Union Budget 2014-2015: Breathing Time to Evolve Long Term Economic Policy

Dr M N Buch, 

Dean, Centre for Governance and Political Studies, VIF

The Economic Times published on 11^th July, 2014 carries the headlines “Narendra Modi aims for goal, hits crossbar”. This newspaper and some others, not to mention the Opposition have referred to the budget presented to Parliament by Arun Jaitley, the Finance Minister, as not containing anything radical which would signal a complete departure from the policies of the previous government. One newspaper describes the budget as “Chidambaram’s budget with saffron lipstick”. Whereas there is a cautious welcome of the budget by a cross section of people, there is also a sense of disappointment that the budget is not particularly radical. Of course it is recognised by everyone that the budget does hold out hope for the future, but in itself it is a form of continuation of the previous government’s financial policy.

Under Article 112 of the Constitution, the President is required to lay before both Houses of Parliament a statement of the estimated receipts and expenditure of the Government of India for that year. Article 112 (2) gives the two main components of the annual financial statement and it reads, “The estimates of expenditure embodied in the financial statement shall show separately – (a) The sums required to meet expenditure described by this Constitution as expenditure charged upon the Consolidated Fund of India; and (b) The sums required to meet other expenditure proposed to be made from the Consolidated Fund of India”. Article 112 (2) (b) has to be read with Article 113, which says that every estimate which relates to expenditure, other than charged expenditure, shall be presented to Parliament in the form of demands for grants and the House of the People may assent, refuse to assent or assent after reduction in the demand for grant. Under Article 114 all the demands for grants which have the assent of the House of the People are put together in the form of an Appropriation Bill, which is to be presented to the House of the People. This Bill has to be passed in toto by the House of the People because Article 114 does not permit any amendment after the grants have been individually approved. That is why if the Appropriation Bill fails, then this amounts to a vote of no confidence and government falls. Government can spend money from the Consolidated Fund of India only after the Appropriation Bill is passed into law. This slightly detailed reference to the provisions of the Constitution regarding the annual financial statement has become necessary to really understand the purport of what is popularly called the budget.

To further simplify the above statement, it is clarified that the budget gives the entire programme of government for which government is seeking the approval of Parliament in the matter of funds. It is when grants are being discussed that every individual scheme of government comes under parliamentary scrutiny and in the budget government charts out the direction in which the entire programme of government will be driven. Of course the revenue portion of the budget states how government intends to raise the funds for meeting proposed expenditure. This means that the taxation policy of government also forms a part of the budget and when the budget is read as a whole it really gives the ideology, the political philosophy and the programme of the party in power and tells the people in which direction the country will move. That is the real importance of the budget and that is why Modi and his Finance Minister are being subjected to judgemental scrutiny.

The present government succeeded a government led by a party which claims to have fundamental ideological differences with the present party in power. Its successive budgets, therefore, reflected that party’s philosophy and programme. The change of government in India has come through a democratic process which has two components, the first being continuity and the second being change. Change is a process in which there is also continuity and has to be evolutionary, which means that if the incoming government wants to have different priorities from the previous one, or different programmes, it has to achieve the change over a period of time and not overnight through total radicalisation. Change of government in a democracy is not a Bolshevik revolution of the Soviet model. In Russia, Lenin and the Marxists overthrew the Tsar and his government by armed revolution and stated that the objective of the revolution was to completely destroy the old political and social order. Earlier the French Revolution also had the same aim and in both cases royal regimes and everything that they represented were destroyed lock, stock and barrel. That is not the way of democratic change. In this context, let us examine what chance the new government had of immediate radical departures from the past. For example, Narendra Modi has held out for “minimum government, maximum governance”. Did he have the choice in the budget presented within forty-five days of coming to power to say that he would immediately reduce the number of government servants by ten percent, a quarter or perhaps half? Part XIV of the Constitution would have to be scrapped if this were to be achieved. Any such attempt would have caused blood to flow on the streets as unemployed government servants would have revolted against it. Would Modi’s own Members of Parliament have found this acceptable? What “big bang”, to which irresponsible journalists and TV commentators refer, was possible for government in this behalf?

Let us take another issue, which is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The previous government had a huge programme of providing hundred days of employment per person in rural areas and for this a very substantial budgetary provision had been made. Could the new government have abandoned the scheme overnight, creating almost universal rural unrest? Therefore, not only has the government budgeted for the scheme but has also proposed enhancement of the allocation of the funds but with a specific rider that government would review the contents of the programme and would move away from just an employment objective into a more productive programme of creating permanent village assets. To those who really understand rural India, this one simple statement contains a message virtually of revolution. NREGS as at present administered is entirely a muster roll based programme and, as is well known, it is not possible to run a muster based programme honestly. If the objective is the same, that is, providing employment in rural areas, a programme aimed at creating permanent assets would radically change it because now employment activity would be sharply focused and at the end of the day the village would acquire a long term asset. The old integrated watershed management programme, of which the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh made a great success, was invaluable because it resulted in improving the water regime of thousands of villages, led to soil and water conservation and a sharp increase in the availability of fuel and fodder. Its abandonment on the insistence of the National Advisory Council and conversion into a populist muster based employment programme was a disaster. The present budget which gives the determination of government to provide rural employment, but to do it productively is, therefore, a big bang.

The leaders of the present government had promised at the time of election that skill development, employment generation and creation of a climate in which investment would flow in would have high priority. Does the present budget reflect this? There is no specific mantra which would make this happen, but the budget has made provision for skill development, it has assured the corporate world that in the future the tax regime would be simplified and an environment would be created which would facilitate investment and, by proposing a venture capital fund for Rs. 10,000 crores, the government has certainly signalled that it wants new enterprises to be created. Specifics can be provided only in the next budget because in the coming year the government would be able to fine-tune the policies which would lead to achievement of pronounced goals in the matter of investment, economic growth and employment generation.

Let us take the question of taxation. For the average tax payer, the budget proposals are on the one hand cautiously welcome and on the other an indicator that the tax regime in future will be liberal, aimed at maximising government revenues but not unduly burdensome to the tax payer. Where it misses out is in the matter of taxes to be paid by business and corporations which could be designed to encourage corporations to invest in major infrastructure projects, whether in terms of capital investment or in investment for maintenance and upgradation. Some of the sectors in which government have chosen to go on the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model could be chosen for long term involvement of the private sector through an appropriate tax regime. Education which is universal and leaves out no one on account of affordability, health care which reaches down to the least fortunate, transportation corridors such as roads and railway tracks, power systems , in fact everything which gives the basics for development, creation of and management of rural assets are all areas in which we need to attract corporate investment, not because they will give direct returns on the money invested but rather because of tax incentives which attract the corporate world to invest in infrastructure which serves people at large. If PPP mode development and tax incentives for private investment are seen as one, then we may find that in the future private investment in public infrastructure could show a sharp increase. Perhaps there was not enough time to do any real thinking in this behalf, but by the time the budget of the year 2015-16 is presented , the Finance Minister, as a part of government, must come up with very specific, doable proposals for radically changing how the Indian economy functions. One word of caution. Using taxation as an inventive would be restricted to long term private investment in useful projects, but could not be used to cover corporate social responsibility.

The present budget talks about a disinvestment programme in which government gradually moves out of selected public sector undertakings and encourages privatisation. Even though it might reflect a continuation of the British obsession on the one hand with the Great Game and on the other the means of rapid troop movement to deal with another mutiny, the fact remains that the Indian Railways have an enormous strategic role to play in joining the country together. Therefore, public ownership of the railways is a necessity dictated by strategic and tactical requirements, but equally by the fact that this is the common man’s main mode of transport. Total commercialisation of the Railways would hit the average citizen very hard. With this as a constant factor, government has to ensure a much higher investment level in maintaining the Railways, improving them and extending them. In the United States, Railways were always in the private sector and it is only when competitive modes of transport such as roads and air traffic began to affect the profitability of the private railway companies and the railway system was on the verge of collapse that that U.S. Government created AMTRAC, a public sector organisation which took over strategic railway lines. AMTRAC has been criticised for not always being very efficient, but it has at least kept the railways alive in America.

