Books
GANGA AND YAMUNA: River Goddesses and their Symbolism in Indian Temples
by Heinrich von Stietencron (translated from the German by Mitch Cohen). Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2010.Stietencron’s work on the visual representation of two of the major rivers of the subcontinent appeared in German in 1972. The translation by Cohen, somewhat modified from the original in consultation with the author (p. xii), provides a welcome addition to the body of literature on art history, iconography, and early Indian ritual traditions.
The author outlines his complex project with elegant simplicity – he attempts to trace the ways in which these rivers were visualized over a period of time, and locates the transformations within religious traditions, most notably in terms of the idea that the temple represents the body of the deity. From this perspective, the representations of the goddesses, generally on either side of the entrance to the shrine, acquire new meanings, which Stietencron unravels with gentle care.
Representations of the river goddesses evolved, the author argues persuasively, through a complex process. One strand was provided by popular beliefs and practices, which valorized demigods such as the yakshas and yakshinis. The latter were often associated with symbols of fertility such as water pots or trees. If these provided the antecedents for the content of later imagery, the location of the images was also significant – at least some of these appear to be associated with entrances – amongst the best-known of these being the female figures that flank the gateways at Sanchi. While documenting these broad trends, the author is careful to note variations, especially in the vahana, the mounts of the deities. In the case of Ganga, this is later almost invariably the makara or crocodile, whereas Yamuna is linked with the kurma or tortoise.
Was the incorporation of the imagery of the rivers within temple architecture and sculpture part of a strategy of representing political relations and power equations within the subcontinent? Stietencron dissects and dismisses the argument that the rivers were regarded as symbolic of the Gupta empire, pointing out that the Doab was perhaps not the heartland of the empire, and that many, though not all, of the representations are found in locations that are spatially and temporally distant from the heartland.
While conceding that any obvious political messages were at best of secondary importance, the author turns to other possibilities. These include the rivers as being symbolic of purifying powers, fertility and the cosmic waters. Stietencron draws on epic and Puranic mythology to underscore the ways in which Ganga traverses the three worlds and acquires particular significance for those who journey from this world to the next. Yamuna, likewise, has associations with the other world, being recognized as the twin of Yama, the god of death. The author wades through Vedic and Puranic allusions to argue that Ganga has lunar connections, whereas Yamuna represents the sun. Thus, the rivers are invested with yet another layer of cosmic significance. Their location on the threshold of the temple, then, represents the multi-layered transformation that the devotee may undergo as s/he enters and encounters the divine presence. What is interesting is the way in which the author circumvents certain obvious, literal associations between water and fertility to excavate other, less visible meanings.
The temple itself, Stietencron suggests, embodies the divine presence in multiple ways. He draws on a range of Sanskrit texts, from the Vedic, agamic, yogic/tantric traditions, to argue for an anthropomorphic analogy for the architectural form of the temple. This then provides the context within which the representations of the goddesses are located. More specifically, the author proposes that the figures of the goddesses may represent the two arterial nerve-channels, ida and pingala, which are regarded as crucial for breath control exercises that form a central strand within yogic practices.
What emerges then are possibilities of moving amongst several levels of meaning – the literal representation of water goddesses, their identification with specific rivers, the rich symbolism of their vahanas, the myths in which they are embedded, and allusions to yogic/tantric traditions. In providing us with access to these multiple levels of understanding with respect to these specific and apparently accessible symbols, Stietencron opens up possibilities for exploring other visual material by locating these within the complex frameworks that he carefully constructs – opening up each layer for scrutiny, evaluation, understanding and appreciation. The reminder that sculpture is multivalent is apposite – as is the attempt to integrate the textual and the visual. While lay readers may not be able to access the textual traditions with the ease displayed by the erudite author, his painstaking scholarship, imaginative reconstructions, and insightful equations will ensure that viewing sculpture becomes a rich, meaningful experience.
Kumkum Roy
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY AS IF NATURE EXISTED edited by John R. McNeill, Jose Augusto Padua and Mahesh Rangarajan. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010.
Environmental History is a call for a deeper engagement between ecological economists and environmental historians. Ecological economists have been dissatisfied at the manner in which complex ecological relationships in orthodox economic theory have been reduced to the term ‘land’. They seek to bring ecological relationships to the heart of economic studies. A similar complaint about writing nature out of historical narratives has prompted environmental historians to focus on the changing relations between societies and nature. Attempting to ‘bridge the divide between study of society and that of nature’ in both the disciplines, Environmental History offers a promising synthesis of ideas and methodologies.
