Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  Growth rates might be high and consumption goods might also be flying from the shopping malls in India’s cities, but in the country’s villages, a number of studies and reports seem to suggest, all is not well. And we are talking about a significant number of people here – about 160 million farming households. Around half of India’s population live in rural areas – a faceless, politically weak and an increasingly desperate population. “By all accounts, large parts of rural India are bleeding,” states the Outlook report. Discontent, suicides, resignation and poverty seem to characterise village life for many in the countryside. Outlook provides a graph which summarises the pain. 302 districts out of India’s 676 are facing drought or some other natural calamity, 13 states out of 28 are facing drought and agricultural output is down by over 50% in 2015 compared to the previous year. Consumption of food, transport and implements are all significantly down. Growth in real wages have dropped from 18% in 2014 to under 4% in 2015. And so on. It’s a bleak picture. Migration to the cities has increased, transferring poverty from the countryside to the urban streets. “It is a silent migration as we are not hearing anything about it,” reports one specialist. Work in the villages and countryside is hard if impossible to get. With no sowing of crops, work is disappearing. Unsurprisingly, there has been a resurgence in claims for support under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Although under attack from the Government, NREGA provides ‘guaranteed’ at least 100 days of work.

  Other indications of the rural desperation are evident. At the end of 2016, millions of marchers and demonstrators – mainly from the Maratha community, the landowning farmer caste – took to the streets in the western state of Maharashtra. “We want our farmers to be looked after and we will keep marching until they are,” stated one participant. The silent protests are complex involving caste and anti-Dalit issues but at the centre are themes of the forgotten or ignored agricultural sector.

  The droughts are identified as the main culprits behind the crisis. In mid-2016, some 330 million people were seen to be affected by these severe water shortages. The earlier than usual high summer temperatures added to the problems. Three consecutive weak monsoons were to blame. Media reports have been dominated by stories and case studies on the effect of drought on rural families and villages, with rationing of drinking water evident and wells that have dried up. Particularly hard hit has been the paddy production. Rice is a water-intensive crop requiring 2,500 litres of water to produce a single kilo of rice. Schools in Orissa were closed and protests around the country sought to draw attention to the problem. Doctor surgeries were reported closing due to insufficient water required to wash hands after medical activity. Stories of protests in Bangalore and across the state of Karnataka were reported over the sharing of ‘their river waters’ with the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. A High Court ruling in 2016 instructed the government to take action.

  As usual, the situation on the ground is always more complex and often worse than the bald figures. The charitable trust based in Bangalore, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, has provided a valuable and continuing source of data and perspectives on agricultural and rural development since 2003. Glancing through some of its studies and presentations begins to open up the hidden aspects of rural life. The ‘feminisation of agriculture’ for example is a process that has begun to reflect the movement of rural males from farm to nonfarm sectors. The growing confidence in these women groups is providing an opportunity to manage small and marginal farms. The lack of land and property rights together with low literacy rates has been identified as holding these women from further progress. Caste-based discrimination in access to water was highlighted in another detailed study of 11 villages from five states in India. A variety of socio-economic factors – size of landholding, occupation, income – were seen as determining access to drinking water. Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim households were seen as those most discriminated against in access to drinking water.

  Numerous studies at a local village level are situated obviously against the wider context of the restructuring of the Indian economy. India has always been seen as the sleeping giant of global agriculture. It ranks as one of the world’s leading producers of agricultural goods, but because of its hesitancy over integration into the global markets, it doesn’t figure greatly in the international media. Until there is a crisis. Farming in India has always been seen to be somewhat of a gamble. Even when most things go well, many farmers find it difficult to make ends meet. The agricultural sector is contracting slowly both in terms of output and of jobs. But small, more optimistic changes are reported in some rural areas. A growth of blue-collar jobs in rural areas has taken up some of the slack, educational levels between urban and rural areas have closed, and wage differences (where work can be obtained) have narrowed. Whether this good news is the result of the recently arrived poor in the cities from the rural areas is unknown. Irrespective of these changes agricultural and rural lives will remain of significant importance in the country in the years ahead. Few other countries depend so much on its agricultural produce, and few other countries employ so many workers in the rural areas. And yes – the annual monsoons are critical to the well-being of the sector and to rural lives, but introducing crop insurance schemes as the current government has done comes nowhere near addressing the problems.

  The new middle class. “We are coming, we are developing.”

  Any discussion of agriculture or the economy in general in India, especially in the decades ahead, usually includes mention of the rising ‘new middle class’. Given the rapid growth and ‘success’ of the Indian economy over the last three decades, this new focus of media infatuation is perhaps not surprising. What is surprising is the consumer-driven focus of content. Even with online newspapers, you have to scroll down a significant way past the gossip and tittle-tattle to get to the news sections.

