The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed about India’s overtaking China in the rate of growth of GNP, while not comparing India with China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy. Economic growth can, of course, be enormously helpful in advancing living standards and in battling poverty. But there is little cause for taking the growth of GNP to be an end in itself, rather than seeing it as an important means for achieving things we value. Dinodia/Stock Connection/Aurora Photos Girls in a classroom in the Indian model village of Ralegan Siddhi, northeast of Pune, Maharashtra, 2006 It could, however, be asked why this distinction should make much difference, since economic growth does enhance our ability to improve living standards. The central point to appreciate here is that while economic growth is important for enhancing living conditions, its reach and impact depend greatly on what we do with the increased income. The relation between economic growth and the advancement of living standards depends on many factors, including economic and social inequality and, no less importantly, on what the government does with the public revenue that is generated by economic growth. Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census. As a result of India’s effort to improve the schooling of girls, its literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has clearly risen; but that rate is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent. One of the serious failures of India is that a very substantial proportion of Indian children are, to varying degrees, undernourished (depending on the criteria used, the proportion can come close to half of all children), compared with a very small proportion in China. Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China. Comparing India with China according to such standards can be more useful for policy discussions in India than confining the comparison to GNP growth rates only. Those who are fearful that India’s growth performance would suffer if it paid more attention to “social objectives” such as education and health care should seriously consider that notwithstanding these “social” activities and achievements, China’s rate of GNP growth is still clearly higher than India’s. Higher GNP has certainly helped China to reduce various indicators of poverty and deprivation, and to expand different features of the quality of life. There is every reason to want to encourage sustainable economic growth in India in order to improve living standards today and in the future (including taking care of the environment in which we live). Sustainable economic growth is a very good thing in a way that “growth mania” is not. GNP per capita is, however, not invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for those features depend also on other things that we do—or fail to do. Compare India with Bangladesh. In income, India has a huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of $1,170, compared with $590 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power. This difference has expanded rapidly because of India’s faster rate of recent economic growth, and that, of course, is a point in India’s favor. India’s substantially higher rank than Bangladesh in the UN Human Development Index (HDI) is largely due to this particular achievement. But we must ask how well India’s income advantage is reflected in other things that also matter. I fear the answer is: not well at all. Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas young women still have substantially lower rates than young males in India. There is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh’s current progress has a great deal to do with the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the country. What about health? The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPTvaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite having only half of India’s per capita income. Of course, Bangladesh’s living conditions will benefit greatly from higher economic growth, particularly if the country uses it as a means of doing good things, rather than treating economic growth and high per capita income as ends in themselves. It is to the huge credit of Bangladesh that despite the adversity of low income it has been able to do so much so quickly; the imaginative activism of Bangladeshi NGOs (such as the Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit institution, and BRAC, a large-scale initiative aimed at removing poverty) as well as the committed public policies of the government have both contributed to the results. But higher income, including larger public resources, will obviously enhance Bangladesh’s ability to achieve better lives for its people. One of the positive things about economic growth is that it generates public resources that the government can devote to its priorities. In fact, public resources very often grow faster than the GNP. The gross tax revenue, for example, of the government of India (corrected for price rise) is now more than four times what it was just twenty years ago, in 1990–1991. This is a substantially bigger jump than the price-corrected GNP. Expenditure on what is somewhat misleadingly called the “social sector”—health, education, nutrition, etc.—has certainly gone up in India. And yet India is still well behind China in many of these fields. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per capita income than India, but even in relative terms, while the Chinese government spends nearly 2 percent of GDP (1.9 percent) on health care, the proportion is only a little above one percent (1.1 percent) in India. One result of the relatively low allocation of funds to public health care in India is that large numbers of poor people across the country rely on private doctors, many of whom have little medical training. Since health is also a typical example of “asymmetric information,” in which the patients may know very little about what the doctors (or “supposed doctors”) are giving them, even the possibility of fraud and deceit is very large. In a study conducted by the Pratichi Trust—a public interest trust I set up in 1999—we found cases in which the ignorance of poor patients about their condition was exploited so as to make them pay for treatment they didn’t get. This is the result not only of shameful exploitation, but ultimately of the sheer unavailability of public health care in many parts of India. The benefit that we can expect to get from economic growth depends very much on how the public revenue generated by economic growth is expended. When we consider the impact of economic growth on people’s lives, comparisons favor China over India. However, there are many fields in which a comparison between China and India is not related to economic growth in any obvious way. Most Indians are strongly appreciative of the democratic structure of the country, including its many political parties, systematic free elections, uncensored media, free speech, and the independent standing of the judiciary, among other characteristics of a lively democracy. Those Indians who are critical of serious flaws in these arrangements (and I am certainly one of them) can also take account of what India has already achieved in sustaining democracy, in