Long after he has been dead and buried, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, principal author of the Constitution of India, who described village India as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism,” has been proved right.

Village India remains a den of ignorance — annual ASER reports of the well-reputed NGO Pratham Education Foundation have been repeatedly reiterating that over 50 percent of class VII children in rural schools can’t read class III textbooks or solve simple math sums. Nor is it a secret that the caste system and communalism typified by mob rampages, are rife in rural India. And to this list of socio-economic deficiencies that have made village life nasty and brutal in post-independence India, one must add brazen, routine corruption. The overwhelming majority of village India’s poor, barely literate majority believe that bribes-taking and giving for public services is legal.

The woeful condition of rural citizens is the natural outcome of poor governance by rural leaders who have failed to provide adequate infrastructure — electricity, roads, rail connectivity, waterways — or hospitals and schools. Landed gentry and dominant castes that ruled rural India in the pre-independence era and successfully dodged Nehruvian zamindari abolition and land ceiling legislation, have converted all progressive provisions of the Constitution to their own use and have effectively maintained the status quo ante. Moreover, they have imported the persistent vices of village India into urban habitats and have substantially levelled down India’s productive towns and cities to village standards.

In this connection, it is pertinent to note that rural elites constitute a substantial majority in Parliament and state legislative assemblies. Rural leaders constitute an estimated 85 percent of Lok Sabha MPs and 70-75 percent of state legislature MLAs. And it’s hardly a secret that their first priority is to secure well-paid government jobs for kith and kin stuck in low-paid work in village India. These migrants with poor foundational education and faux degrees recklessly issued by low-grade state government colleges and universities are mass-inducted into Central and state ministries, departments and public utilities which are quickly run aground because of their poor education and management skills. This explains the air and water pollution and pathetic infrastructure (roads, bridges, government schools and hospitals) of India’s crumbling cities, which although they occupy only 3 percent of the country’s land area, contribute 60 percent of national GDP. Rural migrants have also imported the routine corruption of rural India into urban habitats. Hence, the consistent deterioration of towns and cities.

So what’s the solution? Well-educated, competent urban citizens need to press for wards level local government envisaged by the 74th Amendment to upgrade their proximate environments to save our cities. There’s no other option.