India’s leaders are in a quandary. They must undertake many difficult reforms simultaneously: reforming agricultural systems to increase farmers’ incomes, reforming land-use systems, and radically overhauling systems for job creation. All reforms must also improve environmental sustainability and reduce glaring inequalities. International comparisons show that India’s growth pattern over the past three decades has damaged its natural environment more than any other country. Moreover, it has generated the least decent employment per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). This model is not sustainable—environmentally, socially, or economically.
The paradigm of economic progress needs to be changed. Albert Einstein and other scientists pointed out that it is madness to solve systemic problems with the same thinking that created them. It is time to imagine the contours of a new paradigm of progress. Three recent books offer some pointers.
Peter S Goodman enters global supply chain in How the world ran out of everything (published 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 this tightly integrated system is efficient at generating profits for financial investors, it is fragile. It breaks down when it is needed most, as during the Covid-19 pandemic. Goodman explains how deregulation of manufacturing and transportation industries gave more power to capital owners and reduced the incomes and job security of workers across sectors. The result was booming stock markets during the pandemic in developed and developing countries, while workers could not earn money and food and medicine ran short.
Environmental scientist Vaclav Smil outlines a blueprint for a new paradigm in his book How the world really works: A Scientific Guide to Our Past, Present, and Future (published in 2022). He analyzes the use of fossil fuels in the modern economy. These are used in the production and distribution of four fundamental materials for modern civilization: steel, concrete, plastics, and food. He evaluates the “whole 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 renewable energy sources. Save on one side, add on the other.
Food is the most fundamental need for human survival, more fundamental than steel, concrete and plastic. And more fundamental than digital communication services, Smil points out. Fossil fuel solutions have become integral to scaling up food production and distribution to meet the needs of the human population, which has grown from 2 billion to 8 billion (1.4 billion in India) over the past 100 years. Fertilizers are produced from fossil fuels. Agricultural 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: “Can we go back to purely organic farming, relying on recycled organic waste and natural pest control, and do it without motor-driven irrigation and without field machinery brought back by draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to leave cities, resettle villages, dismantle centralized feedlots, and bring all the animals back to farms to use for labor and as a source of fertilizer. Are we willing to do this?”
Viksit Bharat needs a new paradigm viking. Local system solutions, developed collectively by communities in their own towns and cities, are the way to solve global systemic problems of climate change and unfair economic growth. This was the ‘Gandhian’ solution to India’s economic and social progress, which was set aside to adopt modern, Western solutions to development. Sixty-four percent of Indians live in rural areas (36 percent in China; 17 percent in the US). A majority work on farms and in small industries in rural India, not in large factories using automated equipment. India should take advantage of its current reality rather than trying to catch up with rich countries on their historical development paths.
Western-dominated global governance institutions—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Security Council—have failed to create a just and peaceful world. The third book, Grassroots environmental activism by Ashley Dawson (published January 2024), chronicles the struggle of grassroots movements to have their solutions heard at global climate summits. Their solutions are dismissed as backward by the scientific-industrial establishment. Indian policymakers must free themselves from the untenable ideas of progress that self-proclaimed “developed countries” in the West have imposed on the rest to maintain their own power. These ideas are the root 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 gained power in an established paradigm will resist changes in the fundamental ideas on which it is based. 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 to suppress any ideas that threaten their privileged positions.
India gained its political freedom in 1947 as the first step in its decolonization process. poor swaraj. Now it must seize its intellectual freedom. ‘Gandhi’ ideas about local development were not adopted when India formulated its vision of poorna swaraj in 1947. Instead, India adopted the model of large-scale industries that the West and the Soviet Union followed. In that model, people have to move from farms to factories and from rural communities to cities. Smil suggests wistfully that going back to ancient wisdom is a better way to move into the future. The time has come even for the West to delve into the knowledge of the natural and the rural. Rural India can be a university for Indian policymakers to produce policy innovations 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 print: Aug 05, 2024 | 09:13 AM IST