contrast to many other countries, including China. Not only is access to the Internet and world opinion uncensored and unrestricted in India, a multitude of media present widely different points of view, often very critical of the government in office. India has a larger circulation of newspapers each day than any other country in the world. And the newspapers reflect contrasting political perspectives. Economic growth has helped—and this has certainly been a substantial gain—to expand the availability of radios and televisions across the country, including in rural areas, which very often are shared among many users. There are at least 360 independent television stations (and many are being established right now, judging from the licenses already issued) and their broadcasts reflect a remarkable variety of points of view. More than two hundred of these TV stations concentrate substantially or mainly on news, many of them around the clock. There is a sharp contrast here with the monolithic system of newscasting permitted by the state in China, with little variation of political perspectives on different channels. Freedom of expression has its own value as a potentially important instrument for democratic politics, but also as something that people enjoy and treasure. Even the poorest parts of the population want to participate in social and political life, and in India they can do so. There is a contrast as well in the use of trial and punishment, including capital punishment. China often executes more people in a week than India has executed since independence in 1947. If our focus is on a comprehensive comparison of the quality of life in India and China, we have to look well beyond the traditional social indicators, and many of these comparisons are not to China’s advantage. Could it be that India’s democratic system is somehow a barrier to using the benefits of economic growth in order to enhance health, education, and other social conditions? Clearly not, as I shall presently discuss. It is worth recalling that when India had a very low rate of economic growth, as was the case until the 1980s, a common argument was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard to convince those opposed to democracy that fast economic growth depends on an economic climate congenial to development rather than on fierce political control, and that a political system that protects democratic rights need not impede economic growth. That debate has now ended, not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India. We can now ask: How should we assess the alleged conflict between democracy and the use of the fruits of economic growth for social advancement? What a democratic system achieves depends greatly on which social conditions become political issues. Some conditions become politically important issues quickly, such as the calamity of a famine (thus famines tend not to occur at all when there is a functioning democracy), while other problems—less spectacular and less immediate—provide a much harder challenge. It is much more difficult to use democratic politics to remedy undernourishment that is not extreme, or persistent gender inequality, or the absence of regular medical care for all. Success or failure here depends on the range and vigor of democratic practice.1 In recent years Indian democracy has made considerable progress in dealing with some of these conditions, such as gender inequality, lack of schools, and widespread undernourishment. Public protests, court decisions, and the use of the recently passed “Right to Information” Act have had telling effects. But India still has a long way to go in remedying these conditions. In China, by contrast, the process of decision-making depends largely on decisions made by the top Party leaders, with relatively little democratic pressure from below. The Chinese leaders, despite their skepticism about the values of multiparty democracy and personal and political liberty, are strongly committed to eliminating poverty, undernourishment, illiteracy, and lack of health care; and this has greatly helped in China’s advancement. There is, however, a serious fragility in any authoritarian system of governance, since there is little recourse or remedy when the government leaders alter their goals or suppress their failures. The reality of that danger revealed itself in a catastrophic form in the Chinese famine of 1959–1962, which killed more than 30 million people, when there was no public pressure against the regime’s policies, as would have arisen in a functioning democracy. Mistakes in policy continued for three years while tens of millions died. To take another example, the economic reforms of 1979 greatly improved the working and efficiency of Chinese agriculture and industry; but the Chinese government also eliminated, at the same time, the entitlement of all to public medical care (which was often administered through the communes). Most people were then required to buy their own health insurance, drastically reducing the proportion of the population with guaranteed health care. In a functioning democracy an established right to social assistance could not have been so easily—and so swiftly—dropped. The change sharply reduced the progress of longevity in China. Its large lead over India in life expectancy dwindled during the following two decades—falling from a fourteen-year lead to one of just seven years. The Chinese authorities, however, eventually realized what had been lost, and from 2004 they rapidly started reintroducing the right to medical care. China now has a considerably higher proportion of people with guaranteed health care than does India. The gap in life expectancy in China’s favor has been rising again, and it is now around nine years; and the degree of coverage is clearly central to the difference.2 Whether India’s democratic political system can effectively remedy neglected public services such as health care is one of the most urgent questions facing the country.3 For a minority of the Indian population—but still very large in actual numbers—economic growth alone has been very advantageous, since they are already comparatively privileged and need no social assistance to benefit from economic growth. The limited prosperity of recent years has helped to support a remarkable variety of lifestyles as well as globally acclaimed developments of Indian literature, music, cinema, theater, painting, and the culinary arts, among other cultural activities. Yet an exaggerated concentration on the lives of the relatively prosperous, exacerbated by the Indian media, gives an unrealistically rosy picture of the lives of Indians in general. Since the fortunate group includes not only business leaders and the professional classes but also many of the country’s intellectuals, the story of unusual national advancement is widely and persistently heard. More worryingly, relatively privileged Indians can easily fall for the temptation to focus just on economic growth as a grand social benefactor for all. Some critics of the huge social inequalities in India find something callous and uncouth in the self-centered lives and inward-looking preoccupations of a relatively prosperous minority. My primary concern, however, is that the illusions generated by those distorted perceptions of prosperity