The contributors to this volume illustrate the magnitude of social and ecological distress resulting from policies that have divorced the natural world from paradigms of development. Environmental History, therefore, not only makes a strong case for including environment in the academic disciplines of history and economics, but for contemporary development policy to pay close attention to ecology. Its strength lies in its ability to connect theoretical modes of analysis to pragmatic needs for contemporary development planning. It would be useful if planners give some thought to these approaches.
A useful way of thinking about development for example, is to understand the intersection of political economy and technology. For the last two hundred years, technology has been heralded as the solution to the many problems facing humankind. Today, technology is commonly accepted as a solution to various challenges including climate change, poverty and agricultural productivity. The discussions on technology as illustrated by Karl William Kapp and Asmita Bharadwaj point to the limits of technology in addressing the needs of societies in an equitable way. They also help complicate the idea of technology. Contrary to its popular conception as being ‘apolitical’, these papers reveal that technology is deeply political in nature and firmly entrenched in political systems.
The Green Revolution is a case in point. Bharadwaj argues that the Green Revolution neither benefited small and marginal farmers nor enhanced food security in a sustainable way. Skewed institutional support to environmentally unsustainable technologies undermined farmers, agriculture and the environment. The current debate on genetically modified crops too is influenced by (and is influencing) important changes in politics and governance: aggression of biotech multinationals, retreat of the state and near-absence of independent monitoring and regulatory authorities. This focus on the interaction of political economy and technology is of particular relevance today when technology-driven solutions are informing much of public discourse.
Equally important has been the failure of development paradigms of the twentieth century to take environment into account. Mahesh Rangarajan’s paper on Nehru’s development policies reveals how the twentieth century enchantment with technology has factored the natural world out of development planning. Nehru’s development policies were based on heavy investments in technology and industrialization, often aimed at taming and controlling the natural world. His environmentalism, on the other hand was mostly aimed at wildlife protection and this kind of environmental sensitivity was completely disconnected from his development policies. Nehru’s romantic reflections on nature were mostly during periods of retreat – on vacations or when imprisoned. As planner, he put nature in the backseat.
This uneasy relationship between ‘development’ and ‘nature’ is also evident in other parts of the world. The serious environmental consequence of replicating industrial models of production is ably illustrated by Bao Mahong in his study of Chinese civilization. Mahong’s analytical framework locates Chinese history as a continuum of interactions between culture and innovation within an ecological context. Through massive investments in technology, labour and procurement of raw materials, modern China’s industrial growth has so far been able to overcome the historical constraints put by nature. Given the extent of environmental degradation, however, Mahong argues that China’s chosen path to development is unsustainable.
Mahong does not argue against industrialization; indeed, he acknowledges the role of technology and industrialization in sustaining human wellbeing. Rather, he makes a nuanced argument that places both technology and industrial production within the larger framework of ecology. His suggestion is to bring the natural world back into the interaction between cultures and innovation by adopting innovative indices like Green GDP and Measure of Domestic Progress (MDP).
1Mahong’s contribution is of particular relevance today when industrialization is such a polarizing issue. He makes a compelling case for rethinking development and rethinking patterns of industrialization and offers practical suggestions to accommodate industrialization in an environmentally sensitive way.
The papers by Vinita Damodaran, V.P. Raghavan and Golam Rasul also present innovative ways to approach ecology and economy. Their work, located at the intersection of geography and culture, discusses how space is viewed differently by different groups of people. In all the areas under study, original inhabitants lost their lands, customary rights and dignity to newcomers who had completely different notions of land and how it should be used. Anyone trying to understand conflicts that have accompanied so many development projects of late will benefit from these insights. Damodaran’s papers on the clash between the ‘moral economy of the landscapes’ and global finance capital is instructive to anyone concerned about the endemic violence in Central India where struggles are particularly intense as geographical spaces regarded as ‘resource frontiers’ by mining companies are also cultural landscapes closely tied to Adivasi ways of life.
Governments and planners seeking to resolve the cycle of violence must therefore rethink the economic policies that favour globalizing resources while compromising local interests. Contrary to urban imagination of tribals as isolated, poor and helpless peoples, Damodaran shows that tribals in Eastern India have long resisted intrusive forces. In today’s world, they have forged bonds of solidarity between themselves, environmentalists and human rights activists. The ‘internationalization of indigenousness’ is surely a testament to their struggle to determine their destinies. This proven capacity is in itself a sign that tribals need to be incorporated in the agenda of development of the landscapes they inhabit. This is not a simple plea for ‘prior informed consent’ but a demand to have tribal knowledge and cosmologies play a central role in lands they inhabit.
