developmentbhoomimagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/... · april - june 2012 eternal bhoomi 3...

April - June 2012 Eternal Bhoomi 1

BANGALORE Rs.80/-VOLUME 3, ISSUE - 2, APRIL - JUNE, 2012

DEVELOPMENT:Seeing The Whole Elephant

Buddhist Economics

E.F. Schumacher

Indra’s Net

Thich Nhat Hanh

Paving the Way for Corporate Agriculture

Devinder Sharma

2 Eternal Bhoomi April - June 2012

The Eternal Bhoomi Magazine is printed on wood-free paper using soy-based inks

People who celebrate technology say it has brought us an improved standard of living, which means greater speed, greater choice, greater leisure, and greater luxury.

None of these benefits informs us about human satisfaction, happiness, security, or the ability to sustain life on earth. - Jerry Mander, American activist and author

No one said, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a juggernaut economy that destroys the capacity of every living system on Earth.”

- Paul Hawken, political activist and author

We were taught to see the world as a great machine. But then we could find nothing human in it. Our thinking grew even stranger – we turned this world-image back on ourselves and believed that we too were machines… But the world is not a machine…

As we change our images of the world, as we leave behind the machine, we welcome ourselves back.

- Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers


Educational Institutions and policy makers need to play a role in preparing youngsters for the future. And the future will be determined by the decisions we make about our current development path - whether we shift to a low carbon way of life or not.

We asked a few college going students what they think of development. Many were sure it basically meant progress, bigger cities, better facilities, a better life. Some felt it was an inevitable aspect of human evolution. A few were quite puzzled, saying it was difficult to answer the question since there were so many complexities involved. One student said that just when India is trying to get ‘developed’, all the negatives of development are being talked about, including carbon emissions and climate change; she felt it was an unfair world, because her family after years of dreaming and saving were now going to buy a car – why should they give it up?

Every Indian would know the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Each blind man thinks it is a different thing – a wall, a tree trunk, a brush and so on, depending on which part of the elephant he has touched. ‘Seeing the whole elephant’ when it comes to development is much more complex, since there are so many more aspects to it and each person sees it with her own filters. Education and life experiences lets students - and most of us - only see a few facets of development – without the understanding that they are connected to innumerable other aspects of life.

The sociologist Ashish Nandy wrote about the concept of ‘colonialism in the mind’, where the elite of India had absorbed an entire way of thinking of the colonisers even after they had left. They then replaced the British as leaders as we adopted a path of western style development in India, much against the wishes of Gandhiji, one of the few whose mind was not colonized. Today our minds are not colonized by any other country. We are now dealing with our minds colonized by notions of ‘development’, just as in earlier eras our minds were colonized by religion. We are caught up in a paradigm which embraces the entire destiny of modern civilisation.

By and large, as human beings we suffer from a vulnerability - we seem to be able to value only immediate benefits and unable to see the whole picture in the space dimension or see far into the future or the past in the time dimension. In this issue of Eternal Bhoomi, we have attempted to share the writing of many visionaries from E.F.Schumacher and Thich Nhat Hanh to Vandana Shiva and Claude Alvares – writings that help us see the whole elephant of modern day ‘development’

Seetha Ananthasivan

Phot

ogra

phs b

y An

anth

Som

aiah

Development and Education:Seeing the Whole Elephant


EternalBhoomi Issue No. 10 - April-June 2012

Development: Seeing the Whole Elephant... The theme of this issue: Development seems to mean many things to different people and the world is not yet done with celebrating it... addicted to its products in many ways, it is diffcult to ‘see the whole elephant’... What are we seeing, what do we not see, and what do we not wish to see?

Vantage Point6 Buddhist Economics By E.F. Schumacher

10 Globalisation and Climate Change By Vandana Shiva

13 The Paradox of our Times By His Holiness, The Dalai Lama

16 Paving the Way for Corporate Agriculture

By Devinder Sharma

18 Beyond Labels: India’sScientificandTechnical Traditions

By Claude Alvares

22 Dismantling Development By Wolfgang Sachs

Positive Steps

25 Living and Learning from the Grassroots

Of learning about education and life from Ivan Illich

By Madhu Suri Prakash

48 The Front Porch - A Short story

By Abitha Anandh

49 Growth: New Indicators New ways of measuring growth and presenting a balance sheet.

Multi-view

14 Development - What it means to me?

People from various walks of life share their thoughts

28 Seeing the Whole Elephant - Poster

42 Books that show the big picture

Views on development will never be the same for anyone who reads these 8 books - or even our notes and blurbs on them.

Eternal Bhoomi is committed to bringing you holistic perspectives of renowned writers and thinkers as well as practical ideas and examples of earth conscious living from people from around the world


Community38 Green Warriors of Chandigarh

Conservation

30 Seeing Green, Going Red By Sanjay Gubbi

Food

36 Sprouts - growing on your plate

Eco-Living

37 Make your own Soap and Toothpaste

By Rajesh Thakkar

Expressions40 A Part of the Earth By Seetha Ananthasivan

41 Time to Sit and Stare By Rema Kumar

Deep Ecology46 Indra’s Net By Thich Naht Hanh

50 Snippets 51 Membership Page55 Bhoomi College

We welcome...

your feedback, suggestions, articles, poems or pictures.

Email : [email protected]

or send by post to: The Editors, Bhoomi Network,

c/o Prakriya School Campus, Chikkanayakanahalli Road, off Doddakannahalli, Carmelaram PostSarjapura Road, Bangalore - 560 035

Science and Technology34 Power Grid - A Welcome Technology ByStaffReporter

Participate!in campaigns for the survival of indigenous people...

54 Survival International

Cover Photograph of embroidery of elephant by unknown craftsperson.


Buddhist EconomicsE.F. Schumacher was one of the pioneers of the movement towards

sustainable living and a follower of Gandhiji. His classic book “Small is Beautiful”- Economics as if people mattered”, published in 1977 is still a must read for anyone interested in sustainability.

In this year of his 150th birth anniversery, we bring our readers E.F Schumacher’s own introduction to a radical way of thinking about the basic principles of economics – with an emphasis on simplicity, non violence and a regard for Nature’s capital.

‘Right Livelihood’ is one of the re-quirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist Economics.

Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain faithful to their heritage. So Burma: “The New Burma sees no conflicts between religious values and economic processes. Spiritual health and material wellbeing are not enemies: they are natural allies.” Or: “We can blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology.” Or: “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do”.

All the same, such countries invari-ably assume that they can model their economic development plans in accord-ance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists, from so- called advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pur-sued, and to construct the grand design for development. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics.

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind

of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invari-able truths, without any pre suppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from ‘metaphysics’ or ‘values’ as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.

There is universal agreement that the fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider ‘ labour’ or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation.

From the point of view of the worker, it is a ‘disutility’; to work is to make sac-rifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wage is a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.

The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far- reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of

it, every method that ‘reduces the work load’ is a good thing.

The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called division of labour, and the classical example is the pin factory eulogized in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialization, which human-kind has practiced from time immemo-rial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignifi-cant and, in most cases, unskilled move-ment of their limbs.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be atleast three fold: to give individuals a chance to utilize and develop their faculties, to enable them to overcome their ego- centeredness by join-ing with others in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for existence.

Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve – wracking for the worker would be lit-tle short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul – destroying degree of attachment

Vantage Point


to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Equally, to strive for leisure as an al-ternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence: namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and can-not be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a person’s skill and power and one that turns the work of a human over to a mechanical slave, leaving the human in a position of having to serve the slave.

How to tell one from the other?“The craftsman himself, wrote Ananda

Coomaraswamy, a man equally compe-tent to talk about the Modern West as the Ancient East, “ can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between ma-chine and tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsman’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its signifi-cance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civ-ilization not in a multiplication of wants

but in the purification of human character.

Character is formed primarily by work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.

The Indian philosopher and economist J.C. Kumarappa summed the matter up as follows:

“If the nature of work is properly ap-preciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be atleast three fold: to give individuals a chance to utilize and develop their faculties, to enable them to overcome their ego- centeredness by joining with others in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for existence.


an excellent background for man to dis-play his scale of values and develop his personality.

A person who has no chance of obtain-ing work is in a desperate position, not simply because of lack of income but be-cause of a lack of this nourishing and en-livening factor of disciplined work, which nothing can replace. A modern economist may engage in highly sophisticated calcu-lations on whether full employment ‘pays’ or whether it might be more economic to run an economy at less than full employ-ment so as to ensure a greater mobility of labour, a better stability of wages, and so forth. That economist’s fundamental cri-terion of success is simply the total quan-tity of goods produced during the given period of time.

“ If the marginal urgency of goods is low”, wrote Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society, “ then so is the urgency of employing the last man or the last mil-lion men in the labour force.” And again: “if…. we can afford some unemployment in the interest of stability – a proposition, incidentally, of incredible conservative antecedents – then we can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that enable them to sustain their accustomed “standard of living” .

From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by consider-ing goods as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human – surrender to the forces of evil.

The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning for full em-ployment and the primary purpose of this would in fact be employment for every-one who needs an ‘outside’ job: it would not be the maximization of production.

While the materialist is mainly inter-ested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is ‘The Middle Way’ and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well being. It is not the wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth: not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them.

The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and nonviolence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the

utter rationality of its pattern – amazingly small means leading to extraordinary sat-isfactory results.

This is very difficult to understand for the modern economist, who is used to measuring ‘ the standard of living’ by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that someone who consumes more is ‘better off’ than someone who consumes less.

A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of wellbeing with the mini-mum of consumption.

Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort; that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, more time and strength are left for ar-tistic creativity.

It would be highly uneconomic, for in-stance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like in the modern West, when a much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the skilful draping of uncut material. It would be the height of folly to make material so that it should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to make any-thing ugly, shabby or mean.

What has just been said about clothing applies equally to all other human require-ments. The ownership and consumption

of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the sys-tematic study of how to attain given ends within minimum means.

Modern econom-ics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all econom-ic activity, taking the factors of production – land, labour and capi-tal – as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximize human satisfaction by the optimal pattern of con-sumption, while the latter tries to maxi-mize consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort.

It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life that seeks to ob-tain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised, therefore, that the pressure and strain of living are very much less in, say, Burma than in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of labour-saving ma-chinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used in the latter.

Simplicity and nonviolence are obvi-ously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a rela-tively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: “Cease to do evil; try to do good.”

As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending on a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose exist-ence depends on worldwide systems of trade.

From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from lo-cal resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and

The Indian philosopher and economist J.C. Kumarappa summed up the matter up

as follows:“If the nature of work is

properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is

to the physical body... It furnishes an excellent

background for man to display his scale of values and develop his

personality.”


the consequent need to produce for export to un-known and distant peoples is highly uneconomic, and justifiable only in excep-tional cases and on a small scale.

Just as the modern economist would admit that a high rate of con-sumption of transport ser-vices between a person’s home and place of work signifies a misfortune, and not a high standard of life,

so the Buddhist economist would hold that to satisfy human wants from far away sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success.

The modern economist might take sta-tistics showing an increase in the number of ton/miles per head of the population carried by a country’s transport system as proof of economic progress, while to the Buddhist economist the same statistic would indicate a highly undesirable dete-rioration in the pattern of consumption.

Another striking difference between modern economics and Buddhist eco-nomics arises over the use of natural resources. Bertrand de Jouvenel, the eminent French political philosopher, characterized ‘Western man’ in words which may be taken as fair description of modern economist.

“ He tends to count nothing as an ex-penditure, other than human effort; he does not seem to mind how much min-eral matter he wastes and, far worse, how much living matter he destroys. He does not seem to realize at all that human life is a dependent part of an ecosystem of many different forms of life. As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut off from any form of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived. This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of things upon which we ultimately depend, such as wa-ter and trees”.

The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings, but also, with great emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist economist can demonstrate,

From the point of view of Buddhist economics, production

from local resources for local needs is the most

rational way of economic life, while dependence on

imports from afar and the consequent need to

produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly

uneconomic, and justifiable only in exceptional cases. and on a small scale.

without difficulty, that the universal ob-servance of this rule would result in a very high rate of genuine economic devel-opment independent of any foreign aid. Much of the economic delay of South-East Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.

So, modern economics does not dis-tinguish between renewable and non- re-newable materials, as its very method is to equalize and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels like coal, oil, wood or water power, the only difference between them recognized by the modern economist is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and ‘uneconomic’.

From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential dif-ference between non – renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and re-newable fuels like wood and water- power on the other cannot simply be overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most me-ticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non vio-lence may not be attainable on this Earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on humans to aim at the ideal of non-vio-lence in all they do.

Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great economic achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at attractive prices,

so the Buddhist economist would insist that a population basing its economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasiti-cally, on capital instead of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and could therefore be justified only as a purely temporary expedient.

As the world’s resources of non re-newable fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – are unevenly distributed over the globe and limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever- increasing rate is an act of violence against Nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between people.

This fact alone might give food for thought even to those people in Buddhist countries who care nothing for the reli-gious and spiritual values of their herit-age and ardently desire to embrace the materialism of modern economics at the fastest possible speed. But before they dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of eco-nomic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead then to places where they really want to be.

As far as the masses are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous – a collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul.

It is in the light of both immediate experience and long-term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that economic growth is more important than spiritual or religious values. For it is not a question of choosing between modern growth and traditional stagnation. It is a question of finding the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility; in short, of finding ‘Right Livelihood’

_____________

This article is printed with permission from Resurgence Magazine, UK.

It is an edited extract from a longer essay first published in Resurgence in 1968. The full text is available in Schumacher’s classic book Small is Beautiful. See www.tudor-craig.co.uk for more details.


Globalisation and Climate Change

by Vandana Shiva

Work on the 4th Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) over the last few years involved 2500 scientific expert reviewers and hundreds of contributing authors from 130 countries.

Some of the alarming figures in the Report read as follows: Until 2100 temperatures are likely to rise by 1.10 degrees C – 6.40 degrees C and sea levels by 18-59 cm. During summers artic ice could recede 13 meters and the Gangetic glacier, the source of the Ganges, 30 meters per year. If in a few decades there will be no glacial melt into the Himalayan rivers during summer this will further aggravate droughts.

Climate change could wipe out 9% of India’s GDP. Yet India wants to achieve a 10% growth of its GDP by means of economic globalization. However, this kind of globalization will further contribute to the destabilization of the climate and could well wipe out the 10% economic growth and much more.

