Death and development in Gurgaon

Capitalist development kills in many ways. On 14th of March 2007 several peasants in Nandigram, West Bengal are shot dead protesting against being displaced for a SEZ. In Singur people get killed because they resist the construction of a Tata car factory. Once the car factory is running, the production creates more victims. Suzuki Maruti in Gurgaon has outsourced most of the dangerous sheet-metal work to work-shops and slum production-units in Faridabad. The blood now flows outside the companies premises, union sources estimate that daily over a dozen fingers are mutilated in the work-shops. On 14th of March 2007, while peasants are shot at in Nandigram, three workers in Gurgaon die and six get injured at Evergreen Plywood Limited factory when a boiler explodes. Technical failure. The enforcement of (automobile) industries, the production and the product are fatal. On 12th of March 2007 a young man dies on the new Gurgaon-Delhi highway. He is the twelfth, other sources say the seventeenth person who got killed on this short 15 to 20 km stretch of the NH8 during the last 50 days. In the period between 2003 and 2006 over 1,500 people got injured on highway. The highway and the double lane street beneath it cuts old and new Gurgaon in half and there is hardly safe way to get from one side to the other. Foot-crossings are not part of the supply-chain. Main reason for the construction of the highway: supply of the Gurgaon call centres with thousands of workers from Delhi, just-in-time supply of Maruti, Hero Honda and HMSI with parts, easy travelling for the upper management and high-speed drive-way to Gurgaon’s shopping-malls. Wealth on display attracts people wanting to shine in its halo and people wanting to shine in its purgatory. The shopping-malls on the road between Delhi and Gurgaon are packed with tens of thousands of consumers every day and monthly tens of thousands run onto the street in panic, scared by bomb alarms, the last time on 16th of March 2007. Development is brutal and causes brutalisation. In February 2007 the chapter of a serial killing is legally closed. During the time between January and April 2006 a group of taxi drivers killed 20 people travelling between Delhi and Gurgaon, most of them local workers. They robbed a total of 60,000 Rs, this is 3,000 Rs for a life.