This volume calls for a development based on issues of material sustainability and social equity and recognition of diverse ways in which peoples engage with their material surroundings. Alongside economists and historians, the volume will simultaneously be useful to planners and ecologists trained in natural sciences.
Environmental History, therefore, comes at an opportune time. In its attempt to deliver history ‘as if nature existed’, the book has both the conceptual and empirical weight to stimulate imaginative thinking on socially just and environment-friendly models of development.
Swati Shresth
Footnote:
1. The trend towards ‘green accounting’, is clearly a movement to draw attention to social, ecological and economic dimensions of development. It would be worthwhile however to remember Environmental History’s caution to avoid reducing real world complexity to merely economic functions. This suggestion is perhaps even most pertinent today when Payment for Ecological Services (PES) is a concept being embraced by governments and markets alike. The idea of quantifying complex relationships is, therefore, double-edged. It might result in better development models but it also allows these values to be made complicit in the very systems that have resulted in unsustainable economies.
POWER AND INFLUENCE IN INDIA: Bosses, Lords and Captains edited by Pamela Price and Arild Engelsen Ruud. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.
THE significance of the volume under review is that the theme of political leadership has rarely received critical attention, including from even those engaged in the study of electoral politics in India. The relative degree of neglect may possibly be because the dominant political discourse around the evolving nature of India’s democracy has veered around the assertiveness and conflicting claims of identity groups, and of struggles amongst them, often fought out on lines of region, religion, language and caste or party lines. The critical role of the individual leader in the process has remained under a shadow. Even in the scant literature available on political leadership, usually in the form of biography or political narrative, the leader in question is of ‘national’ stature and presence. It is seldom a ‘provincial’ leader, irrespective of the defining influence he or she may have had on the history and politics of a particular state, which in terms of territorial space and population size may well be comparable to any country in Europe. And then, ‘power and influence’ of individual leadership usually get analyzed in terms of being shaped by structural factors rather than being able to shape political processes and outcomes as a relatively autonomous agency.
1It is only in the recent period that the role of political leadership, especially the regional/local ones, has started receiving its due importance in the analysis of political change and development.
2 This has much to do with the emergence of local/regions/states as the ‘new’ political and economic terrains along with territorially contained state/region level parties with a narrow social support base. These parties are often founded and dominated by the ‘new’ kind of leaders of the ‘post-emergency era’, often credited with introducing new idioms3 in the exercise of their leadership. These ‘party supremos’ play a decisive role in determining the form and content of their party agenda/manifesto, tenor of election campaigns and also decide about important matter of alliance building and modes of distribution of patronage. Given the pervading competitive populism and fragmented nature of state politics, while considering public policy options, the leaders, when in power, have to face the onerous task of ensuring their personal as well as party’s political (read electoral) survival.The essays in the volume present field research based studies of the ‘actions, ideas, values, rhetoric, policies, and styles’ of political leaders of different hues, who wield power and influence in the ‘various types of political spheres’ of India’s huge and diverse democratic space. These leaders, as the subtitle suggests, can be put into the broader categories of ‘bosses/lords/captains/gurus’ even as some of these local ‘netas’ prefer to call themselves humbly as mere ‘social workers /reformers’. What is significant about these fieldwork based accounts is that the ‘followers/constituents/shishyas’ along with the ‘patrons’ of these politically ambitious actors also receive considerable space in the course of the narratives.
For the purpose of reviewing, let us take up first a set of articles where the protagonists are the regional political leaders of eminence – three of them being former chief ministers, one of whom went on to become a prime minister.
The contrasting leadership style of two former chief ministers, Chandrababu Naidu and Digvijay Singh, even as both leaders focused on the politics of development, comes out clearly while reading the essays by Pamela Rice and James Manor respectively.
