Today in its nationalist revival mode, India does not want to look back at its days of being backward, forever seen as a country of poverty, forever under the developing tag. It wants to match up to the best in other countries, to be not only a global power in terms of geopolitics, but also in its infrastructure, facilities, lifestyles. The ruling intelligentsia no more like to describe the country in terms of social fractures, held back by caste, or rural backwardness. The focus very much is on large scale manufacturing and business and employment generation. Agriculture and industry both are now seen in line with new tech, global supply chains, empowered farmers and factory workers, digital support systems, systems of accountability and all the managerialism that goes with it. In this new vision of the country, there is a strong distancing from older ideas – such as Gandhian views on development and economic life, all the buzzwords of decentralised, participative and smaller scale, local development, or NGO-shaped discourses of backwardness.
Among those
who do not subscribe to this changed narrative, there is a great concern about
the impact on both the environment and human communities that this is causing. Is
this what the story simply is? – one of sensible and sustainable development
versus the big business, neoliberal, capitalist push? It seems to me that while
these concerns are still quite real the picture is more complex.
To an
extent the wider narrative shift is quite understandable. To take an example,
the language within NGOs and academia had long painted the 4-5 states in the
north of India as BIMARU states, wherein human development indicators such as
maternal mortality, infant mortality, feoticide numbers were high, sex ratios
poor, education levels low, industrialisation minimal, and much of the
population engaged in low-tech, and medium to low scale agriculture, or its
allied sectors, and there was a lot of rural casteism too. While development
professionals did take action to improve these social indicators, they also
tended to entrench the very idea that these are backward states that are unable
to come out of their rut. Unwittingly this attitude served the continuous need
for development programmes in the region. It however did little to bring the
states forward, and develop their own impetus to address their problems. I was
pleased to see that it wasn’t just me thinking this way. I read a 2007 article
by Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian titled ‘Does Aid Affect Governance’.
These are some lines from it:
By expanding a government’s resource envelope,
aid reduces its need to explain its actions to citizens, which may reduce its
need to govern well (Knack (2001) and Brautigam and Knack (2004)). In
particular, poor governance could lead to a deterioration in the quality of
institutions necessary for a good business environment, as the government
falters in its responsibilities to maintain rule of law, ensure a predictable
judiciary and contract enforcement, and limit corruption….
So when the
Hindu nationalist intelligentsia and politicians questioned the old narrative,
they did have a point. And we did see with the regime change, that states such
as Bihar or UP could also create opportunities via industry, manufacturing,
support for agriculture, tourism etc. So however neoliberal that may sound, a
positive self-image, and a certain industrial ambition, can motivate and drive
a people, or a state.
Yet, what
the change also brought with it was lots of highways, high rise apartments, smart
cities, tunnels in mountains, thousands of trees cut for all this, buying up of
agricultural land, continued reduction of common land, and what not. One can of
course argue, that even the older infrastructure we had, did come at similar
costs. Perhaps it wasn’t so visible, with older media; perhaps its narrative
was more muted; perhaps it served the older elite and middle class. Data does
tell us that pastoral and tribal communities have had to move due to
development action in the past too. Possibly India’s infrastructure is growing much
faster now too, in ways comparable to developed nations. (Not that I understand
it much, but someone spoke to me about ‘gross fixed capital formation’ – which indicates
levels of the nation’s money being put into fundamental infrastructure. India’s
levels have been this high only once before, and they indicate high levels of
investment is building a longer-term infrastructure base).
This does
not mean that sustainability is completely sidelined. In fact even sustainability
seems to have gone big! It’s now all about big solar power projects, hydrogen energy.
The government itself is invested in organic farming, seed preservation,
reviving millets. These are no more radical attempts by some NGOs like Navdanya
or Vanastree. The government also wants to prevent the intervention of vested
foreign interests in agriculture. Of course they do this too via private
capital in agriculture, which they feel will rationalize the system, but they
tend to choose national or favoured foreign corporates which they believe
(possibly) will not undermine the nation. One also sees several efforts on
smaller scale by NGOs, entreprenuers and CSRs to build ecologically balanced
spaces. How effective such efforts can be in the eye of the wider storm of
large scale development? I don’t know. There are strange distortions too. The trends
for millets for example has made millets an expensive food, for instance. The really
meaningful efforts for ecological balance are still small scale.
