“The new apartment complex is going to have 900 houses! I don’t know how safe it will be for my wife and children to walk freely in Muddayyanapalya hereafter”, Gangadhara sighed, sounding rather burdened and pessimistic about the future of their lives.

One may wonder why Gangadhara would be worried about the safety of his family, as apartments are supposed to be secure, with layers of security they promise to offer. But you see, his distress is precisely because he is not going to be living in that apartment complex, but at some point in the future he may even lose his three acre agricultural land to another 900 flat apartment. Gangadhara is a farmer from Muddayyanapalya, a village close to Kengeri, in the immediate vicinity of the bruhat Bengaluru.

The idea of living close to a city but away from its over-stimulation has resulted in land use change from agriculture to real estate-driven multistorey apartment complexes in peri-urban areas. In 1994, even before Bengaluru witnessed the IT-BT boom, a real estate ad for Sterling Park residential flats in Kodigehalli stated that their apartment offered a “..home amidst picturesquely landscape open spaces. Just 5kms from Mekhri circle…Return home every evening to Sterling Park. Return to tranquil and serene surroundings”. At present, Sterling Park is just another building among many other concrete blocks. However, what catches attention in the ad poster is the juxtaposition of an idyllic farm house and Sterling Park’s flats as equivalents.

While it is ‘tranquil’ and ‘serene’ for city dwellers to live in apartments that overlook agricultural lands, the owners of the latter probably do not feel the same. Much research has been done about the impact of urbanisation on loss of agricultural land in India. However, there is a gap in understanding the impact of urbanism on village dwellers, especially those living close to cities. It represents the conflict of two completely distinctive lifestyles and Gangadhara’s insights bring an unfamiliar, yet relevant perspective to current trends of urbanisation and its ‘ism’.

Muddayyanapalya is a village with 35 houses and Gangadhara knows everyone, as he was born and brought up there and never left the place to live elsewhere. What worries him the most, apart from the fear of land-grabbing, is the demographic change the 900 flat apartment is poised to bring to his village. There are no big fences that separate the 35 houses and farms of Muddayyanapalya. His wife and two daughters work in their own agricultural field as well as in others’ at different hours of the day and walk around freely in the village. He is anxious about their safety as it is impossible for him to know the “neeyattu” (trustworthiness) of the apartment dwellers.

In all possibility, he believes that his new neighbours will speak in languages foreign to him. Along with the high walls of the apartment which will physically separate them, the prospects of expressing his cultural identity and interests with them will become difficult due to linguistic and cultural unfamiliarity and incomprehensibility.

The sheer numerical strength and financial affluence of 900 flats’ residents will overpower the interests of the Gangadhara, his family and his village. Super markets, multispeciality hospitals and private schools will replace the existing productive lands of Muddayyanapalya to meet the demands of the dwellers for ‘tranquillity’; and probably twenty years from now this village too will become a part of Bengaluru urban, for today’s peri urban is tomorrow’s urban.