The problem

INVISIBILITY, one might say, lies in the eye of the beholder. Farmers’ suicides, starvation deaths, malnourished children, some of the world’s most anaemic women – 400 million people, all inhabiting the drylands. If they still manage to remain invisible to most of the country’s politicians, scientists, intellectuals and decision-makers, six decades after independence, clearly there is some explaining to be done.

But first, let’s start at the beginning – with establishing the invisibility. Having displaced the United States as the second most attractive destination for foreign direct investment after China, India can claim to be one of the most exciting economies in the world today. Large sections of our people though do not appear convinced by this picture of India Shining. They expressed their displeasure through Verdict 2004. These people do not find a place on the development map of the country.

It has now been decisively established that ‘low-income and poorly-performing major states have not only persisted with their low-growth syndrome but have also experienced further deceleration in growth rates in the 1990s’.1 Inequalities have widened across regions. And it is clear that the poorest of our people live in the drylands of India, especially the tribal and hilly areas.

When we speak of the drylands we sweep our gaze across nearly half of India’s landmass – from the cold deserts of the Himalaya to semi-arid Telangana, Tamil uplands and western Karnataka; from the sub-humid eastern Chhotanagpur plateau including Jharkhand, western Orissa and northern Andhra Pradesh to the hot deserts of western Rajasthan and Kutch and the northern part of the Kathiawar peninsula, passing the central Malwa highlands, the ravines of Chambal and the Deccan plateau (including Maharashtra and northern Karnataka), along the way. It has been unequivocally established that this is where India’s poverty and distress is concentrated.2 This is also where people feel a deep sense of cynicism and alienation with the national mainstream. Over the years many of them have migrated to urban areas, lured by the glitter of the megapolis, ending up in slums where conditions are perhaps even worse than at home. In recent times, many more of these people have turned to extremist violence. Some of them are even committing suicide.

Though it may sound incredible today but this neglect of the dryland people is no accident – it was written into policy five decades ago. The second five year plan was based on the presumption that to redeem the many unemployed in the countryside, they needed to be relocated to industry and urban areas. The dominant economic discourse held that agriculture offered little hope for them. It took the catastrophic droughts and the Indo-Pak war of the mid-1960s to wake up our planners and politicians to the plight of the countryside.

There was also the question of national pride. PL-480 imports from the US were available only on the condition that India withdraw support to Vietnam and Cuba. What followed was the Green Revolution. Ironically, this only deepened neglect of the drylands. Based on the American advice of ‘betting on the strong’, this irrigation-centred strategy focused explicitly and exclusively on areas and people already well-endowed with resources, natural and financial. These wheat and rice growing areas, such as the alluvial Indo-Gangetic Plains and the Godavari and Kavery deltas, were to be the bread-baskets of the nation. Slowly from there, food would ‘trickle-down’ to the rest of our people.

Over the last two decades, Green Revolution-II has been extended to the Indian hinterlands with disastrous consequences. Completely overlooking the fact that two-thirds of India’s landmass is underlain by hard rock formations, totally unsuited to extraction of water by tubewells. This has led to a terrible self-engendered crisis of water in large parts of the country, with water tables plummeting everywhere. As if the water crisis were not enough, we now also have a food crisis, unthinkable just a few years ago when mountains of grain were rotting in the FCI godowns .

For the first time since the mid-sixties, foodgrain production grew slower than population in the 1990s. The pocket boroughs of the Green Revolution have seen a plateauing of yields, as the entire strategy appears to be running out of steam. A serious rethink is underway about how agriculture must be conducted in these areas. But once again the worst hit have been the dryland crops, grown and eaten by our poorest people – coarse cereals, pulses and oilseeds. The 1990s saw each of these register a negative rate of growth. The net per capita availability of pulses has fallen to less than half of what it was in the 1950s. We have been forced to import both foodgrains and pulses this year.

The Green Revolution also had a negative fallout for our livestock economy – hybrid seeds reduced stalk size, diversity and quality of crop-residue, resulting in a fodder crisis in rural India. An overwhelming focus on dairy development and a deep prejudice against pastoral practices led to a marginalisation of smaller ruminants and those dependent on them. The policy-induced decimation of our grasslands is a tragic story of monumental ecological ignorance and administrative insensitivity.

In 1998, my colleagues (at Samaj Pragati Sahayog) and I wrote a book India’s Drylands that sought to place these areas at the centrestage of policy-making in India. We argued not merely that drylands have suffered consistent neglect, we also showed how the potential for reducing national unemployment and poverty was the highest in the drylands. Every rupee spent here would go a much longer way in impacting these problems than the same investment made in already better-endowed regions. Subsequent research in recent years has strongly backed this hypothesis.3

If despite all this, the failure in the drylands remains so complete and so pervasive, it gives us reason for pause; for stepping back and reflecting on the roots of this fiasco. Clearly there is something fairly deep and systemic at work that explains what has happened. Two strands of thought suggest themselves, not entirely unrelated to each other. For the first it is useful to evoke Hans-Georg Gadamer’s classic Truth and Method and extend his understanding of what he terms ‘fusion of horizons’ to our problem.4

The most striking feature of India’s drylands is diversity. We are faced with multifarious variations – in rainfall received, soil and rock type, slope and contour, animal forms, in types of vegetation, crop or forest – and each of these, singly and in combination, has different implications for the possibilities of striking, harvesting and storing water as also the possible forms of livelihood (agriculture or pastoralism, nature of crops that can be sustained, kind of livestock to be raised etc). Many of these variations occur even within a small micro-watershed. And this ‘natural’ diversity has a complex interplay with the socio-cultural tapestry of these regions. That includes values regarding life-goals, priorities (e.g. security in view of pervasive, inherent uncertainty), understanding of and relationship with natural forces and resources, which have evolved over centuries if not millennia.