We, while continuing to have the Indian Railways as a public sector organisation, need to identify those schemes of the railways which can be run through the corporate sector. Tata Motors started as the Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (TELCO), which manufactured steam engines for the Indian Railways very successfully. Why should the railways themselves run the Chittaranjan Locomotives Works? Why can they not privatise the manufacture of locomotives, rolling stock and the maintenance of the existing stock? This is an area which the railways need to explore so that they can concentrate on efficient operation of the railways. There is enough money for both the corporate world and the public sector for running the railways and a partnership mode in which the dominant position is that of government can certainly make the railways an organisation which is profitable but which does not become burdensome to the average traveller. The next budget must go beyond generalities about FDI in the railways and must come up with specific proposals which can be implemented within three years.

There is one very tricky area which cannot be ignored but which can probably also not be instantly cured and that is agriculture. All our efforts at agricultural development tend to be compartmentalised and segmented. There are a number of players in the agricultural scene which, incidentally, is and must remain the largest single employer. In China, ten percent of the land is arable, but in India sixty percent of the land is arable. With such a huge area available to us for agriculture why should this sector not get the highest priority? There is a whole coterie of people who feel that if India is to progress it must draw people from rural areas and put them into urban employment. This, mind you, in a country which is largely ryotwari and in which the cultivator is the bhoomiswami or the owner of the land. In China, the cultivator was a serf, a tenant at will and, therefore, leaving the land and seeking a job elsewhere was not a great hardship. In India, people who want to follow the Chinese model want to replicate China in the matter of migration from rural areas to urban areas. Because of this attitude there is no wholehearted attempt to bring about that qualitative improvement in agriculture which makes it a truly profitable vocation.

As stated earlier, agriculture has a number of players, of which the primary one is land. Then there is the owner of the land. For cultivation land needs water and for high yields it needs manure. Manure can be natural, for which we need animal dung and agricultural waste, or it can be synthetic, that is, chemical fertilisers. With water and nutrients, the land can be made productive and by selecting the correct cropping pattern productivity can be optimised. In those areas where this has been done, for example, the catchment of the Punjab Agriculture University at Ludhiana, the results are spectacular. This needs to be replicated throughout India, but in the context of local soil conditions, water availability and climate. That is why the next budget must give greater importance to developing of agriculture universities in India to the level of the Punjab Agriculture University. Today, for example, two fine agriculture universities in Madhya Pradesh, at Jabalpur and Gwalior, are being strangulated for want of funds. This must not be allowed to happen.

The producer grows a product, but the product has to be marketed. For this one needs roads for transportation and develop mandies or market towns for marketing of the product, value addition through processing and the backward linkages for providing services to agriculture, such as finance. There is need for warehousing and cold storage so that by releasing product in the market in a steady stream there is price stabilisation throughout the year. During the season of glut, tomatoes and onions sometimes have to be thrown away, but at certain times when there is no fresh inflow and there is no supply stabilisation through release from appropriate storage facilities, prices rise very high and this creates a crisis for government. No agriculture policy, no price stablisation policy can succeed unless government intervention ensurs that storages gives a fair price to the farmer because there is a median price which prevails throughout the year, whilst at the same time ensuring steady release into the market so that there is constant inflow which stabilises prices. In fact this is so important that it must form the core of agricultural policy and the price stabilisation policy. Will the 2015-16 budget reflect this? In other words, the budget can be an instrument in ensuring that there is long term agricultural policy which is stable and there is no need for knee jerk reaction to an emergent situation.

One welcome signal that can be read is that the Human Resource Development Ministry is considering a review of the PPP mode policy for six thousand new model schools. School education is the responsibility of government, the Navodaya Schools have proved that if good quality schools are established in rural areas there can be significant improvement in education and in any case unless we improve the level of school education, all our universities and Indian Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research, Information Technology and Management will be worthless pimples on our fair face. The new government, in future budgets, must make so much of funds available for school education that in one cycle of schooling we completely transform the education picture. If everyone, the disempowered, the socially ostracised, the backward and even the socially advanced are all given equally good education they would all become equal in every sense, able to compete with their peers and no longer in need of the support of reservations. In fact education can be the main instrument of making India a casteless society in which everyone is equal in terms of opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills. This is much more important than providing sops to the corporate world, reservation to the deprived or subsidies which provide only immediate relief.

Are subsidies justified? Europe and America shamelessly use subsidies in areas of interest to them, especially agriculture. The entire social security programme is a form of taking from the rich and giving to the poor but as a balanced programme, aimed at levelling out inequalities by raising tax revenue to meet the cost of subsidies. In India, unfortunately, deficit financing is generally used not to kick-start a flagging economy on the Keynesian model, but to distribute largesse ad infinitum. The budget must quickly visit this situation, remedy it and make subsidies part of a self sustaining regime.

This paper is not an analysis of every scheme of the budget. But it is a kind of report of what, under the circumstances, can be considered to be a good, workable budget which gives government the breathing time to evolve its long term economy policy. Mr.Modi has neither scored a goal nor hit the crossbar. He has, however, started to evolve a kind of field strategy which would enable him to repeat what Dhyanchand achieved in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, that is, proved that Hitler’s theory of so called Aryan superiority was a complete myth and that it is Indians who are true Aryans.

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Published Date: 24^th July 2014, Image source: http://currentaffairs.nirdeshak.com

The Settlement Pattern in India - Need for a National Land Use Policy

Dr M N Buch, 

Dean, Centre for Governance and Political Studies, VIF

The settlement pattern in India is in a state of equilibrium and has remained so over a period of time. Equilibrium has different meanings in physics and chemistry. The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary defines it “a state of balance”. It is from this angle, therefore, that the subject will be approached. The table below gives the total population of India,

 

Census Year	Total Population	Total Urban Population	Proportion of Urban Population
1901	238,396,327	25,693,125	10.8
1931	278,977,238	33,138,184	11.9
1951	361,088,090	61,986,721	17.2
1991	846,421,039	215,771,612	25.5
2001	1,028,737,436	286,119,689	27.8
2011	1,210,569,573	377,106,125	31.2

Source: 1. General Population Table A-4 Part-II 2001 (India &States)

2. Primary Census Abstract – Data Highlights-India – Series 1-2011

As will be seen, between 1901 and 2011 the total population of India has increased more than five-fold whilst the urban population has increased by about 17 times. Despite this, as a proportion of the total population, the urban population has increased by only about three fold in these 110 years. Undoubtedly the growth of urban population as compared with the total population is higher than the growth of rural population in percentage terms, but a three-fold increase in the percentage of urban population is not by itself alarming and is certainly not indicative of a skewing of the settlement pattern in which rural settlements are decaying and that at their cost massive urbanisation is occurring in India. In fact, as per the census of India of 2011, the primary census abstract states that the percentage growth of urban population indicates a 3.4 percent growth as compared with the previous decade, which is certainly not indicative of any massive rural to urban migration.

