Saifai
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Saifai, Uttar Pradesh
Kunal Pradhan May 2, 2014
Netaji's village of wonders
MP Mulayam Singh Yadav, Samajwadi Party. First elected in 1989
It is located near the National Highway 2 in south-west Uttar Pradesh. But there is something different about this place. Like the rabbit hole that opened a world of wonders to Alice, a Carrollian secret hides barely 15 km beyond it, down a tiny metalled road that cuts left towards Saifai. What Saifai village boasts of known for little other than its kushti (wrestling) enthusiasts, two decades ago Saifai was an agriculture-dependent village cursed with saline soil with large tracts of barren land. Today, the birthplace of Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has rapidly transformed into a modern education, healthcare and sports hub. The oasis in the desert boasts of facilities that are sometimes on a par with what is available in a large metro, despite having a resident population of only 7,000 and an immigrant population of about 5,000 more.
Saifai falls in Mulayam's Mainpuri Lok Sabha constituency, from which he has been elected thrice since 1996. To further strengthen the family connect, it comes under the Jaswantnagar Assembly constituency, which has been Mulayam's brother and Uttar Pradesh's PWD Minister Shivpal Singh Yadav's bastion since 1996. In or out of power, Mulayam is referred to as "netaji" by the villagers and Shivpal as "mantriji".
Over the past two decades, under the aegis of the Yadav family, Saifai has got wide roads, uninterrupted power supply, water reserves, and flats and villas for its resident students, doctors and sportsmen that resemble those seen in any gated community in Gurgaon. It even has its own airstrip, and among those who land there at least once a month are Shivpal and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav.
Saifai has two senior secondary public schools. One of them, the Sughar Singh Memorial (named after Mulayam's father), is run by a private trust headed by Shivpal. The school has 1,750 CBSE and 1,250 UP Board students, who pay between Rs 100 and Rs 1,000 depending on their stream and their age. For this price, they get facilities such as digital classrooms and spanking new science labs. The other school, run by the government and named after Amitabh Bachchan, has another 1,100 students.
For higher education, a 65-acre degree college on the village outskirts offers such courses as MSc in Biotechnology and Bachelor's in Business Administration, apart from the regular arts, science and commerce streams. It currently has 5,000 students, and has become a top education hub for the region between Kanpur and Agra.
A little distance away, in the heart of this high-tech township that has emerged around the original Saifai, is the Rural Institute of Medical Sciences and Research. A medical college with more than 200 doctors and a nursing staff of nearly 300, this glass-facade hospital treated 500,000 out-patients and 40,000 admitted patients in 2013. In all, nearly 3.1 million patients have been treated since January 12, 2005, when the first out-patient application was signed by Mulayam to mark its opening. The hospital boasts of facilities such as a neuro rehabilitation unit and conducts in the vicinity of 20,000 surgeries a year in its 10 operation theatres. Set up with an allocated fund of Rs 270 crore, the hospital has been constantly upgraded, especially during the Samajwadi Party reign. A super-speciality wing is now under construction for advanced surgeries.
From glass facades to Red Lakha granite on the floors, no expense has been spared in providing amenities to this village. "If every political leader does for his constituency what Netaji has done for Saifai, India's problems will be solved," says Rama Shankar Yadav, 44, principal of the Chaudhry Charan Singh Post-Graduate Degree College. The motive may be open to debate, but at a time when 'rurbanisation' is the buzzword of the Gujarat model, Saifai is a village with modern amenities like few others in the country.