This canvas of differentia specifica poses a unique challenge to the development planner, the scientist, the social worker. Those who seek to intervene in any context, but especially in one with such potential fragility, cannot do so on the basis of a notion of ‘mastery’ over nature and society. With mastery and control, comes the resort to simple tech-fixes – monocultural, unilinear, indiscriminate. Irrespective of the specific challenges of each situation, an unthinking, insensitive bureaucracy seeks to impose its own pet ‘solution’ – tubewells, eucalyptus, soyabean, Holstein Friesian. Appropriateness does not matter. Sustainability is of no concern. Dialogue is not attempted. History is given a go by, with disastrous consequences.

This is not to romanticise in any way the condition of the dryland people. Life is hard in the drylands; it always has been. Nor to attach greater value in all respects to their knowledge over any other kind of understanding. But one thing I do insist upon. The long history of these people teaches us a great deal about the creativity (in both nature and society) called upon for survival in these harsh conditions. We must remember, with Gadamer, that understanding is always a fusion of horizons. There can be no development in the drylands that does not begin with a dialogue with the dryland communities. A dialogue that leaves open the possibility of learning, not just for them but also for the technocrat and bureaucrat, the NGO and academic, who works with them. The conversation must also extend across academic disciplinary boundaries, embracing the entire spectrum of knowledges that touch their lives, one way or the other.

In all our ‘development programmes’ such an approach has unfortunately been conspicuous by its absence. We have always sought to impose simplistic answers, top-down, without making the effort to understand the context, in all its diversity and complexity. We have been narrowly preoccupied with single parameters like aggregate income, neglecting the entire range of issues involved in eco-system resilience and stability. Disciplines, narrowly defined through specialisation, have neither spoken to each other, nor to the people in whose name solutions are sought to be developed. They have not been mindful either of the balance that must be retained if our interventions are to be sustainable. Nature and society are not to be mastered or subdued. They are, rather, to be deeply understood so that we can weave our interventions in a creative manner into their delicate fabric. Consistently learning each step of the way – light, nimble and innovative in our tread.

Through this fusion of horizons, partnerships must develop. A learning, growing attitude based on genuine humility is best nurtured within partnerships. This is a new way of finding solutions to the apparently intractable problems of the drylands. Here, no one knowledge is valorised over another. Power is genuinely shared within a framework of mutual accountability. Decisions are made through a dialogue between self-respecting partners who also respect each other. Solutions emerge in an iterative process of inter- disciplinary exchange and complete stakeholder involvement at each stage. Technologies are tested in the field and subject experts carefully modify their prescriptions based on the feedback of the people who apply them. Vibrant partnerships both enrich understanding and make implementation at the grassroots more effective. And governance more transparent and accountable.

These partnerships facilitate participation in informed decision-making by those who are yet to find a voice in the democratic process. This is the second strand of thought mentioned earlier. The drylands are forsaken as they are because they lack an effective voice, because the balance of power in their relationships with the outside world is heavily tilted against them. Especially of the weakest within – women, dalits, adivasis and the poor. Thus, when Monsanto sells them dangerous and expensive, genetically modified cotton, they are neither informed nor organised enough to stand up against it. When the government refuses to extend price and procurement support for their crops and to their regions, they do not have a clue as to why. When taxes are cut for the rich and subsidies for the drylands reduced in one stroke under international pressure, they remain unaware and silent. There is hardly anyone campaigning for greater public investment in the drylands even though a strong case can be made for this in the interest of national food security, for generating employment and boosting macro-economic growth.

The most urgent need is to imaginatively develop the institutional space that facilitates and encourages this kind of dialogue, exchange and learning. That actually institutionalises this process. That enables the mobilisation of the dryland people to become equal partners in national development. We need to look way beyond the fragmented bureaucracies of rural India towards a reform of governance structures that makes them more participatory, professional and responsible.

 

MIHIR SHAH

 

Footnotes:

1. EPWRF Domestic Product of States of India, 1960-61 to 2000-01, Economic and Political Weekly Research Foundation, Mumbai, 2003.

2. Mihir Shah, D. Banerji, P.S. Vijayshankar and Pramathesh Ambasta, India’s Drylands: Tribal Societies and Development through Environmental Regeneration, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998.

3. Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion, ‘Is India’s Growth Leaving the Poor Behind?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), 2002, 89-108.

4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Continuum, New York, 1975.