Naidu as the chief minister adopted a highly personalized and publicized approach in pursuing a neo-liberal agenda of growth. Projecting himself as the CEO of his state in his effort to realize good governance, Naidu made conscious efforts to bypass the conventions of ‘Andhra politics’. Pursuing ‘person-centred politics’, Naidu projected himself as an ardent votary of neo-liberal reforms that he promised would transform Andhra Pradesh into the most developed state of India. It was only before the 2004 elections that Naidu resorted to ‘mass politics’ during the campaigns. Instead of decrying populist ‘handouts’ from the government, Naidu now stood for ‘alternative economic policy’, aimed at inclusive growth and promotion of welfarism. In an effort to negate the anti-incumbency factor, Naidu even invoked emotive/rhetorical issues like Telugu pride, his ‘rebirth’ after surviving an assassination attempt, the foreign origin of Sonia Gandhi and so forth – a positioning which hardly suited his carefully cultivated global image of a ‘modernizer’ comfortable in the company of Bill Gates and Clinton. Even the belated attempt to remodel his pro-market/pro-rich image by taking up the cause of poor farmers suffering under drought and holding out promises, could not rescue Naidu. The late Y.S. Rajasekhra Reddy, leading the Congress campaign, scored over him by undertaking his famous padyatra in the scorching heat listening to villagers’ complaints. The Naidu saga is instructive in visiting India’s electoral politics since the initiation of neo-liberal economic reforms and taking note of a perceptible ‘disconnect’ between the two.
Unlike Naidu, Digvijay Singh, another two-term chief minister of the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh, kept a relatively low profile in true Congress tradition. The deliberate attempt to keep the focus of politics away from his ‘person’, despite being articulate, persuasive and having a privileged sociological origin, is attributed by Manor to a proclivity to reticence/ self-effacement due to an inherited courtly manner befitting a royal lineage and a pragmatic recognition and acceptance of a Congress ‘culture’ that mandates an exclusive focus on the ‘family’. Compared to Naidu’s relentless drive for development (read growth) in a top-down, illiberal model inspired by the ASEAN tigers, Singh focused on alleviating poverty by adhering actively to a ‘bottom-up, demand-driven development’ liberal approach based on devolution of power through PRIs by generously funding them and enabling them to promote the interests of the dalits. Manor calls Singh an ‘unusual leader’ within the Congress tradition who refused to depend merely on patronage based distributional politics and rather pursued a home-grown imaginative ‘post-clientelist strategy’. In his opinion, Singh’s ‘brand of post-clientelism is more constructive and more exportable to other Indian states,’ which is not the case with the left-ruled states of West Bengal and Kerala for the simple reason that the ‘progressive’ Communist parties ‘cannot gain power in other states.’
Charan Singh comes across as yet another ‘unusual leader’, though belonging to an altogether different era. The original ‘kisan leader’, Paul Brass suggests, was able to maintain his popular support and a degree of admiration in the murky world of politics due to his widely praised ‘personal honesty, integrity and reputation’ and his unquestioned commitment to his core constituency, i.e., the middle peasants and backward classes. As someone who held important positions for a long period, Singh was an unusual leader also in the sense that he refused to indulge in a crass distribution of patronage, rewarding one’s own followers, even the undeserving ones, with positions of power and influence and thus allowing them to acquire corrupted income. He was not only conscious of his personal honour but also ensured that his key followers, even those belonging to his own Jat community, behaved honourably. A tough call, one would say, if someone has some idea of the state and the region he belonged to, even if the era was different.
Andrew Wyatt takes up the study of the emergence of actor-politician Vijayakanth, the founder leader of DMDK. Vijayakanth, popularly known as ‘Captain’ after one of the movie he starred in, symbolizes the return of a politics of populism after nearly two decades marked by the primacy of identity politics. Reminiscent of the late MGR, another actor-politician of iconic status, Vijayakanth has also downplayed his privileged caste and class status and consciously fostered an image of an individual in touch with the aspirations of the ordinary masses by taking recourse to symbolism. His acts of charity are akin to ‘saintly idioms’ which Morris Jones talked about. The significance of Vijayakanth, despite his modest electoral successes so far, lies in showing that it is possible for a leader to manoeuvre within the politico-cultural constraints and norms of Tamil politics dominated by DMK and AIADMK and even challenge the status quo.
Now let us consider the other articles which focus on the ‘less important’ leaders/netas hailing from the micro-polities of village/community/student union/a locality in a small township. Reading these accounts along with the earlier ones enables us to underline the distinctive ways of leadership located differently and operating at different scales. Thus in the same state of Tamil Nadu, unlike Vijayakanth, the lesser leaders leading the dalit movement have been unable to challenge the status quo. This is, Hugo Gorringe argues, because they ‘merely replicate and reproduce the relations from which they are excluded.’
