
shorter lives, not by accident but by design: doctors,
hospitals, and specialist care are overwhelmingly concentrated
in cities, leaving villages critically underserved. Similarly,
stark gaps in years of schooling and educational quality
systematically exclude rural youth from the modern economy,
locking generations into low-wage, insecure work. Geography,
rather than talent or effort, increasingly determines destiny.
The ecological dimension of this divide is equally central.
Climate change, groundwater depletion, soil degradation, and
chemical-intensive farming models strike rural India first and
hardest. While cities experience environmental stress as
inconvenience, villages experience it as livelihood collapse.
The extraction of water, labour, and raw materials from rural
regions to fuel urban growth raises urgent questions about
sustainability, justice, and survival.
This series invites writers to interrogate these dynamics from
multiple angles—political economy, lived experience, gender,
caste, health, education, ecology, migration, and federalism. We
are particularly interested in pieces that challenge the idea
that rural poverty is inevitable or residual, and instead
examine how policy choices, power structures, and urban bias
actively reproduce it.
Ultimately, the series asks a larger question: can India remain
a functioning democracy when the majority of its people are
treated as a vote bank rather than as full citizens? And what
would it mean—politically, economically, and morally—to place
the village back at the centre of national imagination and
policy? We invite contributors to help map this divide, document
its consequences, and imagine pathways toward a more just and
genuinely inclusive future.
In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
--
National President,
All India Peoples Front
Socialist Party (India)
Website: spi.org.in.
Facebook: facebook.com/socialistpartyindia
Twitter: twitter.com/spiinfo
Email: socialist...@gmail.com
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