may prevent India from bringing social deprivations into political focus, which is essential for achieving what needs to be done for Indians at large through its democratic system. A fuller understanding of the real conditions of the mass of neglected Indians and what can be done to improve their lives through public policy should be a central issue in the politics of India. This is exactly where the exclusive concentration on the rate of GNP growth has the most damaging effect. Economic growth can make a very large contribution to improving people’s lives; but single-minded emphasis on growth has limitations that need to be clearly understood. I have discussed this issue more fully in " How Is India Doing? ," The New York Review , December 16, 1982; in (jointly with Jean Drèze) Hunger and Public Action(Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1989); and in Development as Freedom(Knopf, 1999). ↩ I discuss this in "The Art of Medicine: Learning from Others," The Lancet , January 15, 2011. ↩ I am grateful to Lincoln Chen, Jean Drèze, and A.K. Shiva Kumar for helpful discussion of this and related issues. ↩http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/quality-life-india-vs-china/?pagination=false
By Amartya Sen
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Sunday, May 22, 2011
Quality of Life: India vs. China
Friday, February 11, 2011
Contradictions of ‘development’ in contemporary India
Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit? A large number of Indians from various cross-sections are currently enraged about this crucial question. While official outlets make frantic efforts to project this tendency as a contradiction between modernity and backwardness and label anyone questioning the validity of the above development model as ‘anti-development’ or ‘unlawful’, innumerable lived experiences go on reflecting heightening inequalities and the increasing expendability of the poor. Take the case of the resource-rich tribal heartland of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh located in central and eastern India. Mining areas in these states are enthusiastically being leased out to global corporations leaving the poor tribal community homeless; common lands and waste lands in several states that have been traditionally providing livelihood and survival means to the poor are being taken over to make Special Economic Zones; rich coastal areas with enormous bio-diversity are being handed over to corporations like Dow Chemicals for making chemical hubs; natural resources like rivers are being privatised for industrial and commercial purposes, like the Sheonath river in Chattisgarh. Examples abound. This ‘development’ process that rests heavily on displacement, dispossession and destruction of the environment is creating an irreversible production structure in favour of the rich that is actively supported by all major international financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and the like and facilitated by the neoliberal Indian state. Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved. Specific areas in India – large and small, rural and urban - are being identified as global economic regions to carry out modern hi-tech corporatised activities. Essentially global, these new economic spaces (location choices are made by investing corporations) are carved out from existing agricultural areas, forest lands, mining areas, fishing zones, peripheries of metropolitan regions, villages, even slums and dilapidated areas inside cities. In the process of converting these spaces into newer ones, large numbers of farmers, agricultural labourers, fishermen, in short a huge section of economically active but poor people are being displaced and dispossessed leading to fierce resistance struggles, inviting in response, state atrocities and violence. The phenomenon has become pan-Indian: whether in Raigad in Maharashtra, Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal, in Jagatsinghapur-Kalinganagar in Orissa or Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, the patterns are comparable. The official argument says that as the State is not financially capable of providing ‘world class infrastructure’ in a short time, it is necessary to invite private capital to provide it initially in chosen pockets that will boost economic growth in the surrounding regions. While private capital undertakes this task, it becomes obligatory on the part of the State to offer them concessions and subsidies, in exchange. Land acquisition for such global spaces is undertaken by invoking a Colonial Act of 1894 that says that the State is the ultimate owner of land and can take over any tract for ‘public purposes’ by paying reasonable (sic) compensation. Enclave development, once a mainstay of the colonial state, has made a glorious come back in contemporary Indian economic policy. This newer form of capitalist development depends on global finance and technology and a supportive neoliberal hegemonic discourse. It goes beyond the previous practice of disaggregation and production relocation in areas with lower social reproduction costs to an altogether newer design of total appropriation of space for a novel exploitation process. Set to mutate all existing social relations, it further modifies the non-Fordist labour process, transforms relations between the dominant and the dominated and alienates space-economies from their respective social realities to construct an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory. The common collective interest and the public good start getting negotiated away by ideological, political and economic power-plays that privilege individual accumulation, subordinating the common people and their rights in a way that is even used to underpin justifications for state violence. Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved. Resting on a contradictory framework of inclusion (of the few) and exclusion (of the many) it materialises a multiscalar, uneven development involving integration of selective regions and sections of societies in a globalised market framework. A destructive ensemble of obsoletism and reconstruction diffuses across the old spaces, displacing the existing use values and altering the discursive as well as the material geography of such spaces, creating a solid, material background for intense conflicts. A typical neoliberal construction of space, place and scale is taking place in India that is reconstructing a new geography of centrality and marginality, making the issues of production and capitalisation of space extremely crucial. The resultant landscapes of conflict invite resistance and contestation from below by those whose livelihoods get jeopardised and who are systematically marginalised by the state apparatus in diverse ways that expose their vulnerability in the current order. To identify the causal factors, one needs to look at the direction of India’s current economic momentum. There has been a far-reaching shift in her economic policy, facilitating ingress of global capital in all economic sectors, downsizing labour, outsourcing economic activities, and promoting an aggressive urbanism based on gentrification and privatisation. Based on exploitation of the product of labour, pillage of nature and expropriation of social property, such policies have a close connection with international financial institutions, the global corporate sector, and quite significantly, the major capitalist countries. The State, backtracking from its previous role of a provider takes a neoliberal stance, becoming a vociferous facilitator of private capital pitching heavily on a ‘politically neutral’ practice of developmental governmentality. While the country’s growth roars ahead at an annual 8 per cent, growth in regular employment in recent years is found to have exceeded not even 1 per cent. Quite logically India accounts for the largest number of homeless, illiterate and ill-fed people in the world. Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved. Amidst the euphoria of creating a free market, in practice the contemporary policies are resulting in a dramatic intensification of a coercive disciplinary form of state intervention to impose a market rule that subjugates the majority and protects the ‘strong’. This is taking place on an aggressively contested institutional landscape in which newly emerging ‘economic spaces’ stand in conflict with inherited regulatory arrangements, providing a political arena through which subsequent struggles over accumulation by dispossession and its associated contradictions are getting articulated and fought out at various scales questioning the prevailing development path of the country, assuming a national character, often supported by pan-Indian coalitions of regional resistance groups, broadly/basically left oriented but not belonging to mainstream left parties. The resultant negotiating strategy of the neoliberal state creating multi-level contradictory spaces of conciliation, coercion and atrocity is significant in exposing the porosity of the state apparatus. One needs to emphasise that the contextual embeddedness of the current exclusionist economic policy in India, produced at national, regional and local scales, are not only getting defined by the nexus of policy regimes, disciplinary political authorities and their regulatory practices, but also by resistance struggles, consolidated grassroots movements and mobilisation of progressive forces that are challenging the state sponsored corporatised development paradigm. Peripatetic global capital in collision with state power may exhibit its authority in controlling spaces and territories for some time, but the ongoing struggles clearly point at an emerging discourse in search of an alternate paradigm, based on a democratically oriented sustainable development practice. For references and full development of issues see: Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (1997). Spatial Dynamics of International Capital, Orient Longman, Hyderabad. Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2002). 'Critical Geographical Praxis: Globalisation and Socio-Spatial Disorder', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.37 (44 & 45), pp. 4503-09, Mumbai. Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2008): ‘Space Relations of Capital and Significance of New Economic Enclaves: SEZs in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 43(47), pp. 51-60, Mumbai Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2009): ‘Contradictions of Enclave Development in Contemporary Times: Special Economic Zones in India’ Human Geography, Vol. 2(1), pp 1-12, Massachusetts Bhaduri, A (2008): 'Predatory Growth', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.43(16), pp.10-13, Mumbai. Bourdieu, P (1998): 'The Essence of Neoliberalism', Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998. Brenner, N and N. Theodore (2002): ’Cities and Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, Vol. 34, pp 349-379 Conway, D and N Heynen (2006): 'The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism and Emergence of Contemporary Globalisation' in Denis Conway and Nik Heynen, (eds.)., Globalisation's Contradictions, Routledge, U.K. Cox, H (1999): 'The Market as God: Living in the New Dispensation',Atlantic Monthly, March, pp.18-23. Gill, S (1995): ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, Vol. 24, pp 399-423. Harvey, D (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, New Delhi.
The vociferous state
Friday, February 4, 2011
The Potential of the Forest Rights Act
http://sanhati.com/excerpted/3197/
By Sirisha Naidu, Sanhati
Introduction
Neoliberalism in India, rather than consisting of a wholesale withdrawal of the state, has seen its rollback in some spheres and an expansion in others. In the last few decades the state has withdrawn from providing basic goods and services, but has taken a much more active role in promoting new avenues of profitable investment (e.g., those associated with free market environmentalism, facilitating the process of commodification of goods and services that were previously outside the ambit of the capitalist market, and facilitating the privatization of state property). The Indian state has therefore played an active role in original accumulation, which involves the dispossession and expropriation of land from marginalized people in rural and urban areas, as well as ensuring that adequate resources (e.g., natural resources) are available to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of capital. It is in this context that the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA), hailed as a “historic” legislation was passed.
Shankar Gopalakrishnan identifies the opponents of the Act as the forest bureaucracy and the English media, and is particularly critical of the latter’s neoliberal outlook, its attack on the FRA, and its favourable view of state control “as a proxy for policies that favour private capital” (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a). However, he recognizes that certain aspects of the FRA might be beneficial to capital. Indeed, neoliberalism is not a single, undifferentiated process divorced from capitalism; rather its diverse and interlinked practices may reflect a “heightened, evolved and more destructive form of capitalism” (Heynen and Robbins, 2005). In this essay, I offer some exploratory observations about these neoliberal aspirations of the Act.
Reform and Revolution?
The compulsion to design and pass the Act might be located in the demands of a political constituency. It might also be located in the recognition of the growing threat of left-wing insurgency (Gopalakrishnan, 2010b). Samuel Huntington (1968) aptly noted that
If the countryside supports the government, the system is secure against revolution and the government has some hope of making itself secure against revolution. If the countryside is in opposition, both system and government are in danger of overthrow. (pp 292).
The Act however, goes beyond addressing the immediate issue of survival and security for forest dwellers that might be needed to pacify those marginalized and even persecuted by “development”. As Gopalakrishnan notes, it is also “an entry point into a deeper, wider politics of struggle over resources” (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a). For this reason, the representatives of the state (especially the Forest Department) have worked to restrict the scope of the FRA to tenurial security and subvert the provisions of community rights and the rights against arbitrary displacement [1].
