For Modasa, where an agricultural market town is acquiring an industrial estate and two futures at once.
A market town growing a second economy
Modasa has long been where the farms of the Aravalli belt come to sell, and it now also carries a GIDC industrial estate. That combination is recent enough that both economies are visibly present and neither has settled the question of what the town is.
A choice presented too early
What this produces for young people is an unusually stark fork, arrived at unusually young. The land is there, and there is now also a factory job that pays monthly. Families are split, and eighteen-year-olds are being asked to decide something that used to be settled by default.
Clients in their twenties describe being told both that the land must not be abandoned and that only a fool passes up secure employment, usually by the same people in the same conversation.
What the work addresses
Making the decision belong to the person making it. When contradictory instructions come from people you love, the common outcome is paralysis followed by drift - the choice gets made by default, and resentment attaches to whoever seems responsible.
Deciding deliberately, even imperfectly, is materially better than that. Much of the work is establishing that you are allowed to.
Sessions
Online, in Gujarati or Hindi.