India could lead the world to a post- oil future-based on small farmers and renewable energy. However, with the push of globalization, India is rushing headlong into a fossil fuel economy thus destroying the ‘biodiversity economy’ of her rural areas and her peasantry.

The new environmental apartheid

The new global environmental apartheid, by which polluting economic

activities are relocated to the South, was the proposal of Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist at the World Bank. This movement of polluting industries to India is increasing the pressure on land, water and forests on which peasants and tribals depend.

Land has clearly emerged as the site of conflicts generated by the resource demands of globalization. On the one hand 60% of our people are directly dependent on land, on the other a global economy, driven by speculative finance and limitless consumerism, needs their land for mining and industry, for townships and highways. The speculative economy of global finance is 100 times bigger than the real goods and services produced in the world. Financial capital is hungry for investments and returns on investments. It must commodify everything on the planet, land and water, plants and genes, ,microbes and mammals. The commodification of land is fueling the corporate land grab in India, through the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and through Foreign Direct Investment in real estate, both concentrated around metropolitan cities.

The global economy based on limitless consumerism leaves a heavy footprint in terms of demands for natural resources. With trade liberalization, this footprint increasingly falls on countries of the South and within the South on tribal and peasant land. Globalization means more luxury consumption by the rich. More automobiles in more factories have to be produced; more cars need more iron

and bauxite to be mined and more steel and aluminum to be manufactured. The land grabs which have triggered major conflicts include bauxite and iron ore mining and steel plants in Orissa, and car manufacturing plants of Ford in Tamil Nadu and Tata in West Bengal.

Destructive tyre threads

On 28th January 2007, the Prime Minister announced a ten year Automotive Mission Plan with the idea of making India the global hub of vehicle manufacturing, designing and component making and achieving a turnover of $145 billion by the year 2016. The special automotive zones, like Special Economic Zones, will be set up in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkota. The Indian automobile industry currently produces 10 million vehicles yearly and66.46 million are produced world-wide. The aim of the Automotive Mission is to produce 50 million per year. (Ref: ‘PM to announce Automotive Mission Today’ , Business Standard , 29th January 2007.)

At a time of climate change and peak oil, when we need to look at options beyond oil and motorization, globalization is driving India into being a hub for the production of automobiles. If the mines and steel plants in Orissa and the car factories in Kolkota and Chennai are already triggering major land conflicts , how many more conflicts will emerge when India increases its automobile production manifold in the next decade?

For those who are avoiding the issue

Development for Whom? is a question that needs to be asked, as land grab, farmer suicides and unabating plunder of the environment goes on. Leading environmental activist and scientist Vandana Shiva writes about the multiple consequences of the prevailing paradigm of development

Vantage Point


of land grab and are trying to divert it into a debate on “industrialization”’ it is important to recognize the following:

If everybody on earth would consume resource and energy at U.S. level we would need five planets. And: India’s small peasants cannot possibly carry the ecological footprint of a non-sustainable model of global manufacture and global consumption.

Why farmers are ousted

There are two false arguments being invoked to justify land grab. The first argument is that agriculture has become unviable and that farmers should abandon the land. This argument has been used by Jayaprakash Narayan in “SEZs ad Stakes for All”, (Financial Express, January 25, 2007). Narayan stated that “with the decline in share of GDP, greater industrialization and shift of occupations are both necessary and inevitable. India cannot continue to be a largely agrarian economy if we harbor ambitions of rapid growth and global power status”.

However, rapid growth today is jobless growth, both because it is largely in the speculative financial economy and because even industrial growth today is not labor intensive and employment generating. India will not be a “super

power” with millions rendered destitute through land grab. This argument has also been used by The Economist in its article on “The Great Unraveling: Is Globalization killing India’s Cotton Farmers?” (18th January , 2007), which concludes that farmers could escape suicides if they “could escape the soil”. For farmers, soil is not a prison from which they need to escape. It is their support, their means of livelihood, their security, their identity.

The negative economy into which farmers have been pushed is a result of corporatisation of agriculture. High costs of inputs like seeds and agrochemicals are pushing up costs of production. Meantime trade liberalization is pushing down prices of agricultural produce.

The result is a negative economy where costs are higher than returns- leading to debts and suicides. However, there are alternatives to this negative economy such as lowering costs of production through seed sovereignty and ecological farming, and increasing returns to the farmers through fair and just trade. We have achieved this in Navdanya. There is no reason why farmers – being Annadatas (givers of grain)- should be denied prosperity and dignity.

The second false argument being used is that India must “industrialize”. This

is false on a number of grounds: Firstly most SEZs are for builders and for the IT sector, which do not need them since they are already doing well globally. Secondly, the uprooting of peasants of England during the first industrial revolution led to the further uprooting of Native Americans in the Amercias and Aboriginals in Australia. India does not have external colonies. Therefore, replicating the model of the colonial process translated into creating internal colonies – the lands of our tribals and farmers. And how much of the global footprint of resource intensive production and consumption should India carry? If the industrialized west has destroyed the planet for its resource and energy appetite, how many planets will India need to destroy to replicate and perpetuate the wasteful production and consumption patterns of the west? Thirdly,

If India destroys her fertile farmlands for

concrete jungles and uproots her small farmers for a speculating economy there is not enough land in

other countries to provide the food for her

billion people

Phot

ogra

phs b

y An

anth

Som

aiah


no society can become a post food society. If India destroys her fertile farmlands for concrete jungles and uproots her small farmers for a speculative economy, there is not enough land in other countries to provide the food for one billion people.

Land is inelastic. Fertile land is a very precious and very scarce resource. It needs to be protected and conserved as an asset of the farmers and as a national heritage to be passed on to future generations. It cannot be destroyed for a padding wave of short term greed and speculation, which is driving the corporate land grab. And climate change and peak oil should wake us up to the consequences of destroying our local food economies.

While the relocation of dirty industries to the South is a northern strategy, in countries like India, it is being presented as a “sovereign” and “autonomous” decision. Thus, in the recent controversy over corporations grabbing the land of poor farmers, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Chief Minister of West Bengal in a speech delivered in Kolkata on 3rd January 2007 said, “that 63% of the population continues to depend on agriculture for its livelihood is a sign of backwardness. Should we be satisfied with 62% agricultural land and 24% urban and industrial land? From agriculture to industry, from villages to cities- this is what civilization is.”

However, there is nothing inevitable or natural or evolutionary about people being moved from villages to cities. Brazil got rid of its small farmers while India’s policies were small farmer centered. 60% of India still being on the land is a consequence of conscious enlightened public policy not a ‘sign of backwardness”. In fact, in a period of climate change, peak oil and end of cheap oil, people in the industrialized world are talking of “re-ruralisation” since reduction in food miles is necessary to reduce emissions and dependence on oil. Since we cannot live without food, and if we have to avoid transporting food over thousands of miles, then localization of food production is the only alternative. Where local farmers have disappeared due to industrialization of agriculture, rejuvenating small local farmers emerges as a core element of food security policy, environmental security policy and energy security policy.

India has an advantage in making an energy transition beyond oil and our

ecological transition to contain climate change by building on its localized, decentralized rural economies, which emit less CO2 and also have better capacity to adapt to climate change.

