My destination was a house whose postal address, until about a couple of years ago, was “Village Daulatpur, Post Office Maheshtala, District South 24 Parganas, West Bengal”.
Today Daulatpur has a Kolkata pin code and sits on the south-western fringes of the expanding city, but still not the kind of place where you expect cabs to be available at your beck and call.
Therefore, the worry — how to get back home — was weighing on my mind even as I was on my way to the erstwhile village, sitting in an Uber cab. I chose not to share my anxiety with the driver because I knew it was pointless: such drivers are app-driven and rarely consider manual requests.
Daulatpur, in spite of earning a Kolkata pin code, remains a quintessential Bengal village. The house I was visiting belonged to Ambarish De Sarkar, whom I had met two days before in the city, and he had told me that his elder daughter, who is in class 11, recently got a bicycle from the State government. I invited myself to his home and travelled 30 km in a taxi just to take a look at the bicycle.
The cycle — being given to all students of classes 9 to 12 in government schools under Mamata Banerjee’s scheme called Sabuj Saathi, or green companion — turned out to be a blue Hercules Captain that stood on the verandah. Unlike in Tamil Nadu where freebies usually bear the picture of the benefactor, Ms. Banerjee marks her presence on the bike with a miniature autograph — in English.
“Do you ride it,” I asked Anubhuti, who got the cycle.
“My younger sister does,” she said, “I already have a cycle.”
Soon I was sitting at their dining table, surrounded by Ambarish, his wife, their two daughters and his elderly mother. The mother, Nandita De Sarkar, said, “I told my granddaughter not to take the cycle. It is meant for the poor. But she did not listen to me.”
The grandmother had, however, put her foot down when the school had asked Anubhuti’s parents whether they wanted to enrol the girl for the Kanyashree scheme. Under the scheme, a bank account is opened for every girl student in class 8 of a government school and Rs. 500 deposited in it every year until she turns 18, when Rs. 25,000 is transferred to the account. It was initially meant for families with income of less than Rs. 60,000 a year, but the ceiling was subsequently lifted.
“I told my son not to opt for it. He can afford his daughter’s education,” Ms. De Sarkar said.
“Do you think such schemes will help Mamata Banerjee win,” I asked her.
“I think she is going to win anyway,” she said. “Look, I am 70 today, and for most of my life I have lived under the Left Front rule. The kind of violence they are capable of, no one else is. Only that, those days you did not have TV channels to report or play up such incidents of violence.”
I had set out for a glimpse of the bicycle, but ended up meeting some simple people whose simple reasoning gives you an idea why Trinamool Congress won West Bengal in 2011 and why it may retain the State even in 2016.
