An India with no Bharat?

P Chidambaram recently released a compilation of his writings of the last few years on many facets of India. He writes and reflects, among many things, upon his vision of a new India which will move into becoming environmentally sustainable. While he speaks with firmness and clarity on many issues ranging from finance to politics, there are some contours he foresees that will be deeply disturbing to any thinking professional or kisan.

His view--of an India where there will be more and more of our people drawn into industry, services and manufacture, away from agriculture--is representative of a future that the entire world of industrializing countries is recognizing in face of these difficult [or different?] new challenges, all unprecedented, that is before all of us. There will be only the 'India that is India' and no 'India that is Bharat'.

This is a future that political and business visionaries are beginning to articulate more strongly in recent years. In a sense, it means that the rural country in any part of the country will become as urbanized as it has been in Europe for the last 30 years—Belgium, for example, is 95 per cent urbanised. There is no looking back on such a trend. There is no way we can redefine desire among people who seek all those same values that the urban Indian has secured for himself---from cars to telephones; from water closets and showers; to perhaps even air-conditioning.

Should the world be alarmed by this? That is hard to tell. If the attention of the government as well as industry turns to bringing massive energy savings on every appliance that we use at present in city infrastructure, commercial or domestic, there will then be room for further such urbanization and consumption of the mega kind we will see into this future.

Looking back, through the 1950’s, we saw, after the ravages of the War, those development decades which completely was ignorant and oblivious of the dire ecological consequences that we have learnt about in recent years. The air then was suffused with optimism. Nehru called these large industrial behemoths that emerged in the early 60’s as the new ‘temples of India’.

Any talk of ecology was regarded as irrelevant at best, as a ‘dangerous deviation’ from the national agenda. The technologist ruled supreme. Metals and chemicals were twisted to forms that could offer new dimensions to comfort and luxury. No one thought of what it meant for Earth. In fact, in 1945, just after the War, the World Bank said that the future will offer a dynamic world economy ‘in which the peoples of every nation will be able to enjoy the fruits of material progress on an Earth infinitely blessed with natural riches’.

The songs of the time written for Indian films by poets like Shailendra, Kaifi Azmi and others, or the literature of the times, reflected the prospect of unending economic growth. The dream became synonymous with the American dream of prosperity. Science showed, they said, endless frontiers of technologies that could be harnessed for a better world for experience. An expert geologist from Harvard University said in 1952 that he believed that mother earth herself had enough and to spare for the good work that was before such creators of new industry.

We have come, but not a very long way over the last 50 years. Our desire levels have only gone up even further. There are reports that dismay--of the automobile industry or heavy manufacturing moving to ecosensitive regions like Uttarakhand thanks to subsidies and tax breaks offered to companies like Tatas and Mahindras. Dehradun or the outflanks of the valley is not any more the verdant lands they were even 50 years ago. All that seems to drive governments and bureaucrats is still the need for such development that will bring ‘employment to people’ apart from bringing in investments and money.

The story is not any different in what were once fragile regions of Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh. Only in August this year, the Central Government has cleared two massive projects for bauxite mining in Orissa and these two other states which were once part of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

No change can be brought about without the sort of seminal shifts that Manmohan Singh offered in 1991, and which unleashed human endeavour. That can be done only by the Government, not by industry. The good news we have had in the last 18 years is that no successor government retraces economic measures implemented once.

Our political parties and politicians must be driven to offer ‘business plans’ for their cities, tehsils, districts, blocks and states, for 20 years, and their re-election must depend on their performance when in office. How soon can industry realize that there is only a single bottom line--not profits but profits that come without the social and environmental cost that today’s industry entails?

If there is going to be any such change into the future where development and ecological maturity go hand-in-hand, the responsibility will be more of business than of government. The large companies of today have to change the way they look at business and what they want to bring as development in different regions that they choose to work in. To think only of financial benefits and concessions, without paying heed to the social and ecological bottom lines, will be a prescription to eventual closure of such business corporations.

What can Chidambaram, or the likes of such leaders who modulate policy framework, offer to industry in a way that such a stampede for setting up manufacturing plants is moderated? How can the Government do another '1991' on the economy and people--beyond incremental shifts we see? How can that central framework offered by the Union Government make a difference to the way the State Governments respond and articulate the business aspirations of industry positively to people and eco-regions? How can the people themselves who are seeking to be employed, who are seeking to make a living that is meaningful, be helped in this process?

Schumacher, the German economist who wrote ‘Small is Beautiful’ and brought a powerful shift in the 70’s in the world’s thinking on where it should be headed, said with remarkable prescience then: “Only in the last hundred years has man forcibly broken into nature’s larder and is now emptying it out at a breath-taking speed which increases from year to year.” That has not changed to this date. And if we don’t in the next ten years, see a massive change in the way we work things out there, there will be hell to pay.

The India we see now is too restless, on the move, determined to conquer and master nature rather than submit silently to its laws. No one will listen to these directions that we are suggesting here. There have been many visionaries who over the last hundred years have warned us of the cost we will pay. No one was at that or other times been interested in listening to arguments which suggest that a future can be built on dreams such as these.

If Chidambaram’s picture of an urbanised India with nearly all people depending on industry and manufacturing proves to be true, the sad part of this inevitable armageddon of development is that the next twenty years will see the loss of half the subject matter of Indian poetry! The puruvaiyya, or the easterly winds that sweep across most of the Gangetic heartland and Punjab has provoked some of the finest imaginative verse over the last thousand years, on swaying trees and rustling palms and paddy fields. That’s not going to be a pretty picture to come, alright.

- Chandrashekar Hariharan