As the recent controversy surrounding the sanction of Rs. 25 crore per “naxal-affected” district for so-called development purposes [2] indicates, the Indian state has little or no real interest in changing the terms of its engagement with forest dwellers, nor veering from the path of “development” itself. Control of these monies is to be given to a committee comprising the Collector, Superintendent of Police and District Forest Officer. To the extent that the FRA might stabilize political power and prevent revolutions, the Act might be considered desirable from the point of view of the state but beyond that even the interpretation restricted to implementing private property rights has seen limited success. Oddly, the economic and political context under which the FRA is being implemented is reminiscent of land reform carried out by the US in East Asia where large-scale land reform was accompanied by military suppression of radical forces, and involved no political marginalization of the landed class (see Moyo and Yeros, 2005).
The Environmental Fix
To the extent that neoliberals express an interest in the FRA, their focus has been on institutionalizing a particular property regime in forests (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a). The neoliberal property regimes include policies like titling, land surveys and mapping, establishing state land registries, creating new landholding legislation and removing restrictions on land leasing (Sethi, 2006). The policy goals are tenure security, creation of land markets, and improved creditworthiness, and fulfilling the needs of the agrarian export sector.
With the agroforestry expected to develop 25.36 million hectares of land in the next two decades from current utilization of 7.45 million hectares (NRCAF, 2007 cited in Dhyani, et al., 2009), the focus on property regimes could be beneficial. The bourgeoning agro-forestry sector has received a fillip with World Bank sponsored bio-carbon projects in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh under the Clean Development Mechanism (DTE, 2008), World Bank proposed plantation projects in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, and recent developments on REDD Plus discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun in 2010. Understandably, there is a legitimate fear that the newly titled lands could be used for agricultural or forestry related commercial projects. Agro-forestry may not be consistent with livelihood objectives of forest dwellers, but it also may not adequately satisfy the demands for democratization. Experiences with forestry schemes since the 1980s in their many avatars have been criticized for being hierarchical, exclusionary and undemocratic despite adopting buzzwords such as community, participation and decentralization (Sarin et al., 2003). Typically the state (represented by the Forest Department), donors and conservation and development agencies decide the management plan and forest dwellers participate as cheap wage labor and provide free monitoring.
The promotion of property rights in the forest sector will also provide incentives to engage in conservation and management to support the anticipated high growth carbon market. The World Bank’s State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2010 reported that the value of the global carbon market stood at $144 billion in 2009 [3]. While carbon finance dropped in 2009 as a response to the global economic crisis, At the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s third Participants Assembly meeting that took place in Washington DC in September 2010, donor counties committed $100 million in new pledges [4] to support REDD Plus initiatives. Incidentally, it is seen as the only silver lining in global negotiations over the successor to the Kyoto Protocol that is set to expire in 2012. According to Mr. Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment and Forests indications, India will participate in the bounties of the REDD Plus initiatives.
The commodification (even if incomplete) of forest goods and services re-engineers social and cultural notions of forests and nature to fit within the market rubric. Livelihoods can be conditioned through the market with the monetizing of forestland and forest resources and creating what Karl Polanyi termed as “fictional commodities”. This opens up the possibilities for the creation of a new capitalist class in the rural areas, dominated as they are by agrarian interests. The promotion of agroforestry on the one hand provides raw materials, and on the other hand provides fodder to sustain financial instruments in carbon and other forms of environmental trading. As Castree (2007) suggests about free market environmentalism and Sagari Ramdas (2009) demonstrates in her study on FRA implementation, there is sufficient reason to doubt the “ecofriendly motivations” of such instruments. Instead they may be viewed as environmental fixes to the problem of sustained economic growth (Castree, 2008; also see Naidu and Manolakos, 2010).
Self Provisioning, Social Reproduction and Enclosures
Under previous stages of capitalism, original accumulation freed up resources for efficient exploitation by capitalist production but was able to accommodate or absorb the consequent reliance of the population on wage labour, and produce rising wages and better economic conditions for workers. However, one may not expect past histories of capitalist industrialization to replicate themselves in a different milieu. Not only is the current form of capitalist development unable to maintain earlier levels of labour absorption, increasing labour flexibilisation and a decline in social provisioning (e.g., the rollback of the public distribution system) within a neoliberal economic regime serves to accentuate the fact that the system is increasingly unable or unwilling to accommodate the costs of social reproduction (see NCEUS, 2009).
Under conditions of insecure and oppressive wage employment, there is an increasing compulsion to engage in self provisioning by production of use values from land and other natural resources, and relying on the rural social net (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). The FRA partially fulfills this need. However, historically, self-provisioning has been beneficial to capitalist production as is acknowledged by writers in the 17th-19th century. Michael Perelman provides ample examples of writers who believed that workers should have some access to land so that they are not wholly reliant on wage labour but not sufficient to afford them independence from wage employment (Perelman, 2007). This sentiment is reflected in the following proposal in an 1800 issue of the Commercial and Agricultural Magazine
. . . a quarter acre of garden-ground will go a great way toward rendering the peasant independent of any assistance. However, in this beneficent intention moderation must be observed, or we may chance to transform the labourer into a petty farmer; from the most beneficial to the most useless of industry. When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings . . . the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work, and the hay-making and harvest . . . must suffer to a degree which . . . would sometimes prove a national inconvenience. [5]
Perelman surmises that individual property rights in land served as an inducement to more readily accept enclosures of the commons and so that agricultural employers could “profit from a cheaper labour force”. The latter follows from the subsidy that household production, care work as well as petty commodity production provides to proletarianised and semi-proletarianised wage labour. While livelihoods analysis scholars positively refer to the condition in which workers are forced to maintain a dual or multiple income strategy as livelihood diversification, it points to the insecurity associated with and inadequacy of wage labour employment. Secure access to land will allow workers to spend their “free” time and investment in providing for themselves outside of the market, thereby leaving workers to produce a higher surplus value in wage labour (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). Further, the existence of land as a fallback, however inadequate, also means that labour can always be pushed back to the land when no longer needed (Breman, 2000: 241). FRA implementation with its high rejection of claims and provision of titles to land much below that filed in claims is again consistent with this thesis though it is unclear whether this is a well-thought out strategy or merely points to the reluctance of the Forest Department to give up territorial control over forest land.