DEVELOPMENT AND PARADIGM WARS

Either this great civilization will build on its multiple renewable energies – its cultural energy, its people’s energy, its energy embodied in biodiversity and biomass; or it will be consumed by the fossil fuel addiction of its elite joining hands to uproot rural communities and aggravate climate chaos.

There are two paradigm conflicts in the debate of energy, climate change, and the role of countries like India. The first paradigm war is about ‘development’. In a period of Climate Change, should ‘development’ be equated with more emissions, climatic chaos and more ecological vulnerability or should it be equated with less emissions and higher levels of adaptation and resilience to climate change? In other words we can continue to equate development with industrialization or do we need a postindustrial model of development?

The second paradigm war is related to equity in the context of climate change. Should equity be defined within a non-sustainable paradigm in terms of equality in right to pollute or should it be defined within a sustainability paradigm in terms of equity in living a non-polluting life? The consequences of the first paradigm are increased carbon dioxide emissions, relocation of polluting activity to the South, the displacement of the poor for

industry, mining, highways and power plants and robbing the poor of their right to work and creative use of human energy. The consequences of the second paradigm – the reduced carbon dioxide emission worldwide are that the poor get both economic justice and energy justice by securing their rightful place in an economy where their human energy provides them secure livelihood with dignity and sustainability.

The solution to climate change and the solution to poverty are the same: protecting enhancing and rewarding livelihood, work, production and consumption patterns that are based on people and not on fossil fuels. In the case of food, economic justice and energy equity implies more small farms, not less. Small farms are people centered. While large farms rely on machinery and chemicals which contribute to greenhouse gases.

We need more localization and less globalization of staple food production because long distance trade is a major contributor of carbon. Small ecological farms and local food markets are the solution for the North and the South. In countries of the South such as India, the climate change imperative becomes the protection of small farms and small farmers. The defense of small farmer’s livelihoods requires the changing of the rules of trade, which are pushing millions of farmers into debt and hundreds and thousands to commit suicide. It also requires end to land grab for SEZ. In countries of the North the ecological imperative is to rejuvenate local farms and local markets.

We can thus reduce our ecological footprint, reduce economic inequality and improve quality of life by protecting small farms and local food systems in the South and in the North. Food democracy paves the road to energy justice in a period of climate chaos.

Vandana Shiva is a world renowned scientist, writer, activist and the founder director of Navadanya and Research foundation for Research in Science Technology and Ecology. She is a visionary who has been battling for India’s Food Security and upholding Farmers Rights.

This article contains extracts from theNavdanya magazine, ‘BIJA’

The solution to climate change and

the solution to poverty are the same

Protecting, enhancing and rewarding, production and

consumption patterns which are based on

peopleand not on fossil fuel


These are times when there is so much in the window,

But nothing in the room.

Wehavetallerbuildings,butshortertempers

Widerfreeways,butnarrowerviewpoints

We have bigger houses, but smaller families

More conveniences, but less time

We have more degrees, but less sense

More knowledge but less judgment

Moreexpertsbutmoreproblems

The Paradox of our Times - His Holiness,The Dalai Lama

We have added years to life but not life to our years

We have learnt how to make a living, but not how to make a life

We have been all the way to the moon and back,

But have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbour

Thesearethetimesofsteepprofits,butshallowrelationships

Of fancier houses, but broken homes

Phot

ogra

ph b

y Te

nzin

Che

ojar

Vantage Point


Multi-View

Development - What does it mean to me?

We asked people from different walks of life what they think is ‘Development’. We present a cross-section of the replies we received...

Technology is a Drug

Technology is a drug. We can’t get enough of it. We feed it to our kids and watch them grow on a forced diet of desensitization. Switch on the TV and someone will tell you 50000 people died in India. Two seconds later you’re watching a comedy. Technology can do that. It gives us simulated realities that make us oblivious to the real world. Heroin does the same thing. So do most class A drugs. Basically, we are all addicts – addicted to the comfort and convenience that technology provides – addicted to the notion that progress is directly related to the size of your computer screen. Of course it is. We must be right. We come from the developed world. We’re already developed. Sure. Then again, wealthy kids in America shoot each other. Poor kids in Soweto can’t stop smiling.

So who’s developed?

When I look in front of me, I see two paths – spiritual or material. Two worlds – developed or developing. You decide which is which. We’re still in the wake of millennium paranoia – earthquakes, floods, end-of-world scenarios, cult suicides, viral diseases that eat into our computer realities. This is our developed world.

Then, as Nelson Mandela says, ‘We are free to be free’.

Nishant Goyal,Filmmaker,

Mumbai

I can’t explain or write a lot about this. Development now is something I associate with an experience, a state, an inescapable trap. How do I describe what I feel about Development? It is that feeling you have in your mouth, a bad breath due to bad indigestion because you have just stuffed yourself with excess food that is too rich and fat. Only that the bad breath is constant now. I hate it, I am troubled by it and it is something that I cannot escape from.

Development is that thing that makes me feel the unmanageable burden of my own existence and its impact on everything around me no matter what step I take. The black soot on everything and on the rim of my nostrils, the constant sound of ambulances are good reminders of development for me.

It is that snowball which started rolling as a drop and is now gaining mass and speed at a rate that is crushing. It is all soft and nice till it is still rolling, the pain will hit only when it finishes its tumble.

Bindhu Malini’ Independent Graphic designer and

singer, Bangalore

Basics and Freedom

An Inescapable Trap

To develop is to grow. Individuals need to grow into and realise their potentials. To not realise even the most basic potentials is to experience stunted growth.

First, a society can call itself developed to the first degree only when there are no barriers to the realising of the most basic potentials of its every member.

Second, for an individual to develop beyond this first level requires the society to provide the freedom for the individual to freely explore avenues for personal growth.

Once we have both these conditions present, we have a developed society in which it is up to the adult individual to grow, find meaning and develop individually.

S. Ravi Shankar, yoga teacher, Chennai

? ?


Sometimes I think that any movement is progress. A train progresses from Chennai to Bangalore. Then it progresses, back to Chennai. Bengalurians might contend that it regresses to Chennai...

Whichever direction the train moves in, politicians and businessmen have progressed to amass great wealth and power. The poor and chronically ill are progressing down misery road.

A pet dog is progressing towards his weekly spa treatment. A dog on the highway is progressing to become pulp on the highway soon. It’s all progress. I am reading everywhere that humanity has progressed to the state of the dog on the highway…. heading towards its imminent demise.

Sometimes I think that progress is becoming better as a people. But this immediately rings wrong, because a wise man once didn’t tell me, “There is no better, no worse, it’s all good. People have always been the same, and will always be the same.” However, if we become more compassionate, more appreciative and respectful of the bountiful beauty around and within us,…. We are progressing

On a personal level, I think progress is moving towards the very core of who I am. To understand myself and what is right for me.

Of course, I am often bogged by doubts about whether I even have a “very core”… still, I like to think of it like this… progress is the name of the road that leads me to myself, as long as I am travelling on it, I’m progressing.

Jai Shankar Iyer,Musician, Chennai

Development – as far as I am concerned, has nothing to do with infrastructure, high rise buildings, better roads or public transportation. It has further less to do with new clubs, bars or restaurants serving up international drinks or cuisine and even less to do with the availability of fashion apparel and accessories from international designers. It has nothing whatsoever to do with buying power of the nuevo rich.

Development for me is the growth of an individual in his or her social conscience. How can we call ourselves developed when we litter as we need, spit as we please, use walls as latrines?

