This year, I finally made the trip to my birth town in Jharkhand, called Deoghar.
When you’re away from a place for a few years and then come back - you tend to notice a set of things that seem different from the other places you have been living at. Some of them have been there for decades, hiding in plain sight - and some of them are a function of recent changes. This post is a rumination of such observations.
a) Directionally positive in terms of modern infra development:
In the last 5-6 years, the town has gotten a brand new domestic airport, an AIIMS, and a rapidly developing campus of BIT Mesra! The inevitable delays in the government infrastructure projects, not helped by the pandemic and the slow-paced development aside, zooming out - it’s been a major win for the town.
The airport is set up in a beautiful natural setting with rolling hills and a creek nearby. It has become a mini touristy place for the locals to visit as you could see dozens of selfies being taken with the backdrop of the airport.
As for the check-in / check-out experience, it was silky smooth. With just 4-5 months of it being operational, there’s not a lot of rush and you get plenty of time to do your boarding pass rituals as well as the security check-in. Compare that to either Delhi or Bangalore where it’s a deluge (DELUGE!) of folks, the airport experience at Deoghar seemed closer to the private airport experience.
An amusing incident that reflects how the flying experience differs in a small town v/s the cities was how an elderly uncle took out his phone while on the flight from Deoghar to Delhi - and started playing 90s Bollywood songs while keeping his phone on loudspeakers. While it may have irritated a few folks, no one complained about it formally to the cabin crew and the 70-80 of us ended up listening to Udit Narayan and Alka Yagnik for a good 30 minutes. Not that I’m complaining, interesting how it takes time for etiquette adjustments. As most of us have traveled by trains - where it’s quite normal to have folks put their phones on loudspeakers to enjoy music (the romanticism associated with travel, the wind blowing through your hair, and the farmlands/cities passing by definitely helps).
The AIIMS campus is also in development and last I heard, the students have started coming in. For the folks not knowing about AIIMS, it’s the apex medical institute of India and has the toughest entrance examination that I know of.
Until a decade back or so, less than 0.5% of all the applicants were selected for the only campus AIIMS had in India, situated in Delhi.
In a push towards having more centers of excellent medical centers, we had ~20 odd new campuses for AIIMS sprouting up in the country over the decade and the Deoghar campus happens to be one.
Having worked briefly in the healthcare sector before, I believe (and also quite evident otherwise) that the healthcare in India is quite lopsided as most other things. If you have the means and stay in a metro city, you get the best healthcare available possibly in Asia (barring a few exceptions like Singapore or Dubai or developed countries). If you stay in a Tier - 3 city like Deoghar, well - you need prayers as much as the meds.
b) Sustainability is not in the air, it’s on the roads:
One of the most assuring developments that I noticed was the introduction of the electric rickshaw, called Toto - in the local parlance. Devoid of noise and the pollutants that typical petrol-run autos are, Toto was a nice touch in making the general commute an enjoyable experience.
And they look lean and beautiful:
Loved the density of toto on the roads and the space they have.
That’s an exciting development because when we talk about electric vehicles, we tend to think of metro cities with snazzy Ather bikes or BluSmart vehicles. Or the Tesla cars or Cruise vehicles based out of the US.
Important as these developments are on the global scale or at the scale of metro cities in India, the adoption of electric vehicles like the relatively humble toto is a step in the right direction.
c) Traces of hipster trends fusing with traditional practices:
One of my armchair philosophies is that you can measure the movement toward trendy modernization through the “I ❤️ XYZ” signs. Go to any modern city and you will find such signs in new-age leisure avenues and on the t-shirts of young folks.
I never imagined Deoghar to have food trucks with “I ❤️ Deoghar” imprinted on them. Just to clarify, I don’t mean that such a trivial thing makes a city “better” compared to others. It’s just a barometer to gauge how the cultural underpinnings are slowly changing.
That aside, Deoghar continues to be my favorite for street food like samosa and chaat, and nothing beats the peda, rabri, and mithai you get in Deoghar. Even the pasta they started serving in those food trucks was the bomb.
Places like Kolkata and Indore are famous for their mithai and street food. As good they may be, the stuff you get in Deoghar holds its own - at a fraction of the cost.
d) Then again, some basic infra still leaves a lot to be desired
While the above are certain steps towards becoming a better town, there are a few things still very much desirable.
The general absence of streetlights was quite disappointing. During my stay in Singapore, sometimes I used to crave complete darkness as the artificial lights installed everywhere sometimes felt like light pollution
Bangalore lies somewhere in the middle. Deoghar is of course better than the rural hinterlands but with the kind of infra development it has undertaken, installing street lights and maintaining them seems like a relatively trivial problem to solve for.
Accessible water year-round is still a big problem, more so in the center of the town around the temple.
Now what kind of PM would I be if I don’t create a hyperbole lesson around product management in what seems to be more of a recollection of a homely trip? The PM breed is sometimes poked for its penchant for spinning product lessons out of nothing.
Also, just so I add enough value to your time, do check out the fortnightly sessions Tanmay Bhat hosts with Vishal (from the images above), Rohan Joshi (AIB), and Nishant Tanwar. One of the few programs that are actually funny.
Now here goes my so-called product observation during this trip -
Remember the first point around setting up an international airport in Deoghar along with an AIIMS (for readers based out of India - AIIMS is the apex medical institution of India)?
One gotta wonder that out of all the options that the central government had in creating an airport or an AIIMS center, why Deoghar? Sure it’s a popular pilgrimage town and largely peaceful place with a decent climate year round but so are 30-40 other places in India. Deoghar also doesn’t have a legacy industry to talk about.
Just in Jharkhand, you have Bokaro - with a 50-year-old SAIL, ONGC, and Vedanta. You have Jamshedpur with TATA Industries, NIT Jamshedpur, and XLRI (premier places for employment and studies). Or even Dhanbad with an IIT, coal mining companies like BCCL, Coal India Limited, and a hugely popular movie series called Gangs of Wasseypur based on it.
Sure Deoghar has the famous Shiv temple along with a few others, but head to head - it doesn’t seem to match Jamshedpur / Dhanbad / Bokaro on the financial assurance that would lead to setting up an international airport. After all, enough people need to use the airport for it to be economically viable right?
While I don’t have the answers to some of these questions myself, what I am fairly certain of is that the decision to set up the airport or the AIIMS campus in Deoghar wouldn’t just be based on economic factors.
If one were to base this decision on the much-touted frameworks which the popular consulting firms would charge a bomb for, Jamshedpur would have been a natural choice - larger population, need for travel, higher no of people who can afford the travel, existing infra to attract talent among others.
This decision must have been as much about the potential of Deoghar as it’s about the relationships that the key stakeholders - MPs, and bureaucracy would have maintained with the central government.
And that’s where the hypothesis comes in. As much as product development is based on analyzing numbers, logical thought processes, and the so-called first principle thinking - it’s a lot about creating and nurturing relationships with different folks.
The point is nothing too new and there are a zillion variations of this point communicated across time and space. Inspiring people towards a cause, advocacy, and diplomacy are still effective tools when the aspiration towards building something doesn’t seem to work out in the spreadsheets.
Geros ilas!