Further de jure rights also bring livelihoods and management practices hitherto unmonitored or uncontrolled within the ambit of state control (Poffenberger 1999 in Aguilar 2005). For instance, claiming forest rights necessarily disciplines the previously undisciplined population engaged in podu (slash and burn agriculture in Andhra Pradesh) into practicing settled agriculture. This represents a change in lifestyles conditioned by the FRA (Ramdas, 2009). While on the one hand, the market and the state can now control livelihood and related practices of forest dwellers, the settling of rights with its narrow interpretation of access and proprietorship, opens up vast amount of resources at the disposal of the state to engage in promoting capitalist interests and nation building (Springate-Baginski and Blaikie, 2007). This may be pursued without the need for even weak assurances that forest dwellers would partake in the resultant prosperity.
The potential implications of the FRA in enclosing the commons are not lost on its supposed beneficiaries as this quote from an interview by Sagari Ramdas (2009) with a Savara woman from Srikakulam district, AP suggests
I don’t know whether I was (more) free before the act or after the act. Earlier I was a “thief” in the eyes of the law, but learnt to survive. Now I am “legal” and have legally lost my land as the government took all and gave me nothing. We have “legally” been granted “two acres” of community land, whereas all this is ours (pointing to the hills beyond). We reject these titles. We reject these plantations. We will continue to struggle.
Concluding Thoughts
Heynen and Robbins (2005) list four aspects dominant to capital’s neoliberal agenda:
… governance, the institutional political compromises through which capitalist societies are negotiated; privatization, where natural resources … are turned over to firms and individuals; enclosure, the capture of common resources and the exclusion of the communities to which they are linked; and valuation, the process through which invaluable and complex ecosystems are reduced to commodities through pricing.
All four aspects of this agenda are embodied in India’s forest policies and are being imposed on the FRA. This essay discusses ways in which neoliberal capital might benefit from a neoliberal interpretation of the FRA, it must be noted that it also has to contend with a forest bureaucracy unwilling to fully implement even the most neoliberal friendly aspect of tenure security. Apart from neo-Malthusian narratives of the destruction of forests by poor forest dwellers, this might be explained using the notion of territorial logic (Harvey, 2003) that is reluctant to give up power over the forest sector as well as the fact that not all factions of capital will benefit from FRA implementation, one example is that of the Vedanta project in Orissa.
As a land reform program, the FRA is limited. Even on paper there is no intention to address the growing economic differentiation, no acknowledgement of landless forest dwellers, nor is the titling process accompanied by planned investment in agriculture (Das, 2010) or cheap sources of credit (Lerche, 2011). Its transformatory potential thus does not emerge merely from the change in property rights (to the extent that even this occurs). Rather its potential is vested in the space that it allows for a change in the discourse on forest rights with its inclusion of provisions for community rights and against arbitrary displacements, the political space that it allows for challenging existing hegemonies, and for building broader mobilizations (Gopalakrishnan, 2010a) - these are issues not tackled in this essay. The challenge that forest dwellers and their allies thus face is not only to secure the implementation of the FRA but also challenge its neoliberal interpretation.
Endnotes:
[1] See the Campaign for Survival and Dignity website http://www.forestrightsact.com/component/content/46?task=view , http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=69078
[3] http://go.worldbank.org/D2V9XWYHM0
[5] Cited in Thompson, E.P. (1963).The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage), pp. 219- 20. In Perelman (2007).
References:
Aguilar, F.V. (2005). Rural land struggles in Asia: Overview of selected contexts. In S. Moyo & P. Yeros. Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. New York: Zed Books.
Springate-Baginski, O. & Blaikie, P. (2007). Annexation, struggle and response: forest, people and power in India and Nepal. In O. Springate-Baginski & P. Blaikie (eds). Forests, People and Power: The Political Ecology of Reform in South Asia. London: Earthscan.
Breman, J. (2000). Labour and landlessness in South and South-east Asia. In D. Bryceson et al. (Ed.). Disappearing Peasantries? London: ITDG Publishing.
Castree, N. (2008). Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environment and Planning A. 40: 131-152.
Das, Debarshi (2010). Some aspects of agricultural investment In India: Part I. Sanhati, October 28, 2010. http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2905/
Dhyani, S.K., Kareemulla, K., Ajit, & Handa, A.K. (2009). Agroforestry potential and scope for development across agro-climatic zones in India. Indian Journal of Forestry 32(2): 181-190.