How in the post-Mandal era are ‘new’ political leaders doing in a North Indian state/region the late Chaudhary Charan Singh belonged to? Lucia Michelutti spends time in a locality of Mathura town to write a political ethnography of the local leadership belonging to the dominant Yadav community. Here the focus is on how the community supported political leaders who use and legitimize what she calls, ‘muscular politics’. Reinterpreting the whole idea of democratic politics of self-respect, dignity and empowerment, the local community leadership is able to seek ground support for criminal politics and ‘goonda type of political acts’ to earn wealth, power, influence and ‘prestige’ by allowing unfair distribution of corruption in the form of patronage for the community. Loyalty to one’s own community here provides the sole legitimating factor. Historically, being victims of the upper caste led manipulations of law and institutions provides yet another justification. There is another ethnographical study of yet another North Indian town of Meerut from the same region/state and also in the close proximity of the capital city which has wider implications. In his study of the student politicians in the two higher educational institutions of the city, Craig Jeffrey draws attention to the compromised potential of young student leaders to act as autonomous political agents, as the campuses increasingly become arenas for interplay of party-community political competition. In the process the broader causes get undermined. This ironically happens despite the leaders asserting their disillusionment with and desire to be separated from conventional party-driven political strategies of mobilization.
Moving from urban micro-polities to rural ones brings us to a study of the village level ‘new type’ of leadership. Mukulika Banerjee, in her study of two villages of Birbhum district of West Bengal, presents a captivating and incisive description of how the local politics has revolved for over a decade around the ‘comrade’, who has been acting as organic intellectual cum practitioner of mass politics. She argues that the ‘party’ (read the left parties when in West Bengal), long realizing the fragility of vanguard radical movement (refer, the Naxal-ruling left divide since the second split days), has come to rely on these comrades all over rural Bengal. Acting at the behest of the party, the comrades, in tandem with their followers who are also engaged in ‘doing party work’, organize political activities and act as the conduits for the disbursement of governmental patronage in the form of funds, loans and other benefits. The left parties have increasingly come to rely on the political work of these comrades to ensure that the party directives are carried for electoral successes. The study, referring to panchayat bodies, shows how all policy decisions were being made by ‘the party’, and ‘other administrative bodies were mere rubber stamps – the executors of these policies.’
Bjorn Alm in his anthropological fieldwork based study of a village in Tamil Nadu, traces the story of a DMK youth who builds his support base with the help of his network of followers and patrons as the past village loyalties crumble and the traditional leadership based on land ownership gets discredited. Here is a youth leader, mirrored at successive levels of Tamil Nadu politics who, in the mould of a ‘social worker’, harnesses various state distributed resources for patronage. Such aspiring social leaders, often decried as ‘fixers’, are not necessarily from the upper caste or from a privileged economic background, but have the all-important virtues of accessibility and a reputation for ‘delivering the goods’.
4With the focus on the regional/state level/grassroots level leaders and their leadership styles, idioms and strategies, these essays not only respond to the growing interest in a key aspect of the concrete reality of democratic politics, but also bridge a gap in the existing scholarly literature on politics in India. It is all the more welcome that the essays on essentially a political theme have been written by sociologists, anthropologists and students of cultural studies and human geography, with only a lone political scientist. Showing the growing global interest in the ‘Indian model’ of democracy, only one of the contributors to the volume is from India, that too institutionally located abroad. Straddling the disciplinary/national boundaries, the essays show both a sense of freedom from straitjacketing and a freshness of approach – a must read for those engaged in undertaking analytical studies about the ways different kind of leaders and leadership strategies interact with one another.
Ashutosh Kumar
Footnotes:
1. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly XXI(38), 20-27 September 1986.
2. CSDS-NES 2009 survey data clearly revealed that compared to the national leaders it was the state level leaders who played a far more decisive role in determining the electoral outcomes in different states.
3. Morris-Jones referred to three political idioms while analyzing the styles of political leadership in India, namely the modern, the traditional and the saintly. ‘India’s Political Idioms’ in C.H. Phillips (ed.), Politics and Society in India, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1963.
4. Anirudh Krishna calls these new village leaders as ‘naye neta’ who have become the ‘crucial mediators’ between ordinary rural Indians and the state. Active Social Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002.
SOCIAL INCOME AND INSECURITY: A Study in Gujarat by Guy Standing, Jeemol Unni, Renana Jhabvala and Uma Rani. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.
THE book Social Income and Insecurity is an attempt at a new idea, a new way of looking at ‘income’ and at ‘insecurity’. It is also an attempt at understanding better the complexities that define the concept of ‘work’ and its different dimensions in a developing country, and the nuances of institutional structures such as caste and gender in such a context. And because of these attempts, and because of the experimental methodologies used, it is a book that deserves to be welcomed, discussed and debated.
