In Defence Of Natural Resources: Planning At The Grassroots
Dr. Vithal Rajan
We honour today the memory of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, one of the great Engineers of our country, and an architect of modern Hyderabad. During his days the impetus for development came from gifted and learned people such as himself, who made enormous contributions towards modernization, and development of the country. The City of Hyderabad, which was once a model of civic planning and a tribute to Visvesvaraya's genius, is now unable to meet the safe drinking water needs of its citizens; industrial and municipal effluents continue to choke the 400-year old Hussainsagar lake; and the slums that add to its urban sprawl are growing at around 16% every year. Can the cause of such misery for millions of people be located in the hostility of Nature; in our inability to buy the necessary technology; or even in our present-day lack of skills? Not really. All of you know that sufficient competence exists among the members of this august institution to do careful watershed planning, using low-cost minor irrigation and ground-water recharge technologies, to solve our water problem in the near future. Proven technology is also available for waste management. We are among the leaders in the world for developing workable wasteland regeneration practices that could give a hope of sustainable livelihood to our rural poor, and stem the tide of distress migration to urban centres. If we are still unable to rescue the City, or the poor, the fault lies not in our fate, but in ourselves - perhaps, in our inability to make solutions a people's programme. The fault lies in the way we have distanced the people from development objectives. Let us examine how this tragic divorce of the leadership from the people occurred in the critical decades following the achievement of Independence.
Following Visvesvaraya's footsteps after Independence, Prof. Mahalanobis designed the thrust of the great Five-Year Plans that helped India to break out of her colonial past, and emerge in the post-World War II period as a modern democratic country with great potential. The leadership of the country under Pundit Nehru decided on the path of a mixed approach towards the economy, with the commanding heights being controlled by the Government, while private industry was also encouraged to develop initiatives, supported by the development of the country's infrastructure by the government. In the early '50s we went through a process of guesstimates, wondering what level of national savings would enable us to reach the take-off stage.
Unfortunately, the exemplary success of the First Plan was not repeated in the later plan periods. Bottlenecks created by excessive bureaucratization; the lack of managerial skill; the refusal by the West to part with advanced or useful technology; and above all narrow minded actions taken by political leaders for immediate gains, landed the country in the '60s into a period of stagflation (which was to be experienced by the West as well after the emergence of OPEC, and the increase in the prices of oil). The nation struggled to feed itself and was saved from neo-colonial servitude only by the Green Revolution, which enabled the farmers of the Punjab, coastal Andhra, and Tamil Nadu to increase cereal production to a level at which the buying or begging for foreign grain was no longer needed. The threat that the Americans would use food as a political weapon was staved-off.
However, the economy continued to limp along at the "Hindu rate of growth", the benefits of which were eaten up by population growth during the '60s and '70s. It was by the '80s that the Government of India realized, urged by international institutions, that a major fault with its planning and implementation process lay in lack of people's participation in the development programmes. It is true that in the first flush of enthusiasm after Independence, our leadership tried to fulfill the pre-Independence promises of the Congress Party to take government down to the people. These efforts merely became accretions to bureaucratic structures. There was no real political desire to share power with the people at the local or village level. The Community Development programmes were extensions of the administration of the Collector. The Panchayati Raj institutions continued to reinforce the power of ruling rural castes. The Ashok Mehta Committee in the heady days of 1977 did try to establish instruments of countervailing power at the local level. But with the return of Mrs. Gandhi to power, with her decided views on centralized authority, the matter was shelved
during the period of her power, and that of her son. In fact Rajiv Gandhi placed a focus on the rapid acquisition of technology from the West in the leading sectors of the economy. His vision tallied with that of his grand-father and Mahalanobis. It is only after his tragic death, and clear political evidence that the Congress Party may never again regain unquestioned power at the Centre, or even in most of the States, that the leadership of the country tried to explore once again ways and means of empowering the masses; to give a fresh impetus to development; and to secure the roots of their power.