How can we call ourselves developed when we do little for our women who are scared to wear what they want and go where they please? How can we call ourselves developed when we can hack each other to death at the flimsiest of excuses like race, religion or caste?

Sigh! As a wise man once said, do unto others what others you would do unto you; development is to do unto others what you would do unto yourself!

Sangeetha Ranganath, Operations Manager, Bangalore

_____________

Development, to me, doesn’t mean more roads, malls, factories, power stations and the like. Nor does it mean more cell phones in the hands of people, or more internet connections, or more households with TV sets and cable connections. To me, development means the furthering and championing of human dignity. It means people not having to shit on the street, not having to live in the middle of garbage dumps, not having to freeze to death on the streets, not having to rummage through garbage cans for food.

Pablo Chaterji Senior Editor, Mumbai

I’m no tree hugger. I don’t believe in leaving nature untouched- it wouldn’t be natural if we weren’t allowed to. The fact that human beings can use the elements available in nature to create an iPad is to me as natural as a dung beetle doing its thing with… er.. Dung!

But if we do the same without thinking about the consequences and working parallely to ensure balance… aah, then I begin to worry.

So if we’re setting up factories that will wipe us out… that’s stupid. But if we’re worrying that we’re setting a precedent that could cause global destruction… that’s stupid too. To me, development is a constant movement to discover ways to make life more comfortable for the human race without causing the world to end.

Kishore Manohar, Branding Consultant Chennai

_____________

Development is not a mere change, but that which improves access of a particular community to living resources, and also enables them to lead a happier life. It also means change in governance structure which helps in improving access of people to services, and also empowers them to take decisions that benefit them and the resources which sustain their life.

D. Narasimha Reddy, Social Activist Hyderabad

_____________

Character, Dignity

Best of Both Worlds

1. Free education that would enable all to reach their potential - be it in Arts or science or engineering or medicine or accounting

2. Clean water for all - that includes the millions of villagers

3. Affordable medical insurance to all - premiums should be based on their earning power

4. Excellent infrastructure that ties most of the rural India through rail and road.

5. Term limit for the MLAs, MPS and Ministers

6. Younger leaders at the cabinet level for a country that has nearly 400 million in the age group of 15 to 35.

Subramanian Gopi Gopalan, Senior Consultant, U.S.A

What is it, really?

? ?


Paving the Way for Corporate Agriculture

It's a paradox of plenty. At a time when India ranks 67th among 81 countries in the 2011 Global Hunger Index (prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute), mountains of grain continue to rot in godowns while more recently, irate farmers spilled tonnes of potatoes on the streets in Punjab. A few months ago, it was the tomato farmers in Jharkhand, and then it was the turn of onion growers in Rajasthan. And if you think this is a recent phenomenon, you are mistaken. I have seen this happening for nearly 25 years now across the country at regular intervals.

Disgusting, isn’t it? Well, the visuals of food rotting speak volumes of the criminal apathy, neglect and callousness with which we, as a nation, have failed to address the shameful scourge of hunger. For a country that has the dubious distinction of having the largest population of hungry in the world — close to 320 million — and with 42 percent of children officially clubbed as malnourished, the spectacle of massive quantities of food being allowed to go waste is an unpardonable crime. What is still worse is that hunger proliferates in a country that claims to be the world’s largest democracy.

For nearly five years, procurement has hovered at 50-60 million tonnes. Someone had worked it out that if we keep a bag of grain over another, and stack 60 million tonnes in a vertical row, we could actually walk to the moon and back. With so much

of surplus grain, and with unmanageable quantities of fruits and vegetables rotting by the roadside, there is no justification for growing hunger. At the same time, it is baffling to find staple food being exported while the population of the hungry and malnourished continues to multiply. No wonder, hunger continues to keep pace with economic growth.

Over the years, farming has become a big gamble. It is not only the worrisome vagaries of weather that more often than not plays havoc, farmers are also faced with a strange phenomenon — produce and perish. Take the case of Suryabhagwan, a farmer in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. This year, he voluntarily announced that he would rather work as a ‘coolie’ than undertake paddy cultivation. Already under heavy debt and knowing that another season of paddy cultivation will only add to his indebtedness, his call for a ‘crop holiday’ soon reverberated. Within weeks, the idea spread like wildfire, with the result that now more than 1 lakh hectares in the two irrigated districts of East and West Godavari lie barren.

AP is a paddy growing area. While production has been steadily on an upswing over the years, adequate market infrastructure for procurement has not been created. The result is that despite a very high production capacity, there is little space for storage. This is not only true of AP or for that matter Punjab and Haryana, the country’s food bowl, but

extends to the whole country. The tragedy manifested after the initial years of the Green Revolution, when food became abundantly available. The focus then shifted away from agriculture. With public sector investment drastically falling over the past few decades, agriculture was left at the mercy of the rain gods. Protecting every single grain of food produced to feed the growing population of deprived sections never became a national priority.

While production increased, the accompanying market and storage infrastructure were not created. India does not even have the capacity to handle and absorb an excess production of 5 percent, whether it is of wheat, potato or cotton.

Whatever the policymakers may say, the neglect of agriculture was deliberate. It is essentially designed to open up agriculture to private investment. Farmers have been the victims of a bigger and hidden design to push them out of agriculture. The more they produce, the more they suffer. Produce and perish, and thereby make way for corporate agriculture.

Source: www.tehelka.comDevinder Sharma is a Food and Trade Policy Analyst and Activist. He writes on policy issues concerning sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and intellectual property rights, environment and development, food security and poverty and the implications of the free trade paradigm.

By Devinder Sharma

Vantage Point

With public sector investment drastically falling over the past few decades, agriculture was left to the mercy of the rain gods. Protecting every single grain of food produced to feed the growing population of deprived sections never became a national priority.


While production has been steadily on an upswing over the years, adequate market infrastructure for procurement has not been created... The result is that despite a very high production capacity, there is little space for storage...

Whatever the policymakers may say, the neglect of agriculture was deliberate. It is essentially designed to open up agriculture to private investment.

Farmers have been the victims of a bigger and hidden design to push them out of agriculture. The more they produce, the more they suffer. Produce and perish,

and thereby make way for corporate agriculture.

ww

w.fre

epho

to.c

om


The very word “development” was first used in its present meaning only around 1950, and the word “scientist” first appeared in circulation in 1833 and became well-established only in the twentieth century. Most of the words that we use nowadays in discussions – “traditional,” “early modern,” “modern,” etc., are all loaded terms, or what you may today call “branded” labels. I have tried to side-step them with the belief that we should go beyond these categories altogether. All human history cannot be squeezed into neat Eurocentric boxes - like primitive, ancient, dark ages, medieval, modern, etc. These are not universal or inevitable categories.

The discussion on these issues has remained largely Eurocentric. It has been mostly led and dominated by European scholars, though academics from outside Europe have also been drawn in to add their own hypothesis. I have, therefore, tried to take a different angle to understand the evolution of science and progress in India.

Looked at without the Eurocentric lenses of development, the technical solutions of pre-colonial India appear to be designed explicitly to flow with Nature’s cycles. These scientific and technical traditions enabled a great degree of dynamism, of which there is considerable evidence even today.

