Facing the future of development

Facing the future of development

Context

The recent spate of peasant protests across wide swathes of the country points sharply to the unjust folly and sheer unviability of the path of development that India has embraced, especially in the reform era since the late 1980s

Author’s contention

• Widening inequities between city dwellers and small, marginal farmers are glaring in today’s India. 1% of India’s rich own as much wealth as 70% of its population, and the gap is steadily rising
• Agriculture is never a talking point in mainstream media. Farming as an occupation is seen as a thing of the past
• There is a fallacious assumption that India is pre-destined to follow the path of industrialization that the Western world and East Asia have taken. The once-implicit and now explicitly stated goal is to ensure that only a tiny fraction of India’s work force remains in agriculture

In a generation, India’s population is likely to be around 1.6 billion leading to problems of its own like,

• Job creation: Even if just two-thirds of this population is to find its livelihood outside the villages (a modest version of every Finance Minister’s dream), 1 billion people will be living in cities, compared to the present 400 million. This would mean that some 200 million more jobs will have to be created in the next quarter century, at the rate of 8 million new jobs every year. In recent years of the reform era, the net rate of job generation in the organised sector, relying on the government’s own data, is under 0.5 million per year
• Infrastructure: Cities will be required to provide an enormous infrastructure — of clean air and water, sanitation and power, roads and communication, housing and social security — for some 600 million more people
• Feeding the population: A generation without the knowledge of manual agriculture will have far reaching implications on food security because a fully mechanized agriculture in India will pose a huge demand on the world’s remaining oil and coal reserves. This would imply a drain on forex reserves of India

Way forward

Alternatives do exist, practised and conceived of at hundreds of sites in India:

• The achievement of complete food security by Dalit women farmers of Deccan Development Society and small peasants of Timbaktu Collective in Andhra-Telangana (both in dryland conditions)
• The generation of decent livelihoods through crafts, small-scale manufacturing, community-based tourism, traditional health services by Jharcraft, Kudumbashree, Maati, Khamir, SRUJAN, Qasab, and others

These initiatives have stayed or even reversed rural-urban migration, created rural prosperity, attempted gender and caste justice, without trashing the environment