Gopalakrishnan, S. (2010a). Rights Legislations and the Indian State: Understanding The Nature and Meaning of the Forest Rights Act. Briefing prepared for mass organizations. Distributed by SRUTI.
Gopalakrishnan, S. (2010b). Forest Areas, Political Economy and the “Left-Progressive Line” on Operation Green Hunt. Radical Notes. 30th May 2010.
Harvey, D. (2003). A New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Heynen, N., & Robbins, P. (2005). The neoliberalization of nature: governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation. Capitalism Nature Socialism 16(1): 5-8.
Huntington, S. P. (1968). Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.
Lerche, J. (2011). Agrarian crisis and agrarian questions in India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 11(1): 104-118.
Moyo, S., & Yeros, P. (2005). Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. New York: Zed Books.
Naidu, S.C., & Manolakos, P.T. Primary accumulation, capitalist nature and sustainable development. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(29): 39-45.
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (2009): The Challenge of Employment in India: An Informal Economy Perspective, Ministry of Small Scale Industries, Government of India, New Delhi.
Perelman, Michael (2007). Primitive accumulation from feudalism to neoliberalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 18(2): 44-61.
Ramdas, S. (2009). Women, forestspaces and the law: Transgressing the boundaries. Economic and Political Weekly, 44(44): 65-73
Sarin, M., Singh, N.M., Sundar, N., & Bhogal, M. (2003). Devolution as a threat to democratic decision-making in forestry? Findings from three states in India. In by D.Edmunds and E. Wollenberg (Eds.). Local Forest Management: The Impacts of Devolution Policies. London, Earthscan Publications.
Sethi, Manpreet (2006). Land reforms in India: issues and challenges. In P. Rosset, R. Patel, & M. Courville (Eds). Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform. Oakland, Calif.: Food first Books.
I thank Panayiotis Manolakos for his comments.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Water Wars
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main48.asp?filename=Ne290111Thewater.asp You can lease a river in Chhattisgarh for 22 years. At just Rs. 1 per annum. While thousands go thirsty Rivers belong to nations. But, in Chhattisgarh they belong to corporations. BABA UMAR tracks the sale of six rivers in the state IN MAHMARA village of Durg district in Chhattisgarh, Ramoram Thakur, 70, recalls how as a boy he would sing and hear folklore about water, fishermen and farmers of his village, tucked into the western edge of Sheonath river. However, such legends have a tragic ending nowadays. Seated near a babul tree in the community choupal, the old man shares stories with children about how the river passed onto the hands of a private company, which denied villagers water for drinking, washing and irrigation, stopped fishermen from casting their nets and prevented locals from taking sand from the riverbed. “Their barrage drowned a cremation ground on the banks. Dozens of village located downstream were left with little water. What belonged to us for centuries is no longer available for our use,” he laments. Thakur is talking about the Sheonath, the first river to be handed over to a private group, Radius Water Limited (RWL), in 1998 by the government of undivided Madhya Pradesh through its undertaking, MP Aydhyogik Kendra Vikas Nigam Ltd (MPAKVN), now Chhattisgarh State Industrial Development Corporation (CSIDC). Despite major losses to the government, the state didn’t scrap the deal nor could it help the thirsty villagers. Since then, Chhattisgarh has seen hundreds of companies investing in the state and many vying for the river waters. In a recent deal, the Water Resource Department (WRD) gave its nod to 141 private and government projects for which it will be supplying nearly 2,600 million cubic metres (mcm) of water from rivers every year. Interestingly the state supplies only 2,000 mcm of water for irrigation every year. Carved out of Madhya Pradesh on 1 November 2000, Chhattisgarh wasn’t a water-scarce state. According to unofficial estimates, the state has 32,000 ponds. With major river basins — Mahanadi, Godavari, Narmada and Brahmani Kachar — and several major rivers — Kurkut, Mahanadi, Kharun, Sheonath, Indravati, Jonk, Kelo, Sabri, Hasdev, Peri, and Maand — water shortage was never an issue. But the priorities have changed. Earlier, dams were built to store water for irrigation. Now, they are being constructed for supplying water to industry. In fact, the Chhattisgarh government openly declares that it is committed to giving water to industries throughout the year but not to farmers for rabi crop. THE SALE of Chhattisgarh’s rivers began in 1998 when the then MP government handed a 23.6 km stretch of Sheonath river in Durg to RWL, pleading shortage of funds for supplying water to industries. In a shocking story of “corruption and favouritism”, as an Assembly nominated committee discovered later, the Rs. 9 crore project was signed on 5 October 1998 between MPAKVN and RWL on a build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) basis. The plan was to build a barrage on the Sheonath to supply up to 30 million litres per day (mld) to the Borai Industrial Centre. Construction was completed in two years and operations began in January 2001. “We got to know about the sale of the river only when RWL began harassing us,” alleges Khemlal Sahu, a farmer in Mahmara. “Almost 25 percent of the villagers are fishermen. They were stopped from fishing. Soon, fencing around the 23.6 km stretch began. Iron gates were erected on both sides of the barrage to prevent locals from approaching the river.” The deal inherited by the CSIDC gave RWL exclusive access to the river water for 22 years. It also held control rights over the supply of water to the Borai Industrial Centre and