In fact, had it not been for the rude and intentional disruption that commenced circa 1600 (with the advent of Europeans in India), Indian society was perhaps well on its way to a development scenario that sustainability theorists today promote as necessary for a planet increasingly disabled by the crisis of climate change.

Beyond Labels: India’s Scientific and Technical Traditions

Science and Technology

Much of the scientific and technological discoveries by non-western societies have been sidelined or are unacknowledged by the west. And western style education which now prevails in most countries including India, continues to ignore discoveries not made by the west. Take for example calculus it appears in the 16th century in Europe as part of the Newtonian “revolution”; but as Prof. C.K. Raju has shown, it was perfected in India between the 5th and 15th century. Or take the example of moveable type for printing which was invented and already in use in China 200 years before Gutenberg.

How do we place the so-called “Copernican Revolution” in the history of world science when we know that the heliocentric hypothesis was already proposed by Aryabhata several centuries earlier; and the theory that the earth is flat had been discussed and rejected by Lalla, Bhaskara and others much before the Europeans came to propose these as new and revolutionary hypotheses?

These classifications of traditional or modern may not be useful as analytical tools, but we will make grave errors by giving them unwarranted ontological status.

The problem with dealing with this period (500-800AD) is that almost all its events continue to be seen within the “discovery” framework associated with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco-da-Gama. I am not denying that the Europeans are entitled to a European perspective on their discoveries. There is no need, however, to continue to retain the

Vantage Point

Several profoundly complex societies today are measured by only one yardstick: development. The western societies are considered “developed” countries and the rest are euphemistically called “developing countires”, if they are not totally “undeveloped”. Today with the world grappling with climate change caused principally by the ill effects of “modern development”, in what sense can one assess the so-called developing countries within the parameteres of a single development model?

Claude Alvares sketches the broad contours of India’s scientific and technical capabilities prior to the arrival of the colonialists. He discusses the philosophies of Science of that time and examines how the ideas in circulation then were fairly elaborate, detail, intellectually satisfying and above all practical in their approaches to the primary issues of an economy based on permanance and non-negotiable quests for meaning in life.


European framework for a global perspective on these issues and events. For example, how do we evaluate the voyages of Cheng Ho in 1422 ? And how do we assess the Indian Ocean trade in the fifteenth (and earlier) centuries? Compared to these early explorers and traders, the trade inaugurated by Vasco-da-Gama may in fact be considered insignificant?

The existing discovery framework needs to be replaced by a different framework that looks at Indian society from the 15th-18th century as a functioning society operating within its own terms of reference, its own preoccupations. This necessarily means a more comprehensive understanding of its various features than we have today and it would include an understanding of the technical capacity of the society, its knowledge base, its readiness and capacity to respond to market demands and several other related features including systems of medicine and education, theories of language and aesthetics, etc.

Nowadays we talk glibly of the “knowledge economy”, even when we know that for several hundred years none of the societies under discussion functioned without knowledge and without technical capacity. They were true “knowledge economies,” not pre-knowledge economies. I would therefore like to spend time in this presentation demonstrating the remarkable complexity of this society and show that it would be difficult, indeed foolhardy, to compare it with activities, including technical developments, which followed some other chronology elsewhere.

I will briefly discuss mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, industry, etc., within the context of a society that had evolved competent, in most cases, optimal solutions to problems it faced, and then show how all these features indicated that this society could not be labeled as unmistakably “traditional” or “early modern” or even “modern” because none of these categories would be able to describe it in all its complexity. The traditionalists might argue that the tradition was modern since it has not been jettisoned in modern times; the early modernist might argue that some of these ideas were nothing but prototypes of modern ideas. So where does that lead us, except to caution us that looking at non-European societies through the frame work of Europe’s experience would do great violence to our understanding of this societal or civilisational experience.

I am not denying that the Europeans are entitled to a European perspective on their discoveries. There is no need, however, to continue to retain the European framework for a global perspective on these issues and events.

I have already made a reference to the calculus: Prof. Raju has shown that much of the basic algorithms that began to be understood in Europe only in the 16th century were already mastered by Indians more than ten centuries earlier. In India, the precise trigonometric values provided by the calculus were required for an agricultural society dependent on accurately predicting the monsoon. These precise calculations were also critical for navigation. Prof. Raju has pointed out that the very term “algorithm” is from the name Al Khawarizmi who translated the basic mathematical texts from India into Arabic, from where they were further translated into Latin and Greek.

But besides obvious competence displayed in inventing the

Phot

ogra

phs b

y An

anth

Som

aiah


calculus, there are other fairly impressive but little known skills that passed from India to Europe within the same period. The work of Donald Lach, “Asia in the Making of Europe” is often a referral point. But even Lach is not comprehensive enough, since he could not conceivably have accessed all available sources. Certainly he had no access to the materials painstakingly accumulated by Dharampal.

If we take the case of agricultural biodiversity in India, one example alone will suffice, and it deals with biodiversity in rice. Adivasis and peasant farmers were admittedly responsible for the creation and maintenance of some of 300,000 varieties of rice. This is a phenomenal figure and does indicate a very high level of understanding of seed selection and breeding techniques. The art of breeding rice varieties is a dynamic process. Dr. Richharia – himself a leading rice breeder – found he had to revise his opinion about Adivasis’ knowledge of science when he tried out certain seeds which he had procured from these farmers, but which he was unable to reproduce.

None of the so called “saline” varieties of rice were created by modern science; they were bred by farmers in coastal belts. In fact, the International Rice Research Institute has produced, after 50 years of research, only two major successes, IR8 and IR36. This can be compared with the hundreds of varieties generated by India’s peasant and tribal communities, and the hundreds of different uses of these varieties.

The ability to work with seeds was matched by other competencies. There are several reports of agricultural specialists from Alexander Walker to Albert Howard – who came to teach Indian farmers how to farm, but retired after conceding that they had very little to teach and most often, a lot to learn. Dharampal’s Chengalpattu data taken from British records indicates that output of field crops in that region was higher than that associated with the best of the so-called green revolution practices used today.

Large-scale, meticulously planned irrigation systems enabled people to transport and store water in very large quantities (examples: Rajasthan, Pune) and the system of tank irrigation (for example, in Karnataka) was so well designed that when engineers proposed to increase the number of tanks, they found there were no more locations available to build new tanks: the existing tanks had adequate arrangements to collect all the rainfall that fell on the ground in the area.

Indian water harvesting systems were designed to deal with the monsoon, that is, to collect rain where it fell, precisely like a Mumbai housewife knows exactly how to collect as much water from her tap within an hour every morning from when the public water supply starts and before it shuts. Modern irrigation systems built on the technology of dams are never sustainable, since they dam the run off instead of harvesting it. In fact, the forests that harvest and store the water are destroyed in the reservoirs of dams. Since catchment areas are denuded, the life of the dam is considerably reduced. In the tank system, the silt accumulated in tanks was removed and used to fertilize agricultural lands.

Those working in the field of botany and with plants will know that Garcia de Orta faithfully recorded local knowledge of a huge variety of plants that were being used in India for medicinal purposes, and this was thereafter transmitted by him to Europe. The knowledge he collected was circulated in the form of the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (“Conversations on the simple

Vantage Point


drugs and medicinal substances of India”), published in Goa in 1563. His understanding and systematic collection of this vast indigenous knowledge of plants is sometimes misunderstood and it is claimed that he discovered the various medical uses of these plants himself!