As during the Green Revolution the impetus, and a flow of fresh ideas, came from the West. While the Green Revolution had focused on high technology, and high capital input agriculture; the development experts of the '90s have focused on people's participation, and the empowerment of rural women, as the single most important factor for development, if not for political stability. The concept of Rapid Rural Appraisal as a way of saving time was introduced into development parlance. Long socio-economic studies, which the Americans had favoured in the hey-day of their support for social engineering, were abandoned as being of doubtful value. What the planner or administrator wanted he could learn through quick visits and sharp questioning of local people. A deeper and more palatable focus was given when the concept was turned into Participatory Rural Appraisal(PRA) through which by creating a tamasha the people of a village could be involved in telling the planners or administrators all that they wanted to know. The PRA method has been gratefully accepted by every department of government as a sure way of producing desired results. The eagerness of Government officials today, perhaps, reflects their happiness at going back to the 19th century ways of Indian Collectors, who carried out PRAs [participatory rural appraisal] under the village tree!
However, the control of decision-making continues to reside in the hands of the Indian elite, its administrators, its planners, its engineers and scientists whose notion of people's participation is that the people will willingly work on projects designed by the elite, who have given a hearing to the people. It is considered a great step in terms of participation that the people "who know" or willing to listen to "the people". Again there is no revolutionary change brought about by this process, since Indian kings from the dawn of history have always accorded a hearing to the people in their Diwan-e-Aam.
Mahatma Gandhi (who was as great a social architect as Visvesvaraya proved to be a civic one in the reconstruction of this City), saw clearly that the real purpose of Swaraj was to extend its liberating forces to the great masses at the village level. He gave a call for Gram Swaraj, for redesigning the economy so that the poor could benefit far more than the rich; and the wealth of the country would increase in a step-wise manner based upon the increasing wealth and prosperity of the vast masses. He said his plan was to make the poor of the country better off than they had ever been before. While Gandhian economics was ignored in India as so much romantic non-sense, the ideas of decentralization, genuine land reforms, the development of cottage industries, and the empowerment of the people shaped the future of East-Asian countries, such as Japan, the People's Republic of Chine, South Korea and Taiwan. The "East-Asian Tigers", implemented the Gandhian vision, while his motherland ran after the mirage of trying to catch up with the West. It is only after the European economist, Schumacher, produced the concept of "small is beautiful", and western Greens focused on local community building, that the Indian elite have begun to take such ideas seriously. In any case, the uncertainties of present-day political power, caused by the failure of the development process and the disenchantment of the people with their corrupt leaders, are forcing the elite to search for safe ways of improving the economy through grassroot people's empowerment.
The gross failure of trying to produce technological solutions for the demographic problem has led a reluctant leadership to examine the merits of educating and empowering women. A government that is accustomed to using authority, and controlling and manipulating people finds it difficult to accept that the best way to implement a family planning programme is to leave the decision to the mothers concerned. However, the statistics that come out from Kerala cannot be ignored, nor the proven case studies from other parts of India and the world. We all know how the literacy movement in Nellore was seized by the rural women of Nellore to focus on what was the most burning issue for them - the supply of arrack, many times adulterated with chloral hydrate, to their men-folk, when even drinking water continued to be in short supply. Failing to suppress the revolt of the women, the Government has courageously adopted the anti-arrack movement as one of its own. The women coming together through the literacy drive, and encouraged by their successful fight against arrack supply, have now wholeheartedly joined the 'podupu lakshmi' scheme, with over 7000 sangams planning to save around Rs.21 crores. Such a process of spontaneous grassroot development, neither designed by the elite, nor even expected by them, gives one hope that the ordinary people of this country are more than capable of taking good decisions over their own lives, and the survival of their communities. The case histories of several voluntary agencies also point to the fact that given a chance, given some support by a catalytic agency, the people respond in full measure and show that they far outstrip, in designing and in implementing, the ideas of planners and the elite. The Deccan Development Society, a medium-sized voluntary agency working in 60 villages near Zaheerabad, Medak District, with sangams of dalit women has also experienced the enormous creative and organizing power of the poor. In the experience of the Society, the poor become the best guardians of their environment, and the best managers of their community since it is in their own primary interest to survive as a community and as a culture.