In order to understand the urbanisation scene in India, a good point of reference is the report of the National Commission on Urbanisation which was presented to the Prime Minister on 12^th August 1988, though an interim report had been submitted to the Government of India as early as January 1987. The National Commission on Urbnanisation was constituted in 1985 by the Government of India on account of what the preface to volume-1 of the report states in the following words, “Future historians may well decide that the crucial phenomenon of our times is the massive urbanisation that is engulfing the third world. Even in the span of the last two decades, towns and cities all over Asia, Africa and Latin America have been doubling and tripling in size. India, which has the second largest population in the world, is central to this phenomenon. It is indeed encouraging that for the first time the Government of India has appointed a National Commission to look into these issues”. The Commission noted that there was a significant difference between the pattern of urbanisation in India and that in Latin America and much of South East Asia. In 1981, the total number of urban settlements in India was 3301, whereas the rural settlements numbered approximately 5.5 lakhs. At the same time, no urban settlement could be defined as a primate city such as Bangkok or Mexico City because no single city dominated the whole country. Mexico City has almost one-fourth of the population of Mexico. In India, by contrast, as against the urban growth rate of 46.2 percent in 1981, the growth rate of the then existing twelve metropolitan cities was less than 30 percent during the decade 1971-1981. It is the medium size towns which showed the highest growth rate. Though the tables relating to the population break-up of urban India have yet to be released by the Registrar General for the 2011 census, the picture prevailing in 1981 has not significantly changed in 2011. The only real difference is that many of the cities which were just below the one million mark have reached the one million mark, from 12 to 18 in 1991, 35 in 2001 and 53 in 2011. This only reinforces the point that it is the medium towns which have shown a consistently high growth rate and have become metropolitan in the process.

The issue can be looked at from another angle. The census classification of urban settlements is metropolitan, class-I ranging from 1 lakh to 1 million, class-II ranging from 50,000 to 1 lakh, class-III from 20,000 to 50,000, class-IV from 10,000 to 20,000, class-V from 5,000 to 10,000 and class-VI from 3,000 to 5,000. The 53 metropolitan cities contain 19.24 percent of the total urban population of India. However, as a proportion of the entire population of India, the 53 metropolitan cities account for just 6 percent of the total population. Therefore, in the total settlement pattern of India the metropolitan cities still only represent a very small proportion. In this behalf there is not much change between what prevailed in 1981 and what we find today.

There is another factor which we must take into account when we look at the share of urban population in the total population. About 7.5 percent of the urban population lives in towns ranging from class-VI to class-IV, that is, from 3000 to 20,000 population which represents about 2.5 per cent of the total population. When we deduct this from the total urban population, which is necessary because most of these towns are either linked with agriculture directly or provide marketing and other services to an agricultural hinterland which makes them more rural in character than urban, then the picture alters further. If we take their population into account and deduct it from the total urban population because even today such towns are semi-rural or semi-urban, then even today the actual urban population is only about 28 percent of the total population . At the macro level, therefore, one could safely state that India’s population is well distributed in a hierarchy of settlements ranging from the smallest hamlet and village right up to mega metropolitan cities such as Delhi and Mumbai.

This picture is in sharp contrast with how things developed in China after the Revolution. China embarked on a deliberate policy of industrialisation, largely based on the secondary or manufacturing sector and by definition the Chinese model of development made industrialisation conterminous with urbanisation. A great deal of investment went into urbanisation, with people being actively encouraged to migrate from agriculture to manufacture and other urban activities. Today more than sixty percent of the people of China live in cities and towns. China also followed a deliberate policy of directing investment to provinces and autonomous regions which showed the maximum promise of industrialisation and it never had the equivalent of the Finance Commission that we have in India in which weightage is given to backward States and backward areas in the matter of allocation of non-plan central funds and sharing of revenues between the Centre and the States. Instead of promoting equity between different regions, through various programmes, China welcomed migration of people from very backward regions to the cities so that the balance tilted heavily towards urban centres.

The governing philosophy in India is and has always been totally different from that in China. The National Commission on Urbanisation did comment as under, ”Urbanisation involves two closely related factors. The first is the people—work relationship in rural areas, in which land is the essential medium—and which is right now so critically balanced that any addition to the population must inevitably push people out of agriculture into non agricultural occupations. The second is the fact that only urban settlements can offer substantial non agricultural employment and absorb the migrants who are moving out of an agricultural economy”. In this context, the National Commission on Urbanisation, in setting out its philosophy, stated, “It is from this perspective that the Commission has examined the crucial issues and conceptualised the strategic thrusts needed for the next few decades --- without, in any way, questioning or preempting the development and reform which must be carried out with the greatest urgency within rural India itself ”. Thus as early as 1985-88, the very Commission set up to study urbanisation and suggest a long term national policy in this behalf was acutely aware of the fact that rural India itself needs to be strengthened so that there is a continuity and continuum between rural and urban India to the mutual advantage of both. The Commission did suggest urbanisation as a means of siphoning off surplus rural population, but never as a means of actively encouraging migration from rural to urban areas, thus emptying rural India. The urbanisation policy, therefore, has to work in tandem with our policies of rural development. In other words, there is a definite appreciation of the fact that our settlements have a certain equilibrium which must be strengthened and not disturbed.

Why rural India is still so important in our settlement picture? In many of the countries where either primate cities have developed or where there is a deliberate move towards urbanisation one would find that what lies behind between rural to urban migration is an iniquitous system of land tenure and holdings. In Mexico, for example, the ordinary peasant, or peon, held land entirely at the pleasure of the feudal lord of the hacienda and was no better than a serf in medieval England or Tsarist Russia. He, therefore, did not have a visceral relationship with the land that he tilled and, therefore, was quite happy to migrate to a town which offered him a better life. In China, peasant proprietorship as enshrined in the ryotwari system did not exist and the peasant was entirely at the mercy of the landlord or, in Russian terminology, the Kulak. That is why when the Revolution occurred in China it was the land lord who was persecuted to the point of death, just as the Kulak as a class was liquidated in the Soviet Union. Except for the Bengal Presidency where Cornwallis, through the Permanent Settlement, introduced an iniquitous Zamindari system, the rest of India practised ryotwari or where there was Malguzari, or Jagirdari, the tenant was still protected by law. This was further reinforced in the early 1950s of the last century when Jagirdari, Zamindari, Malguzari, etc., were abolished and the tiller of the soil became its owner. I am not trying to read into the situation a spiritual relationship of the farmer with the land, but the fact of ownership did create a vested interest in which the farmer would like to hang on to the land and use it to earn a living. That is why the approximately 5.5 lakh villages in India form such a powerful constituency that at policy level government is bound to promote what the National Commission on Urbanisation refers to as “development and reform within rural India”.

Equilibrium, therefore, comes from the factum of rural India being the most populous entity in India, which had stagnated in the past, but which has now attracted policy attention at the highest level. The continuum is promoted because clusters of villagers need market centres where the produce can be traded and these market centres, in turn, become the service centres which provide services to agriculture and to other activities in rural India. Where the marketable surplus is huge as in the Punjab, the market centres, or mandis, developed into multi activity urban centres which have a defined hinterland and where there is mutual interaction to the benefit of both mandi town and the villages it serves. Between mandi town and the next order of towns ranging from a population of about 50,000 up to just short of a million, there is a definite link on account of agro based industry, banking and other services, education and health facilities and administrative infrastructure. The relationship of the district headquarters, tehsil and block headquarters, the market villages and the village settlement is visible, pronounced and very much alive. A good example of this is the National Capital Region which includes Delhi and towns and villages in an area of approximately 38,000 square kilometres, covering the States of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, besides the Union Territory of Delhi. The NCR was envisaged as a kind of protective envelope for Delhi which would, by ensuring the growth of a number of small and medium level towns, safeguard Delhi from excessive growth. What is forgotten is that the region itself is agriculturally prosperous and contains a large number of small and medium towns which has a viability of their own. Sonepat, Hapur, Alwar and Meerut would have survived even without NCR because they each have a hinterland which they service and with which they interact. The money spent on developing NCR could probably have been better spent in developing towns in those areas where there is economic backwardness and from where substantial migration takes place to large cities such as Delhi. Whereas the rural hinterland of the NCR is still vibrant, the NCR plan has actually resulted in on the one hand increasing the density of Delhi and on the other strengthening the gravitational pull of Delhi so that it has drawn cities such as Gurgaon and NOIDA into the mass of Delhi. This defeats the very purpose of the NCR plan. Despite this, the 38,000 square kilometres of the National Capital Region still shows traces of the basic equilibrium of settlements in India.

