Telugu Society of America (TELSA)

Introduction

Two thirds of Indian population lives in villages mostly relying on agriculture, churning out no more than a quarter of India's gross national product. As agriculture is in a great crisis, a majority of rural households is in deep debt and penury. Impoverished villagers flee to towns and cities speeding up the slumming of urban centers.

What can we do to rejuvenate the Indian village into a living entity, which it once was, and to arrest distress migrations to cities?

TELSA strongly believes that to arrest distress migrations to cities and towns, which in turn get 'slummed-up' with all the attendant ills of crime and disease, the villages must be developed according to a well-defined time-line and a master plan covering all aspects of living as opposed to continuing a band-aid approach.

The Marikal Project, funded in part by TELSA, studied "Marikal", a small village in South Western Rangareddy district of Andhra Pradesh, India. The study has been done over a period of 2 years and is supported by rigorous research and documentation. The study touches on all the above issues by studying one village in depth and drawing up a master plan for it. It suggests that such a master plan, implemented for each village, would transform the rural and urban landscapes offering both livelihood and cradle-to-grave living conditions for the bulk of the population in the villages. Each aspect of the redesign has been tried at one or several places in the country in a non-integrated and unplanned manner. What the Marikal Project does is to bring it all together in order to suggest the beneficial effect of an integrated approach.