The middle-class professional directors of the Deccan Development Society had no grand plan or design of development that they wished to impose in the target area where they started to work. The first principle was to follow the Gandhian vision of Gram Swaraj. The second principle was to follow Gandhiji's advice to start work with the poorest of the poor in the hope that if the work benefited them, the path must be a right one. The third principle was to work in a particularly poverty-ridden area faced with agricultural stagnation, and a degrading environment. After about a dozen years of work, one can see how the sangams of dalit women have now merged out of the obscurity of being poor; once without full employment throughout the year; coming from dalit families who still remember carrying the shoes of their betters; and being women who would not be heard, even by their husbands, even during periods of crisis, such as a child's sickness, or debt bondage, or lack of food. These women now have pooled their savings worth several lakhs of rupees. such savings mean that the recurring necessity to get into debt bondage is no longer there. The working of sangams means the presence of an alternative source of employment for the community, and with this additional labour demand wages have gone up higher than in any other villages. Such employment creation by the sangams also means that the summer months do not produce forced migration from the villages, or hungry nights for the children. Fresh employment created by the women sangams goes into environment regeneration, afforestation, water and soil conservation programmes, which all produce early benefits, starting from the next cropping season. Such benefits need not seem spectacular for the planners, but for the people at the village level, the extra half-bag of jowar spells sustainability and security against drought, and rising prices. The increased savings and the gradual coming to life of regenerated land also enables the sangams to lease in fallow lands at low rentals ranging from Rs.200/ acre per year to Rs.500/ acre per year. The larger land owners of this area many times let as much as half of their land lie fallow, since the quality of the soil is so poor that the money returns from farming the poorer soils is less than labour expenditure. But for the sangams, working such lands over a period of time produces an extra wage, extra bags of jowar, and dal to feed their families, and many times a dividend through the sale of cash crop such as chillies, turmeric, safflower, omum or other crops. To work such soils carefully means once again reverting to the careful ecological agricultural practices that were once followed by the intelligent and experienced farmers of this country. The work of the sangams echoes the words of Dr. Voelcker, who examining the state of Indian agriculture late in the 19th century reported to the British Government on the high skills of the Indian farmers, and said that Western scientists had little to teach them. The greatest problem of the ryot, said Dr. Voelcker, was his poverty produced by ruinous government policies. In may ways, Dr. Voelcker speaks across a hundred years to the present generation of decision makers.
The ecological practices followed by the women has enabled Nature to reproduce herself in all her biological diversity through processes of natural regeneration. The growth of grasses has led to fodder availability, and to the keeping of milch animals. The profusion of plant life has brought back traditional medicinal practice, based on local herbs, to the communities of the poor. The need to manage all these systems has brought the women round to sit at nights in adult education classes. Economic stability, food security, and the security that the sangam members lend each other has given a hope to the poor that their children have a future. The young children are coming to Balwadies, older children are going to schools. Thus through the catalytic action of an NGO that does not come with prepared plans, the people have been able to devise the most appropriate plan for development, and have adopted the most appropriate pace of development, suited to their skills, and their environment. And now, their training programmes are leading them towards participatory governance of their communities. The building up of the strength and self-respect of their communities will lead them towards the Gandhian goal on Gram Swaraj. While this process has witnessed the catalytic involvement of an external NGO; the input of some outside funds; and the introduction of some skills drawn from outside of the communities of the poor, the basic process of development has been the process of self-realization and self-development. It is not dependent on asking anybody's leave.