In the dynamic situation in which India finds itself there are number of forces and counter forces which are operating simultaneously and which are impacting the settlement pattern. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has been designed to give a hundred days employment per year to anyone in the rural areas seeking employment. Almost a lakh crore rupees per annum are being spent on this programme. I do not want to enter into the flaws of the programme, which are manifold, but it has had one major effect in States such as Bihar from where there was migration of labour in search of employment to States such as the Punjab, which are starved of agricultural labour. By providing some semblance of employment in the villages, NREGS has sharply impacted the migration pattern and today rich farmers in States such as the Punjab have to go to rural Bihar in order to cajole the landless and the marginal farmers to come and work as farm hands. This has certainly pushed up wages. Even in Madhya Pradesh, in the more prosperous agricultural districts farm labour is difficult to find. It is too early to make any study of the overall impact on NREGS and its long term implications, but if the programme is restructured to create permanent assets in the villages, such as minor irrigation works, soil conservation and water conservation works, water harvesting, etc., it will certainly reduce rural-urban migration. In fact, in districts such as Jhabua, Dhar, Mandla, etc., which are tribal and from where annual seasonal migration is the normal feature, aggressive watershed development management programmes have increased fuel and fodder availability, raised the water table in wells, substantially increased irrigation at micro level and reduced seasonal migration. The ridge to valley treatment of hill features, vegetation and water conservation methods have all been beneficial to the environment. This has kindled hope in the villages, which show a degree of vibrancy which was hitherto missing.

There are two other schemes which have also had a beneficial effect in retaining the importance of rural India in our settlement hierarchy. The first is the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana which has dramatically improved road connectivity in rural India. The second is the rural electrification programme carried out in States such as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, where separation of the agricultural feeder from the normal feeder has ensured quality power for the prescribed number of hours for lift irrigation and other agricultural purposes, while guaranteeing twenty-four hours normal power supply to every village, but for which there are metered charges. The availability of twenty-four hours power supply does not merely improve the agricultural picture. In many States guaranteed power availability has encouraged small scale industry to locate in villages. One example of this is Bhavnagar District in Gujarat where, in about 180 villages, households have installed diamond cutting lathes and other equipment, thus collectively making Bhavnagar District the biggest diamond cutting centre in the world. The activity is industrial, but carried out by agriculturists and the settlement picture remains undisturbed because the village is viable and people live there. Here is an example of small scale industrialisation not automatically leading to urbanisation, but nevertheless providing nonagricultural jobs to villagers.

There is another factor which is having a definite impart on the settlement pattern and that is education. Unfortunately the village is too small an entity to host institutions of higher learning unless, of course, it be fortunate like Pilani to attract the Birlas to set up the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, an institution on par with an Indian Institute of Technology. Even here some change is visible, for example, the location of the Jaypee Institute of Technology in Raghogarh in Guna District of Madhya Pradesh. Raghogarh is a very small town in Guna District but the Jaypee Group preferred to locate in this place. But by and large children who want to go in for higher education have unfortunately to leave the village for a town where a good college is located. Very often these children do not return to their parent’s occupation of agriculture and they are the ones who permanently migrate to cities. This is a phenomenon which we can neither stop nor should stop. Whereas NREGS may as a stopgap measure check distress migration to the cities, it cannot stop the movement of the educated young to urban areas.

The next question which arises is what should be the destination of migration. The first time educated would be still be at the stage where after a basic degree they would like a job. It is unlikely that their interest would lie in research, academics or fine arts. This is where the hierarchy of settlements and the equilibrium have an important part to play. Because India does not have primate cities there is no single city which dominates, but the mega metropolitan cities do have some characteristics of a primate city, that is, they do not have a definite hinterland. The National Capital Region is not the defined hinterland of Delhi where, for example, about half a million people working in the garment trade have migrated from Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Are Azamgarh, Balia and Ghazipur the hinterland of Delhi? Obviously not, but yet they contribute labour to Delhi. Hapur does not. Similarly, if the city of Mumbai were to be set physically adrift from the mainland, it could survive like the island city of Singapore in which the world would be its hinterland. In fact, the entire Shiv Sena movement gains strength from the fact that Mumbai does not have a hinterland and the Shiv Sena, in a bid to protect the Maharashtrian roots of the city, resents this fact and wants Maharashtra to be the hinterland of the city and the others to be kept out. And yet these huge metropolitan cities are very much a part of the entire settlement picture, representing as they do just six percent of the population of India. But it is the other ninety-four percent who are also accommodated in the settlement pattern and unless there is equilibrium they will virtually become the exploited and the mega metropolitan cities will be the predators and the exploiters. This is a very important factor in determining our settlement policy for the future which, by implication, means the entire economic policy and the employment policy.

By itself rural India has the capacity to be self sufficient, provided the following things are done:- (1) Substantially upgrading the existing irrigation infrastructure and then adopting means of massively increasing irrigation through a hierarchy of projects ranging from the village pond, dug well, tube well, micro and minor irrigation works and all the way up to mega projects like dams on the Narmada. (2) Stabilising power supply and ensuring twenty-four hours power supply to villages, but on a full tariff basis so that there are adequate returns on the power supply. (3) A massive input into improving school education, vocational education and technical education, together with encouragement to rural students to enroll in colleges specialising in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Liberal Arts. (4) Improving the network of rural communications, development of market villages and towns, strengthening of mandis, location of industry which adds value to agricultural produce in the mandi towns. (5) Strengthening the rural credit system so that the service town and farmers in its command both mutually benefit.

There are some factors which are likely to bring about a change in the settlement equilibrium. India is beginning to realise that if it is to maintain and strengthen its strategic global economic strength, then its manufacturing sector has to evolve, develop and grow to an extent where it can compete with the European Union and with countries such as China. One step in this direction is the conceptualisation of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor , which largely impacts the States of Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, as also the Union Territories of Delhi, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Diu Daman and very marginally the States of Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The total area under the influence of the project is estimated to be 4, 36,486 square kilometres. The project is located along a 1,483 kilometres long dedicated rail freight corridor (DFC) largely from north to south on the western side of India, with an area of influence of about 150 kilometres on both sides of the DFC. As the concept paper states, “High impact market driven nodes are proposed to be identified along the corridor to provide transparent and investment friendly policy and facility regimes under which integrated investment regions and investment areas would be set up. These regions are proposed to be self sustained industrial townships with world class infrastructure, road and rail connectivity for freight movement to and from ports and logistics hubs, served by domestic and international air connectivity, reliable power, quality social infrastructure and provide a globally competitive environment conducive for setting up businesses”. This is the concept, but in reality what is likely to happen is an unregulated ribbon development along improved roads and railway tracks in which in the growth nodes land would be provided, which would be built upon, though not necessarily in a planned manner. In almost every new industrial township whereas the infrastructure for the industry may be of a reasonable standard, generally township development for people other than those working in the industries is highly unsatisfactory and what we have is a massive proliferation of Soweto type slums, or the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro. What could happen, however, is that these new nodes or townships could eat into cultivable village land, finish agriculture and seriously disturb the settlement equilibrium, at least within the region in which such development takes place.

In other words, there is no guarantee that the present settlement equilibrium will not be seriously disturbed in the near future, especially because we as a nation seem to be totally incapable of taking a holistic view of anything and then preparing a complete plan. I have already given five small suggestions on how rural India can be self sufficient and, therefore, sustainable. A rural settlement is generally in consonance with the environment because the scale of the settlement is not sufficiently large to cause widespread environmental damage. Urban settlements, on the other hand, are not only large enough in scale to enable man to seriously change the environment through human intervention, largely hostile intervention and because an urban settlement converts land from cyclical and seasonable agricultural use to a one time urban use in which brick and cement replace the tilled soil, the impact cannot be reversed. In terms of service requirements, in dense urban settlements, the requirement is of complex composite services, whereas in a rural settlement these services can be household based and they are not very extractive in terms of a call on natural resources. When the settlement equilibrium is disturbed the problem of servicing the city becomes so difficult that ultimately every city in India becomes a disaster zone. This does not mean that we cannot industriliase or urbanise in a manner which takes note of the environment and protects it, but it does mean that going by our experience we just do not plan or manage in this manner.

