0930 Road & Population

When I learned that Kenchanahalli was a village of about 100 households, I expected it to be remote and low-density. Sometimes, this seems to be the case. The view from our house is of rolling green farms and distant forest, with the rare brightly colored brushstroke that I know is a field worker. Likewise the clinic campus is usually calm, with only a handful of staff and patients at any given time.

But it only takes a few minutes of driving along the road on a weekday morning to change this feeling. From the window of the bus that we ride to Saragur Hospital, I watch a population story unfold. The road fills with crowds of running schoolchildren, men lugging sacks of grain, and women toting babies and plastic urns of water. The bus stops to jam on ten more passengers, then swerves to pass a pick-up with fifteen in the rear. We pass by a schoolyard where 200 children are lining up for morning call. We stop again to pick up and drop off more people. A mile or so down the road, we pass another school with just as many kids. LOTS OF KIDS! Stop, more people move on and off. Another school. SO MANY KIDS! More people. Another. UNBELIEVABLE NUMBERS OF KIDS! More… I think to myself, “Okay, wow, this is high-density”.

While the rural population may be low-density in residence, it begins to feel quite crowded when people aggregate around the major local throughways and public institutions. Similarly, the villages feel remote and self-contained—at Kenchanahalli, it’s easy to feel like we are alone in the world—and yet there are other villages within walking distance in all directions. Geographic segmentation makes it possible to lose sight of the whole. The morning commute reminds me that India is indeed a highly populated country.