What about more basic things like food? In fact, from the point of view of nutritious food and the wide variety of recipes available, especially the widespread expertise in making breads and fermented foods, as far as food and preparation of food was (and is) concerned, India and China were indeed both advanced civilizations which Europe would take several centuries to match. It is an undisputed fact that the variety in Chinese and Indian cuisine still excites and dominates the palates of the planet.

...we are dealing with a civilization that can hardly be dubbed as traditional, early modern or modern simply because several of its features in fact reflected an economy of permanence which could be pursued as long as human beings survive on the planet.

Several skills like the manufacture of textiles could not have developed in Europe without close study and import of Indian textile making procedures by English and European traders. In fact, English colonial masters in some areas had to cut off the thumbs of local weavers in order to kill the local industry. We know that the knowledge of natural dyes was widespread here. Today, after a relatively short and disastrous courtship with chemical dyes, natural dyes are returning under the garb of promoting sustainable industry. This very clearly indicates that some features of the Indian economy ought never to have been changed in the first place. The intellectual traditions that were still very vibrant at this time were intensely preoccupied with theories of aesthetics, architecture and grammar. For example, the cultural arts and their gharanas (including the various classical schools of dance) maintained their ability to reproduce the expertise, innovating when circumstances required.

Psychological theories and therapies, still in use today because of their obvious therapeutic worth, were passed on without much damage. One of the most important demonstrations of dynamism is the maintenance by eminent teachers and spiritual men and women of the system of commentaries which sought to re-interpret various scriptural texts in the light of contemporary experience. The Bhakti movement is not the sole instance of vitality. All these are not signs of what is generally dubbed a “traditional” society.

One of the most outstanding of accomplishments, for example, is the medical skill of plastic surgeons. The art of plastic surgery was a routine medical procedure in the Pune region and fairly detailed reports of the operations were noted by British surgeons before they were copied, adopted and adapted in Europe. The transmission of knowledge is very clearly documented and is without any doubt whatsoever. The art of plastic surgery developed in India due to a peculiar social custom. Men found guilty of marital infidelity were subject to the punishment of having their nose cut off. Indian surgeons met the resultant demand for rehabilitation by developing the skill of rhinoplasty, which when literally translated means, “the art of reconstructing noses”

(Adapted from Paper presented at the Conference on Multiple Trajectories of Early Asian Modernities, 16-17 December 2011 Varanasi)Claude Alvares is a renwned environmentalist based in Goa. He is the editor of The Other India Press and is a member of various government and other conservation organizations and groups

Those who think that the period from 15th-18th century was largely passive or stagnant – whatever image this may conjure – will have a difficult time explaining the speed with which India accepted a whole series of new crops including potatoes, chilli, tomatoes and cashew that came from South America. The ready adoption does not indicate the presence of a moribund or static society stuck to its civilisational habits from which it was not inclined to move.

There is little doubt then that we are dealing with a civilization that can hardly be dubbed as traditional, early modern or modern simply because several of its features in fact reflected an economy of permanence which could be pursued as long as human beings survive on the planet.

Much of this work of discovery was triggered by the research of the late Dharampal, who though not an historian, eventually forced historians to take stock of his findings.

The point of this presentation is not simply to highlight the various competencies that people in India continued to display from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries (considered as the pre-modern era), though it is appalling that not even a very elementary knowledge of these facts are known even among educated folk. There is no doubt that this is because our academic life has been submerged and soaked in Eurocentric perceptions of social history for more than two hundered years now. Also, most of our historians are from the discipline of humanities, with little or no engineering, scientific or technical backgrounds; and the general impression that has gained disproportionate credence is that whatever good has come to this country in the form of serviceable ideas, has come exclusively from the West.

This has had a severe impact on the self-esteem of Indians because of the impression created that the modernity enjoyed by us today is borrowed and not our own; whereas in actual fact, it is quite apparent that much of modernity would not exist if India (and China, Egypt, Arabia and Persia) had it not existed and provided the foundations for the advances of the West.

I am glad to hear at this conference that there are western writers like Jack Goody and Martin Bernal who have been working on similar themes. My grouse remains that this work has to be done and acknowledged first by Indian scholars who have for far too long continued to blindly accept the western view of modernity and work within its categories. This presentation is an invitation to this august audience to re-think the frame-works that rule and burden our intellectual work. Certainly, we did not have a vast period like the dark ages in Europe; and in almost other countries (outside the west), ideas and innovation moved people with relentless force. In fact, it may actually be hazarded that our “dark ages” are only just beginning, ever since our intellectual elites including our planners decided to ignore history and instead place this huge billion plus civilisation under the self-destructive development path chosen by the West.


Dismantling Development

Seeking equity and wellbeing – rather than economic growth – will be the new corner stoneof the post development age, writes Wolfgang Sachs, editor of The Development Dictionary

By Wolfgang Sachs

Every time the Olympic Flame is lit in front of the host country’s President, the pulsating of a nation begins to accelerate. But the games had rarely been staged with more ambition to self- aggrandizement than in Beijing in the summer of 2008. China celebrated its arrival as a world power. Moreover, what in 2008 was broadcast to the world through the language of the Olympics will, in the course of this year, be reiterated in the language of a World Exhibition when China presents itself to the global public as a platform for the scientific achievements of the 21st century.

The Olympics and the World Exhibition are nothing but symbols of the secular shift that occurred around the turn of the 21st century, enabling the rise of China- and other countries of the South- to membership of the exclusive club of global players. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the significance of this shift for world history and in particular its significance for the people of the South, who, after centuries of humiliation, finally witness a country from their ranks on a par with the powers of the world. Yet what amounts to a triumph of justice threatens to turn into a defeat for the planet because the desire for equity is largely fixed on ‘development–as-growth’, and it is this definition of progress which strains human relations and brings the biosphere to its knees. Indeed, China’s success brings the dilemma of the 21st century sharply into focus: politics is compelled to push either equity without ecology or ecology without equity and it is difficult

to see how this dilemma can be resolved unless the belief in ‘development’ is dismantled.

Whilst discussing the idea of the end of the development era, way back in October 1989, we were unaware that right at the same time the concept of ‘development’ was about to get a brand-new lease of life. I had gathered with a small group of friends (who eventually became contributors to The Development Dictionary) for what we called a ‘living-room consultation’ in State College, Pennsylvania, to review key concepts of the development discourse. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, events were building that just a month later brought the Berlin Wall tumbling down.

Like most of our contemporaries, we were blissfully ignorant of the way in which the fall of the Wall would be a historical watershed. In hindsight, though, it has become obvious that those events finally opened the floodgates for transnational market forces to reach the most remote corners of the globe, and as the new era of globalization swung into full force, hopes of increased wealth were unleashed everywhere, providing fresh oxygen for the already flagging development creed.

On the one hand, the globalization period brought economic development full swing. The cold- war divisions faded away, corporations relocated freely across borders, and in many countries politicians

as well as populations set their hopes on a Western – style consumer economy. In a rapid advance, a number of newly industrial countries acquired a larger share of economic activity. They have notched up growth rates far higher than those of the old-industrial countries, playing their cards as energy suppliers (United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Russia), as export platforms (South Korea, Thailand, China) or as sizeable markets (Brazil, China, India). In any event, quite a few Southern countries have broken away from the group of money-poor economies and transformed into a new generation of industrial countries, narrowing the distance that separated them from the rich economies. For them, it is as if President Truman’s promise, at the birth of the development period in 1949, of poor nations catching up with the rich has finally come true.