In fact, if at the macro level there is still a basic equilibrium of settlements, at the regional and at the mili level and at the intra city micro level, there is a very serious imbalance. So much so that in practically every major city in India we have a parallel existence of two cities. The first is a planned city for which there is a development plan or master plan. That probably covers about thirty per cent of the city. There is a parallel unplanned city of the unauthorised construction, the slums, the unserviced segments, which lie outside the ken of the planning process and where the people have helped themselves to land because the State has failed to provide. When interventions take place in such a situation they are bound to be ad hoc and almost totally politics driven. The prime example of this is the unauthorised colonies of Delhi which, at every election, are regularised, no development takes place and five years later they are regularised again. However much the National Commission on Urbanisation may talk about settlement equilibrium, the fact remains that this equilibrium is seriously endangered in our large cities and this has denied the people equity. A society which lacks equity cannot be said to be balanced and, therefore, more than equilibrium in spatial distribution we need equity in city planning and city administration.

One naturally likes to end on an optimistic note. The National Commission on Urbanisation was able to identify twenty-four urban corridors or spatial urban regions, further divided into forty-nine Spatial Priority Urbanisation Regions (SPUR) which are well distributed throughout India. The Commission also identified 329 cities and towns, generally in the small and medium category, which have a potential for growth and have been designated as Generators of Economic Momentum (GEM). These are evenly distributed throughout the country, they are located in one or another SPUR and if planned investment is done they would be able to grow in tandem with the rural hinterland which they serve. In other words, the Commission has given a blueprint for urban growth which supports and enhances the basic equilibrium of the settlement pattern. Perhaps the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) is partly a result of the concerns expressed by the National Commission on Urbanisation, but whereas the programme aims at enhancing the infrastructure of the existing towns, it does not go far enough in encouraging urbanisation in the manner suggested by the Commission.

Ultimately all activities take place on land and, therefore, anything which disturbs the land use pattern automatically disturbs the settlement balance. Sad to say India does not have a national, a State or a meaningful city land use plan. For example, in India six percent of its land is arable, thirty percent either under forest or is fit for afforestation and about ten percent is uncultivable waste. A sensible land use policy would try retain this balance and design land use in a way that there is minimum disturbance of agricultural land and land which either is or potentially can be under forest. By accident Gujarat has moved towards a sensible land use policy in that much of the industry is now being attracted by districts such as Kutch where land does not have an opportunity cost because it is unsuitable for alternative purposes and, therefore, its conversion to industrial or urban use has the minimum impact on the environment. This is in sharp contrast with what happened in the past in which great chunks of fertile land in central and south Gujarat was given over to industry. Once we have a land use policy in place, maintenance of the settlement equilibrium would become much easier.

India Shining? Or India, The Dark Continent?

Dr M N Buch (Visiting Fellow, VIF)

The newspaper headlines and electronic media such as NDTV24×7, Times Now, CNN-IBN keeps screaming at us that India is the land of scams, the very fountainhead of corruption. On the one hand are the Indian people – harried, betrayed, looted by those in power. On another we have the predators, the politicians and bureaucrats. As if a third hand had sprouted on our body politic we have the crusaders, the knights in shining armour, the Anna Hazares, Arvind Kejriwals, the father and son Bushan duo, the Sisodias, Damanias and Kiran Bedis, fighting valiantly to expose the corrupt and punish the guilty. Or does one sense a certain tarnish on their armour, a certain uneasy feeling that a desire for publicity, a hunger to be in the limelight, a vaulting ambition to unseat those in power so that they themselves can assume power? Is the campaign against corruption, based less on commitment and more on the benefit that flows to the campaigner really aimed at eradicating the disease rather than on just exposing, selectively, some of the powerful for the vicarious pleasure that scandal-mongering gives? In other words, is India a total cesspit of corruption, or is there another India also in which the average citizen goes about his peaceful occupation and keeps the country ticking?

This essay is not really young India’s contribution because I am already seventy-eight years old and I joined the India Administrative Service more than fifty-five years ago. India, like me, was still young as an independent country, being only ten years old in 1957. We were in a very exciting era in which a leader of the stature of Jawaharlal Nehru had launched India on a path of development which promised to pull a sleepy colony from its slumber to become one of the great industrial powers of the world. Smug though it may sound we young officers also were galvanised by the thought that in our own small way we, too, were a part of the process of modernisation. Great things did happen, dams were built, food self sufficiency was attained, the capital goods industries went into production, education and healthcare took large leaps, electric power brought light to rural India. We, who had been the brightest jewel in the British crown, were suddenly moving by leaps and bounds to catch up with the developed world. The sheer sense of pride we had as Bhakra Dam went on stream, Bhilai Steel Plant began to produce steel or the Railways began producing their own locomotives. No country that is genetically corrupt can achieve all this and our scientists, engineers, technologists, doctors, researchers, even our politicians and civil servants proved that we are better than the best. No country in the world could produce a team equal to one headed by S.N. Mehta of the ICS and Tata Rao, a great electrical engineer, who together built the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board into a powerful engine of economic and social change in the largely tribal state of Madhya Pradesh.

Even if the paper is not written by a young man it is still the outpourings of a person who is xenophobically Indian. I believe in this country, I have faith in its future and I take great pride in the commonsense of its people. Therefore, unlike the Kejriwals of today I would like to draw up some sort of a balance sheet which would help us look at ourselves in perspective, recognise the legitimacy of the demand to eradicate corruption because the fact is that not only at top levels but even, or especially, at the level of normal routine the citizen has become the victim of bureaucratic inefficiency, even deliberate harassment, political corruption and even downright cheating by unscrupulous businessmen. In the delivery of services by both government and the private sector there is a feeling based on reality that the citizen will face a shortfall. Even in performing its minimum function of maintaining law and order and controlling crime government seems to be failing, with political interference in police functioning being the main cause. It is almost as if the will to govern no longer exists, though the desire to use power for personal gain is very much in evidence.

The negative side of the report card can be extended to cover a volume, but the negative is also constructed out of elements which highlight what is wrong without looking at the whole picture. Therefore, unless one is looking at a situation such as faced by Germany at the end of World War II, when the nation stood destroyed by the colossal mistakes of an unbridled megalomaniac, if the negative is viewed in perspective it often becomes manageable and capable of remedy. The question, therefore, is whether the near failure of governance in India, the widespread political and bureaucratic corruption, the systemic shortcomings, are still manageable and capable of remedy or do we now need a total revolution? Is the India Against Corruption campaign of washing dirty linen in public such a revolution or is it only another form of J.P. Narain’s failed ‘sampurna kranti’? Is there cause for despair or is there still real hope?

A perspective requires a study of what is positive in the system. One must, therefore, begin with seeing the institutions which the British left us and which the Constitution enshrined. The first is parliamentary democracy itself. Despite the brief interlude of the Emergency institutionalised democracy does work in India. It accommodates the political philosophy of Hindutva without sacrificing the basic secular character of our democracy. It encourages middle-of-the road politicians and parties to set a benchmark to which both extreme right and extreme left have to adhere. It allows the Marxists to rule two major States and wield great influence nationally. It forces fissiparous regional parties like DMK and the Akali Dal to subordinate their regional interests to national interests and it makes the Government of Gujarat acquiesce to prosecution of communal elements in the State who allegedly enjoy state patronage, many of whom have been convicted and sentenced by our independent courts. In fact the fiercely independent judiciary itself is a legacy of the British, with the courts standing as a stout wall which protects our democracy. This is an unparalleled achievement and one could state with little fear of contradiction that no other country has such proactive courts as our Supreme Court and High Courts. Politicians may accuse the judiciary of sometimes encroaching on the territory of the executive, but no one dares to defy or disobey a court order.

