When an MLA in waiting tells his constituents in a town as apparently unexceptional as this that what can be done in Mumbai or Delhi, whether a skywalk or WiFi hotspots, can easily be replicated in Latur, you know this is a city on the move. Realty prices have shot up, young women zip about on two-wheelers, and a residential school called Gold Crest High is coming up near the town’s snazziest offering — a PVR cinema.

“People from neighbouring towns and villages are migrating to Latur,” says Shrinivas Phadke, 29, who owns a patch of land in neighbouring Ausa where he grows soybean, but lives in Latur city, moonlighting as a local cable television news anchor. “A flat in a good locality in Latur can now cost up to Rs 15 lakh, more if it’s a large house.” At Rs 1,700 a square foot, that’s as much as real estate in Mumbai’s farthest suburbs is likely to cost.

He has friends, especially young post-graduate students in Latur’s many colleges and technical institutes, who have moved here from towns in Beed and Osmanabad districts. Latur is a place where salaried people, even government officers on their last posting, don’t mind settling down with families. It’s had a history of having almost no communal tension, acceptable levels of law and order, and its largely trader population makes the best of the thriving agro-based commodities trade that has given Latur its understated prosperity.

Alongside Aurangabad, which has been administratively and historically a big city, Latur is now one of Marathwada’s leading urban centres.

... contd.