On the other hand, the globalization period has superseded the development. This is mainly because nation-states have ceased to contain the relevant economic and cultural relations. Instead, goods, money, information, images and even people now flow across frontiers, resulting in the creation of a ‘transnational space’ in which interactions occur as if national spaces did not exist.

Historically, development concentrated on the transition of nation-states from agrarian to industrial societies, with the state conventionally considered to be the main actor, and the national society the main target of development planning.

Vantage Point


For this reason alone, the concept of development withered away under the influence of transnationalisation. With the state moving out of focus, development looks strangely out of place in the era of globalization.

Development has indeed become denationalized (indeed, globalization can be aptly understood as development without nation-states) and as a result of this shift, development now largely implies the extension of a global middle class, along with the spread of the transnational economic complex, and is no longer about the formation of a national middle class, along with the integration of a national economy.

Seen from this angle, it comes as no surprise that the globalization period has produced a transnational class of winners. Though distributed in different densities around the globe, this class is to be found in every country. In the large cities of the South, glittering office towers, shopping malls with luxury shops, screened–off districts with villas and manicured gardens, not to mention luxury limousines on the highways and a never-ending string of brand advertisements, all signaling the presence of high purchasing power.

Roughly speaking, the transnational consumer class now resides half in the South and half in the North and comprises social groups that, despite their different skin colours, are less and less country-specific and tend to resemble one another more and more in their behaviour and lifestyle models. They shop in similar malls, buy the same hi-tech equipment, watch the same films and TV series, roam around as tourists and dispose of the key instrument of assimilation: money. They are part of a transnational economic complex, which is now developing its markets on a global scale. Nokia supplies consumers everywhere with mobile telephones, Toyota with cars, Sony with televisions, Siemens with refrigerators, Burger King with fast food, and Time Warner with DVDs. Western- style development, to be sure, continued spreading during the globalization period, but boosted the expansion of the transnational economic complex rather than the formation of thriving national societies.

It would be misleading to recognize just the desire for wealth in the scramble of countries and middle classes for

income. Though it goes without saying that the time-honoured vices of greed and arrogance are omnipresent drivers in this scramble, it is also true that from the point of view of the South, there is more to it. Behind the craving for skyscrapers and shopping malls, gigawatts and growth rates, there is also the desire for recognition and equity at work. A quick glance at China will illustrate the point.

The ascendancy of China to the ranks of a world power is balm on the wounds inflicted on her during two centuries of colonial humiliation. And the success of the middle class is seen as a source of pride and self- respect that puts the Chinese elite on a par with social elites elsewhere

on the globe. The Chinese example brings to the fore what has been part and parcel of development all along ; the desire for justice is intimately linked to the pursuit of development.

Looking at our original 1992 version of The Development Dictionary today, it is striking that we had not really appreciated to what extent the development idea had been charged with hopes for redress and self-affirmation. It certainly was an invention of the West, as we showed at length, but not just an imposition on the rest. On the contrary, as the desire for recognition and equity is framed in terms of the ‘civilisational model’ of the powerful nations, the South

Phot

ogra

phs b

y An

anth

Som

aiah


has emerged as the staunchest defender of development. Countries in general do not aspire to become more ‘Indian’, more ‘Brazilian’ or for that matter more ‘Islamic’ : instead, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, they long to achieve industrial modernity.

To be sure, the element of imposition has not been lacking, and self-defense against the hegemonic powers was a key motive in the drive for development, but what once might have been an imposition, more often than not turned into a basis for identity. In this way, however, the right to a cultural self- identity was compromised by accepting the development worldview.

Despite decolonisation in the political sense, which has led to independent states, and despite decolonisation in the economic sense, which has turned some countries into economic powers, a decolonisation of the imagination has not occurred. Quite the opposite, because across the world, hopes for the future are fixed on the right man’s patterns of production and consumption. The longing for greater justice on the part of the South is one reason for the persistence of the development creed, even if neither the planet nor the people of the world can afford its predominance.

As it turns out, the demand for relative justice may easily collide with the right to absolute justice. To put it in political terms: the competitive struggler of the global middle classes about greater shares in income and power is often carried out at the expense of fundamental rights on the part of the poor and powerless in society. As government and business, urban citizens and rural elites mobilise for forging ahead with development, more often than not the land, the living spaces, and the cultural traditions of Indigenous people, small farmers or the urban poor are put under pressure. Freeways cut through neighbourhoods, high-rise buildings displace traditional housing, dams drive tribal groups from their homeland, fish trawlers marginalise local fisherfolk, and supermarkets undercut small retailers.

Economic growth is of a cannibalistic nature: it feeds on both Nature and communities and shifts unpaid costs back to them as well. The shiny side of development is often accompanied by a dark side of displacement and dispossession: this is the reason why economic growth has time and again

produced impoverishment next to enrichment. The globally oriented middle classes, however, who push for development in the name of greater equality, largely disregard the plight of the poor. No wonder then that in just about all new-industrial countries social polarisation has been on the rise, along with growth rates, over the last thirty years.

To invoke the right to development for the sake of greater equity is therefore an untrustworthy undertaking. This is particularly the case when governmental and non-governmental representatives call for accelerated growth in the name of helping the poor. Most of the time, they take hostage the poor for garnering relative advantages from the richer countries’ without much of an intention to guarantee the fundamental rights of economically disadvantaged communities. At the core of this cover-up lies the semantic confusion brought about by the concept of development. After all, it can mean just about everything, from putting up skyscrapers to putting in latrines, from drilling for oil to drilling for water, from setting up software industries to setting up tree nurseries.

It is a concept of monumental emptiness, carrying a vaguely positive connotation. For this reason, it can be easily filled with conflicting perspectives. On the one hand, there are those who implicitly identify development with economic growth, calling for more relative equity in GDP. Their use of the word reinforces the hegemony of the economic worldview. On the other hand, there are those who identify development with more rights and resources for the poor and the powerless. Their use of the word calls for de-emphasising growth in favour of greater autonomy of communities. For them, using development speech is self-defeating: it distorts their concern and makes them vulnerable to hijack by false friends. Putting both perspectives into one conceptual shell is a sure recipe for confusion, if not political cover-up.

It is difficult to see how, in any case, the automobile society, high-rise housing, chemical agriculture, or a meat-based food system could be spread right across the globe. The resources required would be too vast, too expensive, and too damaging for local ecosystems and the biosphere. Since the Euro-Atlantic model of wealth has emerged thanks to exceptional conditions, it cannot be generalised to the world at large. In addition, this model requires social exclusion by its very structure, so it is unfit to underpin equity on a global scale. Therefore, unless global apartheid is taken for granted, development-as-growth cannot continue to be a guiding concept of international politics. If there are to be some forms of prosperity for all world citizens, the Euro-Atlantic model of production and consumption patterns will not be fit for justice unless they are resource-light and compatible with living systems. For that reason there will be no equity without ecology in the 21st century.

Cleansing the mind from development certainties requires a conscious effort; therefore, the authors of this book have ventured to expose those key concepts that make up much of the mental furniture of ‘development’. As it emerges, just to name some examples

developmentbhoomimagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/... · april - june 2012 eternal bhoomi 3...

Documents