The strengthening of the communities of the poor, who are the great majority of our people, through decentralized processes, will result in the growth of purchasing power among the great masses. The careful husbanding of the environment will lead to regional agricultural growth, based upon increased carrying capacities, with a renewal of local soils, local water-harvesting capabilities, and the natural regeneration of local flora and fauna. While this process might be slow, and go through a period of "latent development", it will be a period of sure growth, broadly based in terms of regional development, and in terms of social depth, touching all castes. Such growth augurs well for the nation. It will produce employment at home within the villages. It will no longer make it necessary for rural people in desperation to migrate to urban areas in search of work which is not there. The fear will recede that our cities will turn into huge ugly urban conglomerations, without even drinking water to supply to its citizens. Above all, the routine savings of the rural masses will fuel industrial growth, similar to what has happened for the "East Asian Tigers". We will not need to catch up to the West; but we might break through into an era of ecological and social stability which the West may envy. All of this depends on the elite of this country coming to understand that the great masses are the best people to plan and decide their own future; that the people though illiterate are skilled and cultured; that the poor though in extreme difficulty still have a stake in guarding their environment; and that the poor though short in cash still support the elite in their wasteful ways. If the great masses are given the right, which is their inalienable right, to decide on their futures, and have access to their natural resources, which is also their inalienable right, the elite may be assured of their own future. The great vision of the architects of this country, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Bharat Ratna Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, and Sir Mirza Ismail, will be achieved in the future, neither by politicians, nor by the learned, but by the masses acting in their wisdom for the welfare of all.
STEPS IN GRASSROOTS PLANNING
I give below, as an aide-memoire, a list of steps that may be taken to ensure grassroots holistic planning for sustainable use of the key natural resources of land, water, and biological species:
1) The concept of people's participation is many times confused with the involvement of people only as implementers of a plan or as forming an audience while a development plan is being prepared. In my view such a concept is totally insufficient. Meaningful people's participation can only be secured through local structures at the community level of participatory governance. That is, communities of the poor must be entrusted with political power for the governance of their communities, and development of plans according to their own priorities. Without such organizational power so called participatory processes still leave critical decision making in the hands of elites, who are distanced from the interests of the poor, and requisite local knowledge.
2) Again while laying an emphasis on local communities - that is village level communities and their importance - we must distinguish between the hierarchies in such communities. It is a fact that village leadership or tribal leadership in Third World situations are many times more closely linked to westernized, centralized elites, and the interests of the West. Therefore, when we talk about emphasizing the local community we must clearly stipulate we are talking about organizations or associations of the poor themselves without the over-lordship of traditional village or tribal leaders. The involvement of such basic communities of the poor, brought together around activities or development plans, are essential to achieve development goals.
3) In this context I would like to emphasize that many such newly formed associations or communities of the poor around development activities should be composed only of women since gender biases even among the poorest of the poor stifle the voices of women who bear the greatest responsibility for the survival of poor communities.
4) Again, there should be sufficient emphasis on community building, and development strategies for the poor, which should be necessarily based on environment regeneration, wasteland reclamation. This issue is important since land is the greatest resource available to the poor, apart from their own skills, and social traditions of community help, and hence all development strategies must have at its core environment regeneration on degrading land areas to enable the poor to increase the carrying capacity of their region, and reach a measure of self-provisioning.
5) Similarly, at the very core of such a linked development- environment strategy there must be a focus on achieving localized food security. That is, the regions where the poor live must be carefully developed through ecological methods to provide sufficient food and nutrition for the local people, not only in terms of necessary energy giving bulk foods, such as cereals, but also through bio-diversity in terms of insuring supply of pulses, greens etc. for giving them balanced nutrition.
6) Such environmental, and developmental foci would require a reorientation of agricultural, and other sciences towards incorporating the traditional wisdom, and ecological knowledge of several communities of the poor so that destructive agricultural and production systems established by government may be stopped forth-with, and ecological measures on slower but sounder growth path-ways followed as an economic necessity.
7) The above mentioned point pre-supposes that we will not only emphasize research, and involvement of educational institutions such as universities, but place a far greater emphasis on people's knowledge, and developing village-level educational and research centers. Such processes would be impossible unless there is already in place structures of localized, participatory governance, as was envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi when he elaborated his famous principle of Gram Swaraj, or true independence at the village level.
8) A call for improvement of health standards would be impractical unless at the very centre of public health security we build enabling processes for local medicinal traditions to be practiced, and for local people to be recognized, and trained in such practices. Such an institution of "barefoot doctors" can also only be founded on improving bio-diversity and local medicinal plant resources. Structures may be created to integrate such medicinal traditions with the modern medical system, so that basic nutrition, and preventive care is taken care of for 100% of the population at a very low cost, while a referral system exists for the treatment of more complicated cases.