The book has also come at a time that is very pertinent. The world is today a more economically insecure place and more unequal than in the past few decades. The developed nations of the world are still reeling under the impact of a financial crisis-fuelled-economic crisis, whose effects are being felt in other parts of the world too. The so-called western model of socio-economic development is in disarray. Polayni’s ‘great transformation’ is gone – there are now new transformations taking place that require a new understanding of socio-economic institutions, especially the labour market. In this context, a book examining the notion of ‘social income’ in a developing country offers a fresh perspective. More so because it examines many of these issues through the lens of low-income women workers – who contribute much to India’s growth, but who so often are also ignored in socio-economic policies.
Social income, as defined in this book, is a broader concept of household income which includes state, community and private benefits ‘…social income is an attempt to identify all sources of income, as a means of assessing an individual’s command over resources and the social pattern of entitlements’ (p. 1). The book illustrates how these different components can or should be measured and provides a composite picture of the structure of incomes and support systems of different societal groups. It recognizes that the structure of income and its distribution is linked to economic and social policy and the dynamics of development and argues that unless we have a more ‘holistic’ approach to income and income support systems around the world, it will not be possible to develop policy measures and interventions that are appropriate. And it develops this perspective through a household survey in rural and urban areas of Gujarat, India in 2008.
In other words, the book develops a concept that is global in scope and understanding and tests it, locally in the very specific context of India’s Gujarat state which is the home of the Self Employed Women’s Association. This helps in demonstrating the universality of the idea itself.
This survey had its genesis in the People’s Security Survey (PSS) carried out in Gujarat in 2001 (p. 23). The introductory chapter, ‘Social Income, Globalization and a World of Unending Uncertainty’ resonates the link between the global and the local and the need for using different policy interventions to deal with different forms of insecurity. Running into some 200 odd pages, it presents these ideas in a manner that makes it easily readable while being intellectually rich, interweaving economic analysis with case studies of women workers. It illustrates how policies and their impact are mediated by the intervening institutions, including both the gendered nature of the labour market and the efficacy or otherwise of the local government.
Let me now take up a few key issues from the book for comment, with the aim of provoking a wider debate. There is no doubt that looking at income in totality, or in a holistic manner, is useful for academic as well as policy analysis, especially if the context is that of security/insecurity. Calling this ‘social income’ instead of ‘total income’ perhaps promotes a language of aspiration.
As the authors note, the concept of social income provides a framework for the analyst to ‘weave a story that is richer than that using the concept of money income alone.’ It also provides an understanding of the extent to which the individual is ‘commodified’ – a higher wage income share of social income implies greater ‘commodification’ (p 3). While this is largely true, for many women in developing countries in India and elsewhere who work but do not get paid – ‘unpaid family workers’ and ‘unpaid care workers’ – this may not be so. The fact that they do not get a wage income does not mean that they are not participating in the labour market and are not ‘commodified’ as it were. Their labour market status is linked to the concept of ‘control’ that the book explores. As the book notes, ‘control’ is not only looking at income in totality, but also at mechanisms that allow or not (as it were) the decision-making power over income earned for self or for the family. For the group of ‘unpaid family workers’ and ‘unpaid care workers’, there is neither paid income nor control over the income they contribute to.
For many others even paid work does not ensure rights of control, as is demonstrated by the experience of low income workers in this survey and in the previous People’s Security Survey (PSS). A logistic regression analysis of the PSS in Gujarat in 2001 had found statistical evidence for the hypothesis that women who are organized (in this context members of SEWA) are more likely to have control over their earnings than those who are not. The 2008 survey on which the book is based upholds this hypothesis. However, an earnings function specifying many variables including membership to SEWA in 2001 did not indicate any significant relation between being a SEWA member and higher incomes, though this survey shows that there is a positive correlation between income and SEWA membership. While mention is made of the 2001 survey (and the authors of this book were involved with the previous survey too), there is no comparison on broad issues between the two. Many issues examined in this survey were examined in the previous one. Admittedly the samples are not the same, but certainly some broad indications of change (or its lack thereof) in the five ensuing years would have been interesting and revealing.
Second, an underlying issue in the social income analysis is the relation between the different components of social income. The book notes, for example, that there is a positive correlation between labour income and enterprise benefits – meaning that higher wages and salaries possibly imply more formal and secure job scenarios in the formal sector which also provide various enterprise benefits. And this has an inequalizing effect. Guy Standing in his writing, here and elsewhere, has argued that with globalization there has been a withering of other forms of income such as enterprise benefits and state benefits, and an increase in the monetary earnings form of income.