the CSIDC was obliged to provide land free of cost. CSIDC also handed over its entire infrastructure in Borai, and assets worth Rs. 5 crore to Kailash Soni, owner of Kailash Engineering, for a lease of a token Rs. 1 per year for establishing a water supply project on BOOT basis. The CSIDC was to purchase water from RWL and later sell it to the industrial units in Borai. Though there was a lack of sufficient demand for water, then MPAKVN managing director GS Mishra signed the agreement with RWL. Back then, Borai had two large and medium-scale industries, and their combined water requirement was between 1.14 and 2.5 mld, while the CSIDC had to compulsorily shell out money for 4 mld. Adding to the losses, CSIDC purchased water at Rs. 15 a cubic metre (1,000 litres) from RWL. However, it sold water to industries at only Rs. 12 a cubic metre. The agreement meant that CSIDC would incur a loss of 20 percent on every unit of water it sold. Increase in both supply or demand would mean higher losses. Adding to the toll was Hindustan Electro Graphite (HEG) that was to buy almost 90 percent of the CSIDC’s water sales but reneged on its agreement. While CSIDC continued to incur losses, public outrage fuelled by continuous harassment of people by RWL saw several NGOs participating in the agitation. Those who joined the protest included villagers from Mohlai, Boludi, Malood, Kotni, Piperchadi, Kekro Koli, Bedwa Pathra, Vagrum Nala and Basik Hai — all affected by the drying up of the Sheonath downstream. The Nadi Ghati Morcha (NGM) started a movement from Durg that reached Raipur and then Delhi. Roadblocks and rallies were held. The ferocity of the protests finally forced the then chief minister Ajit Jogi to announce the “abrogation of the RWL contract” on 2 April 2003. However, he didn’t keep his promise. NGM coordinator Gautam Bandhopadhyay says, “People had plenty of fresh water for cooking and working. But they don’t have rights over the common property. RWL may have invested money but the villagers who are living in the area for centuries have invested resources and have equal rights on the water.” ‘The government is ruining its resources. By favouring the private firms, it is harming the interests of the tribal farmers’ RAMESH AGARWAL,Founder, Jan Chetana PHOTOS: TARUN SEHRAWAT In 2003, the state Assembly constituted a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to probe the privatisation of Sheonath. The committee presented its report on 16 March 2007 lambasting both CSIDC and RWL for signing a deal that caused loss to the state exchequer and harm to villagers. THE GOVERNMENT vowed to cancel the contract “within a legal framework” and pay compensation to RWL for the lease period after the legal department and the Advocate General give their opinions. The legal department reportedly said, “If the government ends the contract, it has to pay a compensation of Rs. 400 crore.” Since then, nothing has changed. RWL continues to manage the barrage and the reservoir while the spate of public protests too has declined and so has their impact. Ramchandra Singhdeo, who was the irrigation minister when the deal was struck, says, “Without the knowledge of the irrigation secretary, engineer-in-chief and myself, the CSIDC managing director signed a deal that proved detrimental to both villagers and government. We sought action reports from the government over the PAC’s recommendations but the usual reply was: the legal department is looking into the matter. I don’t know why the government is reluctant to scrap this deal.” Current CSIDC MD Devendra Singh says the contract can continue as it has started to reap benefits. “Earlier, CSIDC was making losses. But now we are selling 8-9 mld of water to half-a-dozen big and small companies at beneficial rates,” he says. Singh is quick to add that scrapping the agreement would mean CSIDC paying Rs. 36 crore to RWL as compensation. Water Resource Minister Hemchand Yadav concedes the deal between CSIDC and RWL was “flawed and skewed” in favour of the latter. The government is willing to scrap the contract and pay Rs. 10 crore to RWL as compensation. “This deal affected several villages and the government. I guess the controversy will die in a year,” he says. But will RWL accept Rs. 10 crore? “If the contract is stopped before its term, the termination clauses have to be fulfilled. But nothing like that is going to happen,” says a defiant Pramod Agrawal, RWL project director. Lashing out at the PAC, he says it has no jurisdiction over the issue, which is in the domain of the public undertaking committee. “But the public undertaking committee was never formed by the state Assembly. Even PAC members never talked to us. It’s a farce. We reject it,” he says. Agrawal says three other projects — New Capital Water Supply, Siltra Industrial Estate Water Supply and Urla Industrial Estate Water Supply — were also privatised “and if our project is terminated, these projects too should be abrogated. Why isn’t anyone talking about these projects? We are convinced the government or the CSIDC don’t have the money to compensate us and abrogate the agreement”.FOR A FEW LITRES MORE
The industrial revolution is coming at a heavy price90
paise is the price Jindal Steel and Power Limited pays for every 1,000 litres of river water. Other companies are charged about Rs. 3 for the same23.6 km
is the stretch of Sheonath river controlled by Radius Water. The area has been fenced and villagers are prohibited from using the water54
million cubic metres drawn annually by Jindal Steel from Kurkut river. The agreement, signed on 14 January 2008, will be renewed after 30 yearsRs. 185 cr
revenue loss suffered by the Chhattisgarh government during 2007-08 because of “undue benefits” provided to private companies2,600
million cubic metres allotted annually to companies investing in the coming years. In contrast, agriculture and irrigation will get only 2,000 mcm
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