The heart of Ahmedabad doesn’t beat

AHMEDABAD: For a majority of the populace, the battle is for sheer subsistence every day. They are angry and embittered not because of the violence they were subjected to in 2002. They are fighting for basic amenities.

Their bitterness is revived, refreshed and rejuvenated every day for the want of four glasses of clean drinking water, a hygienic place to bathe, an approach road to their homes, drainage facilities for the area, medical amenities, social security free of crime, and last but not the least a neighbourhood of basic hygiene to bring up healthy children.

Every day they walk through overflowing drainage on the mud roads, earn less than Rs250 a day but have to pay Rs10 for drinking water.

It may or may not come as a surprise, but these areas, in the heart of the city, do not have even a fraction of these basic facilities that are taken for granted by any resident of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) area. However, taxes are collected here!

Take Dani Limda for instance. Adjacent to the iconic Maninagar constituency of Modi, DL was incorporated into the AMC’s jurisdiction about 36 years ago. The area was earlier a hub of industrial units, with several thousand mixed-community houses. Post-2002, the area has transformed into a Muslim hub, with other minorities like Dalits and OBCs pushed to the fringes. The additional influx of Muslim houses in the past six years has been 12,000, estimated additional population of 60,000.