India’s leaders are in a quandary. They must make many difficult reforms simultaneously: reform agricultural systems to increase farmers’ incomes, reform land use systems, and radically reform systems of employment creation. All reforms must also improve environmental sustainability and reduce glaring inequities. International comparisons reveal that India’s growth pattern in the last thirty years has harmed its natural environment more than other countries. Moreover, it has generated the least decent employment per gross domestic product (GDP) unit. This model is not sustainable—environmentally, socially, or economically.
The paradigm of economic progress must be changed. Albert Einstein and other scientists pointed out that attempting to solve systemic problems with the same thinking that caused them is madness. The time has come to imagine the contours of a new paradigm of progress. Three recent books give pointers.
Peter S Goodman enters the global supply chain in How the World Ran Out of Everything (published in June 2024). He explains how the global supply chain works in agriculture and manufacturing, with its interconnected institutions and infrastructure of shipping, logistics, warehousing, and large-scale factories and farms. While efficient for generating profits for financial investors, this tightly integrated system is fragile. It falls apart when most needed, as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic. Goodman explains how the deregulation of production and transportation industries gave more power to capital owners and reduced workers’ incomes and job security in all industries. The result was booming stock markets during the pandemic in developed and developing countries, while workers could not earn, and food and medicines ran out.
Environmental scientist Vaclav Smil provides a blueprint for a new paradigm in his book How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present, and Future (published in 2022). He analyses the use of fossil fuels in the modern economy. These are used in producing and distributing four foundational materials for modern civilisation: steel, concrete, plastics, and food. He evaluates the “total system” requirements of fossil energy (and steel, concrete, and plastics) for technological innovations for renewable energy solutions such as electric vehicles and solar panels. He points out that it will take many decades to replace these basic materials and fossil energy used in the production processes of renewables. Saving on one side, adding on the other.
Food is the most fundamental need for human survival—more fundamental than steel, concrete, and plastics. And more fundamental than digital communication services, Smil points out. Fossil fuel-based solutions have become integral for increasing the scale of food production and distribution to meet the needs of the human population, which has increased in the last one hundred years from 2 billion to 8 billion (1.4 billion in India). Fertilisers are produced from fossil-fuel feedstock. Farm machinery is made of steel and runs on fossil fuels. Plastics are used for hygienic transportation of food in global supply chains.
Smil calculates the benefits of locally circular, organic, multi-cropping systems and says they could be the solution the world needs. He asks, “Could we return to purely organic cropping, relying on recycled organic wastes and natural pest controls, and could we do without engine-powered irrigation and without field machinery by bringing back draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to abandon cities, resettle villages, dismantle central animal feeding operations, and bring all animals back to farms to use them for labour and as sources of manure. Are we prepared to do this?”
Viksit Bharat needs a new paradigm of viksit. Local systems solutions, cooperatively developed by communities in their own villages and towns, are the way to solve global systemic problems of climate change and inequitable economic growth. This was the ‘Gandhian’ solution for India’s economic and social progress, which was set aside to adopt modern, Western solutions for development. Sixty-four per cent of Indian citizens live in rural areas (36 per cent in China; 17 per cent in the USA). A majority work on farms and in small industries in rural India, not in large factories that use automated equipment. India should take advantage of its present realities rather than trying to catch up with rich countries on their historical development paths.
Western-dominated institutions for global governance—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO), and Security Council—have failed to create an equitable and peaceful world. The third book, Environmentalism from Below by Ashley Dawson (published January 2024), recounts the struggles of people’s movements to have their solutions heard in global climate summits. Their solutions are dismissed as backward by the scientific-industrial establishment. India’s policymakers must free themselves from the unsustainable ideas of progress that self-certified “developed countries” in the West have imposed on the rest to maintain their own power. Those ideas are the causes of global problems. They cannot provide solutions.
In his book Theory of Scientific Revolutions (published in 1962), Thomas Kuhn pointed out that those who have acquired power in an established paradigm will resist changes in the fundamental ideas on which it is founded. The paradigm of ruling ideas gives them their wealth and political power. They will use their power to control the media, think tanks, and universities and suppress any ideas that threaten their privileged positions.
India won its political freedom in 1947 as a first step in its journey of decolonisation onto poorna swaraj. Now, it must seize its intellectual freedom. ‘Gandhian’ ideas of local development were not adopted when India set out on its vision of poorna swaraj in 1947. Instead, India adopted the model of large-scale industries that the West and the Soviet Union were following. In that model, people must move from farms to factories and from rural communities to cities. Smil wistfully suggests that going back to old wisdom is a better way to go to the future. The time has come even for the West to dip into the knowledge of the natural and the rural. Rural India can be a university for India’s policymakers to produce innovations in policies for sustainable and inclusive progress while taking appropriate advantage of new technologies. This will make India a leader on a new course for progress that India and the world urgently need.
First Published: Aug 05 2024 | 9:13 AM IST