9) Similarly, a general call for improvement of educational standards does not have much meaning unless local educational priorities are understood, and diversified educational systems are developed to meet the primary educational needs of different communities. In practical terms this means that apart from basic literacy, and numeracy, it is important that communities of the poor should be educated in environment regeneration, ecological farming, primary health-care, community organization, and their own local histories and culture, and the linkages of all these areas of knowledge made with modern democratic systems, and their priorities. I would like to underline that I am not talking about "inferior" systems of public health or of education, but relevant systems of public health and education which are accessible to all.
10) All leaders mention over and over again the prime importance of employment. This factor is crucial, and it is a failure of modern centralized government structures that by denying access to the poor over natural resources, the poor have been deprived of control over their own lives and communities. Hence an important focus of all development strategy should be the creation of sufficient person-days of employment in each region; not, as so often happens, in activities which are meaningless to the lives of the poor, but in such terms as sketched out above. That is, employment must be facilitated in the area of environment regeneration; for local nutritional self-sufficiency; and for promoting bio-diversity to help develop local health-care capabilities, among other benefits; and for improving educational capacities of the poor, whether in the class-room or while carrying out ecological farming or pursuing traditional crafts. It is well known that the structured, and timely, food for work and famine-relief programmes of the Government of India have prevented massive famines from taking place in India, though the per capita availability of food-grains in drought-hit regions have been many times lower than in famine-hit Sahel. Hence there are governmental precedents for successful implementation of large-scale employment programmes to meet economic and social guidelines. But the structure and priorities for such employment programmes should be based on an accumulation of priorities articulated by organizations of the poor, and not on work programmes designed by a Central Government.
11) The coming decades will see a deep penetration of all third world economies by TNCs and large industrial houses. We should rapidly provide credit and marketing facilities to rural communities of the poor to enable them to manufacture many items which perhaps they can make better than large companies (such as bio-pesticides, soap etc.). Attempts should be made to establish networks of rural cottage industries, and manufacturing centers so that the flow of manufactured goods stem not only from central urban areas to the rural hinterland. Rural areas should supply manufactured goods also to mega-cities, and trade among themselves. This is one of the surest ways of increasing the savings, and purchasing power of the great masses; of preventing uncontrollable increase of urban slums; and ultimately of strengthening our economy. This step may be the greatest we can take to halt the uncontrolled growth of cities, which lead to disastrous consequences to the environment, and any prospect of sustainable use of natural resources.
12) Unfortunately, most plan documents do not recognize the social fact that most communities of the poor happily retain many of the beneficial aspects of community cohesion and fellow feeling, as important aspects of their pre-industrial culture. This sense of community and identity is the strongest cultural source that the poor people have for a sense of well being and a sense of purpose, and public morality in life.
Unfortunately modern development has tended to destroy community cohesion, cultural values, and the binding sense of morality based on such values. There is also an unfortunate tendency in our western trained elites of looking down on traditions as non-modern, superstitious, or even as fundamentalist. The spiritual meanings of life have been written out of development dialogue as obscurantist and non-modern.
Unless the elite makes a serious attempt to bridge this gap in the understanding of cultural values, and morality, they will always be in conflict with the poor majority. We cannot produce any solutions for such deficiencies in the elite. This is why it is even more important that organizations of participatory governance should exist at the local level so that the national elite can re-educate themselves about what is actually important in terms of values for the poor. Can planning provide for exploring such processes?
If this gap in values and morality can be bridged, perhaps, many of the great problems that face us may find gradual local solutions since the emphasis will not be so much on what people possess, but the kind of communities that they are. The poor will not be considered, as they are being considered today, by the national elite as welfare cases needing hand outs and support, but as self-governing communities with great moral and human resource capabilities.
Our elite should be lead to accept cultural diversity, and different ways of expressing human values, and the self-governance of communities of the poor. Such a change in perspectives, perhaps, would be as important for our survival as conserving bio-diversity, or devising a proper land-use system.
Seminar to Commemorate the 134th Birthday of Bharat Ratna Sri Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, "Visvesvaraya Bhavan", Hyderabad, 15 September 1994