There are three other institutions which need mention. One is our totally apolitical Armed Forces. Our Armed Forces are a democratic organ of a democratic State and anyone who underplays this fact is a fool. This is definitely one of the major positives of our report card. Then we have the Civil Services, including the Police. They have been under immense stress as values erode and politics becomes corrupt, fissiparous, or demanding of our Services to become partners in wrongdoing. No doubt there is some erosion of values and probity, but there are many fine Civil Service and Police officers who have been true to their salt, been steadfast in doing their duty and have stood their ground against all odds. To this we must add our great civil Constitutional institutions such as the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Public Service Commission, Union and State and Commissions such as the National Human Right Commission and the Information Commission. “They stood, and earth’s foundations stay”, to quote Housman.

Empowerment in its broadest sense is a definite positive in India. The British studiously avoided empowering us. They did delegate certain functions to Indians and made marginal institutional changes, but in terms of giving Indians real power in the way that the Preamble of our Constitution does or Part III of the Constitution through the Fundamental Rights confers on all citizens was missing from the British mindset. Empowerment after independence has been devolved politically right down to panchayat level and now, through the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments of the Constitution, urban and rural local government forms the third tier of government in India. At local government level, through reservations which are legally mandated, women, tribals and scheduled castes and other backward classes which hitherto did not enjoy a share of power have now been constitutionally made partners in government. The most significant change has been reservation for women in local government, which has forced a conservative and, in the case of States such as Haryana a fundamentalist orthodox society, to share power with women. This has not ended discrimination against women but as more and more of them begin to enjoy political power one can see a perceptible shift in gender equations in large parts of the country. Khap panchayats of Haryana still exist but the voices of women can no longer be stilled and the movement for gender sensitisation and equality is bound to gather pace.

On the social front one finds a great deal of ferment in what has hitherto been a caste bound socially static society. One change is that those who had been oppressed for millennia on account of birth are standing up, demanding and .fighting for their rights. Social structures cannot change overnight, but as more of the underprivileged raise a cry for an equal share of power, wealth and development, the social momentum for equality is bound to accelerate. Many people, especially of my generation, find it anathema that those who happen to be born in a lower caste are now coming and sitting not only beside us but sometimes above us. There have been violent clashes between different social groups on this account and stories of atrocities against lower caste people are still heard frequently. Here, too, there is a change. It is not the Brahmins and the Thakurs who are the main exploiters of the Dalits. The main clash is now between OBCs and the Dalits. If the highborn can learn to live with those whom they consider shudras, the day is not far when OBCs will also have the accept Dalits as equals. Where we are failing is that government, which should play a strong proactive role to promote a casteless society and to come down with a heavy hand on those who use their collective caste status to oppress others, often plays a wait and watch role. If government becomes proactive we can very quickly become a society based on merit rather than caste and class. One would have thought that the Socialists would be in the vanguard of a campaign to promote castelessness, but unfortunately the two main Socialist groups, the U.P. group of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Bihar Group of Lalu Prasad Yadav, have preferred to play the intermediate caste card for political gain and these two groups have in fact encouraged caste based politics which is highly divisive. In a country undergoing social ferment which can only create a new, positive dynamics, divisive caste politics is trying to reverse what is a desirable forward progression in India. Nevertheless I still look upon social ferment as a healthy sign and would put it on the positive side of the report card.

How well have we managed our economy? Have we eliminated poverty, tackled malnutrition, provided jobs, increased productivity, balanced the budget, controlled prices and generally created an environment in which there is healthy growth with equity? I would like to answer this question somehow obliquely. In the beginning of 1962 I became District Collector of Betul, a beautiful, jungle clad, hilly district in the Satpuras, with a large tribal population. When compared with districts in the more prosperous areas of India or, for that matter, in the Chambal or Malwa regions of Madhya Pradesh, Betul was backward; there was visible poverty and very little industrial activity. Soon after I took over, a Swedish Bishop, who had served as a missionary in the district more than thirty years ago, came to call on me. He expressed surprise at the enormous progress made by the district, which took me aback. I asked him why he felt that there was progress. He told me that whereas in the past many people were bare bodied he did not find a single person without a shirt on his back or footwear on his feet, many tribals were on bicycle, there was electricity even in rural areas and that in a district where wheat was almost unknown he found it to be the major rabi crop now. I had taken a spot view of the district, whereas the Bishop had taken a longitudinal view. I swore that day that in future when I looked at any issue I would also like to create a perspective in which I could compare what was and what is. If we view India through this prism it is amazing how much progress we have made. When the British left only about five thousand towns and villages were electrified. Today there is universal electrification and though power supply in rural areas is erratic, intermittent and of poor quality, at least the basic service is in place. If we emulate the example of Gujarat which has separated the agricultural feeder from the main feeder, ensured twenty-four hours supply on the main feeder at full tariff and prescribed hours of top quality supply on the agriculture feeder we, too, can improve the quality of power and the quantum of power throughout the country. Here there is a management failure but not an economic failure. If we set the power system right there would be a massive upsurge of economic activity and this is something which is capable of both implementation and management.

India had a rudimentary industrial structure when the British left and today we are one of the most powerful industrial economies in the world. We look at the aberrations of the system, but why do we not recognise that Ratan Tata, Rahul Bajaj, Keshub and Anand Mahindra, Dhirubhai, Mukesh and Anil Ambani, the great Chettiar industrialists of the South have created absolutely new industrial and economic models which have made India prosperous? We bother about Mukesh Ambani spending rupees six hundred and fifty crores on his house in Bombay, but we do not even mention the fact that the world’s biggest refinery of petroleum products is the Reliance Group’s establishment at Jamnagar, which has created thousands of direct and indirect jobs. One does not excuse the Ambanis for any shady practices they may have adopted to create this vast empire, but the fact is that Dhirubhai and his sons have played a major transformative role in developing Indian industry.

NREGS is the flagship vessel of government to create rural employment. The idea is sound because if we create rural jobs which are productive we can ameliorate rural-urban migration and also improve living standards in rural areas. However, in practical terms the scheme is somewhat ill-conceived because its main focus is employment and not asset creation. The minute we change this scheme to create permanent rural assets which benefit the rural economy, the scheme will suddenly become a major source of increasing productivity on a long term basis in the agriculture sector. One has only to visit those areas of Jhabua District where a successful watershed management programme has dramatically increased fodder and fuel supply, raised the water table, brought about a higher agricultural yield and very substantially stopped the seasonal migration of the villagers in search of wage employment. The thought was correct, the design of the scheme was defective and, therefore, unsatisfactory implementation coupled with corruption was an inevitable consequence. What we need here is not Kejriwal; what we need is a system which automatically forces planners to think and then from these thoughts emerge practical proposals which can be implemented without difficulty.

I would say that on the whole the economy has not done badly. The major failure of government in this behalf is a total inability to grasp what causes inflation and to take remedial measures in reasonable time. That is also because the economic managers and advisors of government are unfortunately not grounded in Indian realities and, therefore, outdated, totally irrelevant and out of context, World Bank influenced ideas flow from them and virtually dictate policy. Prices can be controlled through better networks of roads which enable produce to be moved from rural areas, a wholesale market which buys directly from the producer and not through middlemen, a host of storage facilities which enable grain, for example, to flow into the market on a year round basis, in which there is no sharp drop in prices when the harvest season sets in and a sharp increase as the season passes and grain becomes in short supply, and a well developed market intelligence system which enables commodities to be quickly moved from the producer to the areas of high demand. It does not take a genius to look at what is obvious but it takes hard work, based on proper planning and priorities, to achieve desirable results. I consider it a big negative in this country that we still have not been able to develop a system which could encourage price stabilisation, while paying a fair share to the producer.

