Mid-summer this year, village in Kuth on the western-most tip of India resolved to divide itself. About 40 families, out of a total of 70 odd, gathered their belongings and moved eastward, closer to a tar road, by whose side the grazing camels scatter at the approach of the occasional motor vehicle. The older women of the village shed silent tears as long-time neighbours walked away without turning back. Children, untouched by the emotional baggage of a splitting village helped the elders in their new venture of getting nearer to civilisation.
This is a story of Julrai village that broke up into two, barely three months after the earthquake that brought almost every brick and mortar structure all over the western region of Gujarat to the ground. In Julrai today there are houses with roofs caved in and there are walls cracked so wide that stray dogs can walk through them. There are freshly painted windows and doors that open out on to nothing in particular. There are the remnants of rooms with no walls. There are houses whose external form has survived the quake. But peep through a half opened window and the sights and sounds of seismic devastation present themselves—the eerie creak of broken beams straining to collapse or a section of roof waiting to be detached from its mooring and fall to the earth. And then there are heaps of rubble, remains of what used to be houses. These were once the homes of people who now live in tents less than 60 metres from these narrow lanes of desolation.
Julrai qualifies to be reconstructed by the government of Gujarat. The criterion for such bureaucratic recognition is the magnitude of destruction. The government is committed to rebuild those villages which have sustained more than 70 percent destruction in the earth quake. In addition, an NGO called Self Employed Women's Association (SIMA) and a government owned mining company, the Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC), were both willing to reconstruct the village.
GMDC and SEWA, quite naturally, had dramatically different approaches to rebuilding the village. The sequence of events that followed forced SEWA to withdraw, leaving Julrai in the hands of GMDC and the government of Gujarat.