In other words, there has been an erosion of the responsibility of the state and the enterprise and, as a result, income as such is more vulnerable to shocks and crisis than it was before globalization. To that extent, an insecurity adjusted social income today, where the predominant form of income is money income from labour, may show less dispersion than one where money incomes for certain groups were supplemented by other forms of benefits. There is, in other words, a trend towards greater insecurity in social income for all income groups. But the rise in insecurity is more for those who were earlier better-off because of enterprise benefits. The poorer groups were insecure then, and continue to be insecure now – but as the book explains, the community benefits that the poor had access to in the past are fast diminishing too.
This brings us to the other major assertion of this book – that ‘security is worth something’ (p. 1). In a world characterized by informal contracts, casual precarious employment and subcontracted work on the one hand and volatility of financial markets and the changing role of the state on the other, there are many who lament the loss of socio-economic security. But how do we claim/reclaim some basic level of socio-economic security? There are strong arguments to support the fact that states in developing countries need to play a more pro-active role, contrary to what many neo-liberals would have us believe.
The book examines the three possible ‘lines’ for state benefits – the commodity line (food etc), the labour line (NREGA) or the cash line. It argues that the cash line is gaining respectability and argues for unconditional universal (as opposed to targeted) cash transfer schemes as the way of the future (p. 202). This is not a new idea, but one that is increasingly being discussed. Redistributive cash transfers will certainly raise aggregate demand, at least in the short to medium term. Granted that fiscal issues are not a constraint, further research is required to understand the sustainability of a model of development based on such transfers.
This book certainly raises many questions, and provokes debate. What it does not question is the current growth path. That is taken to be inevitable – growth will create inequalities, will exacerbate vulnerabilities, and jobs created will be of poor quality. The book deals with the means to counter these negative impacts through a redistributive strategy based on universal cash transfer mechanisms. This is certainly one way of looking at it, and in a progressive way. But the fundamental problem lies elsewhere – in the model of growth itself that creates these inequalities in the first place. And the critical question, perhaps, is how the nature of growth must change to reduce vulnerabilities and to improve job quality.
To sum up, this is an important book. Experimental in nature, it presents a convincing case for looking at the different forms of income that form ‘social income’ and their interrelationships, for policy intervention. It has a strong message for policy-makers regarding the role of the state. And a strong message that workers in developing countries, in these uncertain times, will need direct support through state benefits.
Sukti Dasgupta
SOCIAL PROTECTION AS DEVELOPMENT POLICY: Asian Perspectives by Sarah Cook and Naila Kabeer. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.
ORTHODOX measures for social protection are by nature aimed at coping with risks arising from various contingencies, and fail to address the fundamental causes of insecurity and vulnerability. Broadening the goal of social protection from risk minimization or alleviation to risk elimination would imply a shift in strategy from preventing a fall in income or minimizing its fluctuation to raising the level of income. There are two problems to be addressed by any programme of social protection: First, countering the effect of random shocks; and, second, increasing security for all so that people do not live in constant fear of a calamity. While the first can be termed protective security, the second is promotional security. This requires fundamental reforms that attempt to modify the institutional environment in which the informal sector functions.
The World Bank with its focus on Social Risk Management addresses individual risks such as illness, accidents, widowhood, disability, old age and death, as well as collective risks like drought, bad harvests, natural disasters, riots etc. These are social risks arising from life cycle or crisis events and the need to tackle or cope with crisis or risks essentially rests on the protective aspect. The UN with its emphasis on human capital formation actually adopts a long-term strategy and the immediate economic problems or solutions are not addressed. The ILO through its objectives of ‘decent work’ is clearly promoting work and emphasizing social dialogue which would allow workers to accrue benefits; the modalities, however, remain unclear. Though most of these approaches try to emphasize structural factors like land and asset distribution, certain inherent structural factors like activity status of the workers and gender are completely missed out. This book attempts to widen the concept of social protection and addresses some of these issues. Cook and Kabeer argue that the Asian perspective favours the development perspective of social protection.