Our social infrastructure has definitely improved. There are more schools, more colleges, more institutes of technology and management and medicine than before and whereas peaks of excellence may have flattened, the overall standard has risen. We may not win Nobel Prizes, but we are a better educated and more technically qualified people than before. I hold the view that if the Education Ministry could put its act together we can revolutionise our educational system and standards. This is also true of healthcare. But unfortunately here the primary healthcare has not kept pace with a high level medical and surgical care. What we need to do is to raise the median to a higher level so that the quality of primary and community level health care dramatically improves. This, again, is an achievable objective.

India may not be shining like burnished gold but it certainly is not the Dark Continent. I would say that we are progressive but not optimally efficient, we are not genetically corrupt but there is systemic corruption in India which we are not serious about eradicating. We have a dynamic economy, but as a people we seem to prefer the brake pedal to the accelerator. We lack strong, purposeful democratic government despite a firmly entrenched democratic polity. None of these, however, need cause us despair, though there are twinges of distress. We can overcome all these shortcomings with greater citizen participation, greater accountability which rewards the good and punishes the bad and with reformed political parties which emphasise values and ideology and prepare themselves both for exercise of power and to sit in opposition. Platitudes? Never -- for all this is in the realm of the possible.

Is Verrier Elwin Still Relevant? –A Study of the Bhils of Jhabua

Dr. M N Buch
Visiting Fellow,VIF

Verrier Elwin dedicated his life first to live with Maria and Muria tribals of Bastar (both groups belong to the Gond family) and then the tribals of the North East in what is now Arunachal Pradesh. Pt. Nehru had a liking for and faith in Elwin and many of our policies relating to the tribes were based on the thoughts of Verrier Elwin.Elwin felt that the tribals are a very special people who must be kept separate from the rest of Indian society in order to conserve and preserve their ethnic identity, their tribal social structures, their culture and their way of life. He strongly believed that contact with the rest of India would place the tribals in an unequal contest with the nontribal people and would expose them to virtually unlimited exploitation. In a way this is a policy which the American Government followed vis-à-vis their own indigenous American population, who were confined to earmarked reserves and kept from assimilation into mainstream American society. It is almost as if these people were an endangered species of wild life whose habitat had to be shut away from ordinary society. The fact that mainstream America was the guilty party and that the American Indians were an endangered species because of threat of extermination held out by the new settlers seems to have been lost sight of. .

The legacy of Elwin is Scheduled Areas and Inner Line Areas which were kept isolated from the rest of India. Even today an Indian citizen requires a permit to visit a designated Inner Line Area. This would work where the means of transport and communications were limited to such an extent that this restricted the mobility of people. The Second World War, which brought a foreign enemy into our tribal areas, especially Nagaland and Manipur, saw the massive induction of the Indian Army in order to fight the Japanese and this certainly ended the isolation of the North East. As the war ended and the armies receded they left behind the merchants, tradesmen and other camp followers from all over India and they settled in the tribal areas. As a people they were different from the North Eastern Tribals and whereas a degree of interdependence developed between tradesmen and locals, a large number of exploitative businessmen also came in and certainly there was resentment as they began to exploit the tribals. Verrier Elwin would no longer be relevant in a situation in which tribal society was forcefully projected into what passed for mainstream India, in which the tribals were untrained, uneducated and not oriented to deal with these externalities which now impinged on their daily lives. The genesis of a great deal of unrest in North East can be traced to this unplanned intermingling of, say, the Marwaris of Rajasthan, Bihari labour and the locals in Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, etc. Verrier Elwin’s theory of keeping the tribals isolated left them unprepared for all external influences and this has had a very unhealthy effect on the economy, social structure and behavioural patterns of the tribals of the North East. This is one of the major causes of insurgency.

In Bastar the size of the district, its remoteness, the density of the forests and the entirely Gond tribal nature of its people had kept the district fairly isolated from the rest of Madhya Pradesh and adjoining States. However, roads were built, settled administration did penetrate the region and a degree of interaction between tribals and nontribals did take place. So long as the pace was evolutionary it did not present many problems. However, two major developments took place which completely transformed the district and not necessarily for the good. The first was settlement of large number of refugees from East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh) in the Dandakaranya area of Bastar and adjoining Koraput District of Orissa. In Bastar the largest such development was in the Pakhanjor area of the north and west of the district. Vast areas of forest land were cleared and whereas the tribals were not allotted land the refugees were settled on it, thus causing simmering resentment amongst the tribals. The second major development was the discovery of what is perhaps the finest iron ore in the world, the blue dust of Bailadila. The forests of this region, which is drained by the Dankhani and Shankhani rivers, represented semi moist deciduous and evergreen forests of Central India at their climax. It had been reported that as late as the second half of the nineteenth century Bailadia was an abode of the one horned Indian rhinoceros.

The people of Bailadila were very backward as their exposure to nontribal society was negligible. Suddenly into this region was unleashed the National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC), with its huge machines such as excavators, front end loaders, dumpers, large drilling rigs and explosives for blasting. The tribals had never seen such equipment, they were not trained to operate it and certainly they were quite unprepared for the influx of a whole army of workers from outside the region. Virtually in the twinkling of an eye their forests were destroyed, their land pitted and cratered, their rivers polluted, their homesteads gone and their farms rendered useless. They received some cash compensation but they were totally untrained to handle cash and soon the money was gone. In what can only be called an act of barbarism the tribals were rendered homeless, without work, their tribal society substantially destroyed because their social structures broke down as the people were scattered and their women virtually sold into prostitution. This is the inevitable fate of any group of people which finds that the cocoon around it has been shattered and the people rendered helpless by the relentless blows of external factors. Had India educated, trained and helped the tribals in acquiring new skills neither Baildila nor Pakhanjor need have occurred. India could not adopt a policy of keeping the tribals in designated reserves, nor does its Constitution allow it to deny any Indian the opportunity for progress and, therefore, Verrier Elwin’s thoughts ultimately proved fatal to tribal society.

Amongst the major tribes in India are Bhils of Western Madhya Pradesh, Northern Gujarat and adjoining areas of South Eastern Rajasthan. The largest concentration of Gonds is to be found in Jhabua, including Alirajpur, Dhar, Ratlam and Khargone in Madhya Pradesh, Panchmahals in Gujarat and Dungarpur, Bhilwara Banswara and Udaipur Districts of Rajasthan. Of these Jhabua is more than ninety percent Bhil and about seventy percent of the population of Dhar is Bhil and allied tribals such as Bhilalas and Patelias. Of all the tribes in India the Bhils have had the longest contact with nontribal people. The Bhils are basically war like, live in nuclear families, are highly individualistic, every Bhil has his own little compound or falia on his own little isolated hilltop and the nearest people to them that I can think of are the independent Highland clans of Scotland. Bhil warriors formed part of Maharana Pratap’s army, they fought for the British as part of the Malwa Bhil Corps and even today the Bhil continues to be hardy and independent. He is fond of alcohol, loves music and can dance all night and he fiercely protects his individual freedom.

