Jagriti Yatra 2017 – Day 6 – Dec 29: Sricity, The Industrial City

Disclaimer: Contains probably a biased view on Industries, Corporations who are running the whole world at the expense of Environment. With my minimal understanding of Social Economic impacts of the Mega corporations.

After getting ready for the day, I was sitting by the window and looking out. Train stopped at a station and I was surprised to see the station name, “Tondiarpet”. Goyala. We are in Chennai! Then the train started moving and the next stop is Tada, where we all get down. We are taking a bus to Sricity from Tada station. Goyala! First time coming to Tada, but not going to the waterfalls.

Met with Baldip Singh, who was talking about the much exciting Nordic economic, democratic model. He now lives in Norway, very near to the Nordic countries. Also met Bandit Roy today, who is a Programmer turned into a Filmmaker now.

Welcome to Sricity

Amith from Sricity is our Tour guide for the whole day. The moment we entered Sricity campus, had a negative vibe inside me. Most probably because of hearing the terms

1. Industries,
2. Mega Corporates,
3. 40000 acre Land Acquisition
   1. from Villagers
   2. from Govt. for Free of cost
4. We are to visit a mining Company

Yeah, I do understand without all this Mega corporations, destroying the Mountains, toxify our rivers, we wont have Advancements, Innovations to our Civilization. Between the

• “Realistic” Corporates manufacturing needs exponential needs of Public in these Megafactories vs
• All this production decentralized as in “Utopian” `The Venus Project`, or Gandhi’s vision of Villages,

I am truly lost. Hope Blockchains take us to the Utopia of decentralized Production, Supply chain, More transparency, Less destruction, More processes that align with Nature’s cycles, etc., Enough of my rant.

Some stats about Sricity

An Industrial park such as Sricity basically provides Land, Electricity, Water, Internet, Housing for Employees and other such required Infrastruture for Mega corporations to setup their Factories.

1. Very few Industrial parks do both Social + Commercial and Sricity is one among them.
2. 35,000 people working in Sricity now. All villagers are given employment opportunities, since their traditional way of doing Agri is not Profitable and something to look down on. Apart from the employment, they also were numerous other benefits like Impoved Infrastructure, Some money / individual / year, etc.,
3. Sricity is a mix of SEZ, Non-SEZ, etc.,
4. Have 165 Industies as of now and plans to expand to 300+
5. Have a solar production capacity of 7-8 MW
6. Also did Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) in most buildings.
7. They dont allow red labelled, polluting Industries like Tannery, Tyre, etc.,
8. Also did Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) in most buildings.

Had good conversation with Yashashwi, and Engineering student from Andra in the bus. More than conversation, I was dumping all my stories.  

Mining Machinery Development (MMD)

We then visited this company, MMD. We were taken to a Hall and shown an Intro video of MMD. The video started with a scene of a Mountain being blown away with Dynamites. OTHA! My negativity reached its peak.

Dear Homo Sapiens, We are blowing up all Natural formations and spoiling the Rivers and Ocean because of our behaviour of Mindless Consumerism. I wish we all evolve soon to a real Intelligent species and follow the path of Minimalism.

Then visited the inner parts of their factory. We are not allowed to take photos and I am not gonna write anymore about MMD hereafter.

Key people of Sricity

We had a session with Key people, Founding members of Sricity. Again very upset by one the beginning statements of Mr. Srini, Chairman of Sricity

In Agriculture, you can’t make much wealth

Fuck!!! I am need to run away from this place, as soon as I can. People speak as if Agriculture is not a profitable, royal work by Nature. It’s us the shitty Humans, who made crap economic system, lifestyles in a way that made Agriculture look like this, and made us all run towards making Wealth blindly without giving a thought on What life is all about!

Some positives on Sricity

From the start of this post, I am posting only negative stuffs about Sricity. So to balance, some positive things:

1. They recycle 100% of their water. Very happy about it.
2. They made a big tank to collect all Rain water to give to Water hungry Industries like Pepsi, rather than sucking out Ground water
3. They meet their Domestic (city) needs via Solar
4. Setting up 3 world class Universities

We got back to our Train by 4PM and started our Journey to Vishakapattinam. I started learning more about Art of Change 21, Caire game for the rest of the day and of course, some blogging.
For other day experiences, visit the Summary page