Perhaps we
would be naïve to ignore the importance of bigger scale systems, remaining
caught in a romance of the small? After all change can come only through
systemic shifts in larger socio-economic structures. Here I think some of the
arguments that favour the new narrative are worth considering, though not necessarily
accepted blindly. An argument from a Hindu nationalist thinker I heard was that
one of the reasons that India remained deeply caste-ridden and unequal was
because of its deep ruralisation. From a historical perspective he argued that after
the decline of the great kingdoms (and here he refers to the early medieval period),
a lot of the large cities declined, and majority of people were in rural areas,
where caste became entrenched. He believes it is urbanization that breaks this pattern–
as caste has strong links with feudalism. He and some other political thinkers
believe that by focusing on urbanizing tier 2 and 3 towns, and small areas, and
connecting them via highways, creating industry jobs etc., these social features
can be altered[1]. It
can be asked that when hereditary, feudal hierarchies existed in almost all
societies, why has Indian society become so locked and defined by it. Why
unlike others it has not been able to weaken these ties in the same way. Of course
there may be many answers to that –religious authority, excessive colonial recording
and research, electoral politics and caste activism, and so on. There is to
some extent a troubled relation with our past – which we want to shed and
conserve in the same breath. Anyhow, so the view here is that urbanization,
industry, connectivity, technology, aspiration, economic participation – all these
will open up a society which till about 2 decades ago was run chiefly by its elite
and old middle class. A similar argument was made for bullet trains. I like
others, had felt that India really did not need bullet trains, and there was no
need to emulate other nations without reasonable grounds. This was again based
on the idea, maybe even romance, of gentle paces, local culture, and efficient
railway systems that have a rhythm of their own. Yet the view of those pushing
fast trains is again about creating well connected city and town networks,
allowing the growth of expanded hubs of urban activity and living. Perhaps,
developed countries of both Asia and the West have done the same for their own
rural areas, allowing for a larger modernization of their social fabric? So,
then this means the old must give way for the new, then? Are there also
benefits? Will less Biharis now migrate to Punjab, Gujarat or Kerala to work in
the future? In a recent discussion on the Punjab, I heard a view. Academics
from the region mentioned that a romantic idea of Punjab as a rural area has
been developed, though in truth it has historically been one of the areas with
maximum urbanization, as well as modern life, culture and education. They were
arguing that Punjab needs to think beyond the idea of the ‘pind’ and address
economic stagnation.
Of course
one can question all this discussion quite easily too. Much of the modern
growth is not sustainable, it is harmful to humans and nature alike, and may
not last fiscally either. Residential areas have poor occupation, cracking
walls, and sewage and waste disposal problems. And so much more. One can cite the
impact of fast trains on animal-human conflicts. One can speak of Kerala which
involves another kind of rural-urban continuum, which is much more people
friendly.
I think
both views have merit, though the rapid development model has perhaps too high a
cost. Surely, we can no more live in the romance of the village republic, the
imagined Gandhian idea of the self-sufficient village, wherein every caste does
its professional task and contributes some idea of a whole. Caste activism has
deconstructed this picture. Yet the very same Gandhian economic view also went
in other useful directions, and engaged with ideas to build ecologically
balanced and wholesome lives for people. Many of these are as relevant today as
ever, as long as we do not ignore the realities of social inequalities. There is
of course a dual aspect. It is the knowledge of specific communities - tribes
and castes – that is the carrier of indigenous knowledge as well. It is the
same feature that prevents beautiful uses of this very knowledge.
I have
watched over the past few years, various Japanese, Chinese and other Asian
films and dramas. I see hints of how modernization and indigenous knowledge has
been simultaneously nurtured, some of it in ways better than what India did
(and some less?). It is up to us perhaps to see what meaningful ideas we catch
in our fishnet. For example, if we borrow from Japan –there is Foukouka’s
natural farming. But there is also the quick fix solution of Miyawaki forests
that have become to new trend today – allowing builders and developers to
flatten old trees and then plant new rapidly growing ones. All kinds of
knowledges and development paths can serve some benefits, I suppose, if they
are invoked from a sensitive, informed and balanced perspective.
[1] It is also a fact that both for
governments as well as market interests, the class group they want to reach out
to now, is the new middle classes and poor. Just like in the 90s it was all
about our own middle classes. One can see it in much of the advertising and promotion
material one sees. There is felt need to tap this talent, and market, also of
course also to uplift and empower. Ironically perhaps, these have always gone
together.