The Bhil districts, especially Jhabua and Dhar, are hilly, have poor soil which cannot retain moisture, have been massively deforested and this has caused environmental degradation and because of these unhealthy practices soil productivity is low. Jhabua has about thirty five inches of rainfall per year but the rainfall pattern is erratic. Once in three years invariably there is a drought and because the forests have been felled and there is soil erosion, water run-off is rapid and ground water is in very short supply. All these have adversely affected agriculture and, therefore, the Bhils are forced into seasonal migration in search of livelihood. After the kharif harvest is in one rarely finds any adult male in a Bhil village because all of them have gone out in search of work. This seasonal migration brings the Bhils into contact with the rest of India, though only in the form of unskilled, underpaid labour. Nevertheless, the Bhils are aware of what is going on elsewhere and to that extent they are not isolated like the tribals of Bailadila or Nagaland. That is also perhaps one reason why in the matter of religion there is considerable sanskritisation of the Bhils. What is surprising is that despite all the external influences and interactions with nontribal people the Bhil identity is not totally lost and one can still clearly recognise the Bhil as a tribal and his society and culture as typically Bhil. There have been changes, which is only to be expected as external factors begin to operate, but it says much for the innate strength of Bhil culture that it has been able to retain its own individual identity whilst reacting to the modern influences which now operate.

The Bhil districts in Madhya Pradesh, being drought prone, have had at least sixty years experience of government intervention through relief works. I remember that some years ago the Engineer-in-Chief of the Madhya Pradesh Public Works Department told me that there was enough aggregate and stone dust collected in the districts through relief works to be able to pave every road in the State. The philosophy of relief works was that the work should be arduous, not permanently productive but of a nature such that only the really needy would come forward for it. In fact there was a time when were told that it was perfectly in order to dig holes and then fill them up because the idea was not so much to undertake public works as to provide employment. Fortunately this philosophy changed when the drought prone areas programme, integrated rural development programme, watershed management programme and now the National Employment Guarantee Scheme came into being. The ruling philosophy is that rural works should be taken up with the objective of creating permanent assets which could benefit village society and economy, improve water and land management and create assets which could help to ameliorate poverty. Jhabua is one district where large scale watershed management programmes have been implemented and this has definitely improved water availability in a number of villages, increased fodder supply and by bringing many hill features under afforestation, has brought about long term stabilisation and improvement of ground water. This, in turn, has had some effect in the matter of seasonal migration. The indications are that it is possible to improve the water situation in Jhabua and to increase soil productivity, which would inevitably bring about a major change in the migration pattern. Unfortunately the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme as it is designed today and operates in the field has diluted the Watershed Management Programme and this is not a healthy development. Government must have a review of NREGS to see how it can be made an effective instrument in the creation of permanent village assets, especially through the Watershed Management Programme.

I have been visiting Jhabua on and off and have been a keen observer of how Bhil society has evolved over the last fifty years. Certainly in the villages where the Watershed Management Programme brought about improvement one can see that irrigated cultivation has caught on and one see horticultural crops where none existed before. For example, in Petlawad Tehsil of Jhabua District there is extensive cultivation of tomatoes and chillies, both products which have a ready market. It is a pleasure to see stacked against walls of even mean hutments plastic crates used for transporting tomatoes to market. We need to expand this activity much further, but the inhibiting factor is that the markets are far away and there is considerable spoilage of what is a delicate agricultural product and the money which goes to the farmers is only a fraction of the price at which the product sells in the retail market. The pro FDI lobby would immediately argue that if we allow foreign retail chains to enter the market they would take care of this problem, arrange to collect the horticultural products from rural areas and give a good price to the farmers. Those who know Jhabua well would realise that no FDI retail chain will penetrate into this remote region in the immediate future. Therefore, the true answer is for indigenous processing units to add value to the product by conversion of tomatoes into puree, sauce, juice or even tinned tomatoes. The processing units would be in the small and medium industry class, they would be local based because it is easier to transport the processed product than it is to transport the raw product and they would provide local employment for which the skill level required is not very high and for which the tribals, especially the women, can be easily trained.

I brought this up in a meeting of the district officers and whereas the officer in charge of horticulture welcomed the idea, the officer in charge of industries said that the scale of production did not attract entrepreneurs to set up units. I had to tell the District Collector that the two officers should sit together, the Industries Department officer should project the minimum requirement of the processing industry and the horticulture officer should then try and increase production of tomatoes or any other horticulture product to a level where a processing industry could operate with profit. I am mentioning this specific case because if we have the correct mental approach and there is coordination many of these seemingly trivial problems can be solved locally.

The main problem appears to be that because of generations of seasonal migration the people of Jhabua seem to have lost faith in their own ability to make a good living out of land and have also lost faith in land as a provider of livelihood. I remember visiting the Punjab Agriculture University at Ludhiana some years ago. There were large groups of farmers thronging the campus because they had heard that the university had successfully experimented with a new variety of wheat. They wanted to know all about it so that they, too, could benefit from this research by sowing the new variety of seed. The Punjab farmer is confident that he can earn a living from the land and he is independent enough to want to be his own master. However, in the Bhil mind wage employment has become almost an embedded idea and, therefore, everyone I met in Jhabua wanted more wage employment and better wages. There was very little demand for the kind of land and water management techniques which would help to increase soil productivity and give the Bhils a good livelihood based on land, cultivation and allied activities such as cattle breeding, etc. Because of this mind set the Bhil tribal has become excessively dependent on wage employment and to that extent he has lost his independence. That is why agricultural productivity in Jhabua is stagnant and the Bhil is, in a way, now bonded as a worker in wage employment programmes whose objective is to give employment but not necessarily to increase productivity or create assets. According to me this is the single most harmful development in the land of the Bhils, the psyche of the Bhils and their attitude towards permanent upliftment. We need to break this and to bring the Bhil back to a state where land becomes all important and the desire to earn a good living from land overpowers and, perhaps, eliminates the desire for wage employment.

How does one do this? One obvious answer is coverage of the district and all Bhil areas with a watershed management programme which is universal and covers every mili and micro watershed in the region. Villages Jakhela, Khardubadi, Kharduchhoti, etc., are living examples of what watershed management can do. Thousands of acres of hill features have been brought under afforestation and they have magnificent grasses, shrubs and trees which have transformed these barren hills and have even attracted wild life. I have personally run into a pantheress and two cubs on the Khardubadi hill and there are reports of a tiger being sighted at Jakhela. Avifauna abounds where there was none before. The greening of these hills and the treatment of the rivulets and the streams in the area has revived all wells in eight villages and more than fifty new wells under the Kapiladhara Scheme have been sunk. There is no migration from these villages. This is the kind of programme which must be undertaken throughout region.

There is a Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), or Agriculture Science Centre in Jhabua. Excellent work is being done there on the breeding and extension of Kadaknath breed of poultry, which is unique both nationally and internationally because the bird is black and its flesh is black. In fact an IPR patent should be taken out for this bird because it does not exist anywhere else in the world outside Jhabua. But KVK Jhabua needs to go much further. It and the agriculture and horticulture departments of government must demonstrate on a very large scale throughout the Bhil areas that even with erratic rainfall, periodic droughts, poor soil and the present low productivity it is possible for us to agriculturally transform Jhabua through correct soil and water management practices, careful choosing of crop varieties to suit the local agro climatic conditions and the adoption of agricultural operations which are well planned. If hundreds of such demonstrations could be held throughout the district we should be able to convince the tribals that they can make a living from their land and that they need not seek wage employment.

What would be the advantage of such an approach? Improving the land is in itself one of the most environment friendly exercises that we can think of. Making the land yield enough to bring prosperity to Bhils would be a permanent reversal of environmental degradation and would certainly improve nutrition standards dramatically. Reduction or even elimination of seasonal migration would enable children to be educated because they would be stable in their own villages and, therefore, the school system could be improved. This is equally applicable to health care, which is difficult to provide if people are migrating to distant places. As Bhil society prospers and as stability of population returns because there is very little seasonal migration, traditional Bhil culture would be strengthened because now on their home ground the Bhils would be able to tackle externalities on an equal footing. If I were to be asked what is the one factor which can give strength to Bhil society I would say that we must replace the mindset of wage employment by a desire for self-employment and this would release the innate entrepreneurial skills of tribals who are determined to stand on their own feet.