This edited volume consists of an introductory chapter by the editors and eleven different cases of social protection from Asian countries. These papers form part of a research programme on social protection initiated in 1999 and funded by the Ford Foundation. There are four chapters on various issues in urban China, one each on Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh, two chapters on India and one each on South and South East Asia. The topics are quite varied. The papers on China cover issues of shock induced poverty, vulnerabilities of dependent children, laid-off workers and rural migrant workers. The study in Indonesia covers social protection and market reforms, while the Bangladesh study analyzes the BRAC approach. Two other chapters discuss issues of home-based workers and one each focus on property rights and domestic violence and food security. The issue of targeting in social protection programmes is the theme of the study in Indonesia. In the introductory chapter, the editors have succeeded in bringing these diverse studies together by discussing vulnerabilities in terms of deficits, exclusions and poverty traps, and highlighting the possible implications for policy.
The four studies on China, taken together provide interesting insights into the changing scenario of vulnerabilities of different groups as the country dismantles its universal social security schemes and develops market orientation. The two chapters by Cook and Jolly and Wang et al. provide particularly interesting insights into the dilemmas and crisis faced by laid-off workers and rural migrants in the changing context. The process of restructuring of the industries raises questions of women’s identity, as the earlier socialist ideal of gender equality of work status was gradually eroded. The major gains for women in their social status during the socialist regime was slowly lost with the penetration of market ideology. The plight of rural migrants workers as they lose the benefits of their rural hokou and their inferior status regarding social protection compared to the urban citizens is brought out starkly.
The story of Vietnam’s entry into the market economy with economic reforms introduced in 1986 is similar to the case of China (chapter by Bach and Duong). As workers lost their life-long employment and social protection support, their vulnerabilities and inequalities increased. The two groups identified as having suffered the most are the agricultural workers and the rural to urban migrants. Social networks facilitated the migration process and social capital was used to sustain them. The authors suggest changes in the old household registration system to take care of the changing reality of mobile populations. This system can be used to track migrants and provide social protection such as health of children. It would also encourage the small private businesses to enrol to ensure access to services in the area to their workers. This might help to fill the gap between institutional and community social protection and economic growth.
The two chapters on home-based workers bring out the vulnerabilities faced and lack of social protection due to the status of such work. These studies, with assistance from the network of organizations of home-based workers, Homenet South Asia and Homenet South East Asia, formed part of the process of information gathering and advocacy for these workers in these countries. The emphasis was on economic security for these workers and housing was identified as a major need to be included under social protection programmes, since the house was at the same time a place of residence and a place of work.
The two studies on Kerala bring out the importance of property rights and food in securing the lives of the people. The two studies were conducted in comparison with other states, West Bengal and Orissa, and in both the cases people of Kerala were found to be relatively more secure. The impact of property rights on women and domestic violence on women is found to be mediated through the type of social support she receives. Social norms and the role of the natal family are found to be critical factors influencing both property rights and domestic violence. The paper highlights the vulnerabilities arising out of ‘relational inequalities’, which are seldom considered when designing social protection policy. The better experiences of food security in Kerala is seen as an outcome of sustained public action mediated by land reforms and worker’s organizations, that ensured better targeted and non-targeted public provisioning.
The last two chapters present some challenges for policy. The Indonesian study (Suryahadi, et al.) discusses the methodologies and mechanisms of targeting of programmes that can address vulnerabilities and exclusions. The methodology suggested to design poverty maps for the country was implemented in Indonesia through a pilot project and received mixed results. The method, however, appears very cumbersome and data intensive so that the practicality of implementing it in developing countries with poor data bases remains in doubt. The Bangladesh study describes the extensive experience of Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in the field of poverty reduction (Matin, et al.).
The chapters in the book are a successful attempt to stretch the concept of social protection beyond the boundaries of the conventional social welfare programmes. The themes selected and the populations studied are also unconventional for a study of social protection. This is at the same time both the strength and the weakness of the volume. The strength is the range and depth of the issues considered and deliberated upon in such scholarly fashion. However, the weakness of the book is that these diverse themes do not necessarily pull together as a cohesive whole and the reader has difficulty in relating the chapters with each other. Some of the chapters are technically weak, for example when the authors undertake regressions analysis and report results which are not statistically significant. They also draw conclusions based on these non-significant results.
Overall, this is an important contribution to the growing literature on social protection. It also was a prelude to another research programme on social protection coordinated by the authors, which should also eventually appear as a book adding further insights into the debate. The current book is essential reading for academics and practitioners interested in issues of social protection in Asia. The bottom-up approach to social protection advocated by the authors, the various entry points for intervention examined in the chapters, and the argument for a mix of programmes and approaches to tackle the problems of poverty, vulnerability and insecurity are refreshing and the major contribution of the volume.
Jeemol Unni