  The structural changes occurring in India – the slow decline of the agriculture sector, service-led economic growth, rapid expansion of urbanisation and higher education – are seen generally as fuelling the rise of the middle class. The existence, nature and size of India’s new ‘middle class’ is of course an important issue. It does impact on consumption patterns as the newspapers have discovered but it also has important wider implications which are the focus of excitable debates. Did the success of the BJP in the recent elections, for example, depend significantly on the middle class vote? Is the middle class more secular than other groups and does caste still maintain its grip with this group and, anyway, who are the middle class?

  Conceptually there are numerous debates about understandings and definitions of social class, and especially the ‘middle class’. The most often quoted data (from outside the scholarly literature) in the Indian media is from the McKinsey Global Institute which defines middle class as those with an annual disposable income between $3,500–$18,000. Using these figures India today has a middle class of around 200–250 million – huge in absolute numbers but only a small percentage of the population. This figure will more than double by 2025 to around 583 million. Any discussion of numbers is important here given the slippery nature of the subject matter. Credit Suisse for example quotes 23 million people instead of the oft quoted 260 million as being middle class in India. This lower figure is arrived at by looking at wealth rather than income. Despite these large differences in understandings, more considered opinion seems to concur that the Indian middle class is very diverse and is characterised by its differences and divisions, unlike the middle class in Europe or the USA. It is a group that has benefited substantially from the liberalisation reforms of the 1990s. Reflecting this change, it’s common to read of the ‘new’ as opposed to the ‘old’ middle class. It is the ‘new’ middle class which replaced and did not integrate or blend into the ‘old’ middle class, which was seen as mainly coming from state institutions. This ‘new’ group for example is not a middle strata existing in some tension between the poor and the elite. In India the ‘n
ew’ middle class merges into the elite because of its privileged position. Its influence comes not from its wealth but from its privileges. They are educated, English-speaking, mainly from the upper castes, have benefited from the increase in private sector jobs and are in better paid work, especially in the technology sector. What was ‘new’ was not only the background of its members but the production of a distinct social identity that has claimed the fruits of the 1990s liberalisation reforms. This new middle class, argues Gurcharan Das, “is different from the older bourgeois, which was tolerant, secular and ambiguous.” Instead, money, drive and an ability to get things done are seen as characterising the new order. Rather than entrance being based on education, capability together with a liberal optimism, there is this emphasis on consumerism – “without social responsibility, let alone spiritual values” – that is seen as providing access. Das in his India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age is an enthusiastic advocate for the rise of this new class although he laments the passing of his own class, the ‘old’ middle class. Instead of having one foot in India and the other in the West, the new class is constantly bemoaning the decline in our national character, he points out. He is surely right in locating the rise of the new middle class to more universal social changes associated with the rise and spread of capitalism and the relationships characterising this development. “It is,” he continues, “free from the inhibitions that shackled the older bourgeois. It doesn’t seek endorsements from the West; what works is good. It is non-ideological, pragmatic, result oriented.” Cricket stars and, above all, Bollywood personalities are its only heroes. It accepts affirmative action for the lower castes and Hindu nationalism (with the accent on the BJP), says Das. For the older middle class, it is common and popular to grumble about the new wealthy upstarts. They lament the decline in commitment towards a more egalitarian society, the crippling ideological barrenness, naked self-interest and rampant consumerism.

  Das’ account is perceptive although a little uncritical. It sometimes blurs exactly what needs further exploration such as the ‘non-ideological’ or the ‘bourgeois’ nature of this new middle class. They seem to me very ideological views, and I’m unclear in what sense they constitute a ‘bourgeois’. But he is right to see the arrival of this ‘new middle class’ as a significant development with important ramifications for India at all levels. Interestingly, Dréze and Sen have little time for “the new middle class”. As scholars and campaigners steeped in statistical tables and graphs stretching back centuries, they avoid the shorthand descriptions of social change, preferring instead the painstaking accumulation of numbers and tentative conclusions. It makes for a less interesting and riveting read but, however tentative, its conclusions carry substantial weight. This is why their views of “the relative affluent” as they persist in labelling the new middle class are important. And they are not very flattering. Their ability to see themselves as ‘the common people’ – aam aadmi, in Hindi – is deceitful, manipulative and wrong, the authors seem to suggest. The complaints of the relative affluent they say, “are powerfully aired, and the perspectives of this easily mobilised group get the lion’s share of the championing of the major political parties.” The strength and great achievement of the new middle class it appears has been the imposition of its demands on the polity as a whole. It has captured the political agenda. Its influence, if this is correct, goes way beyond its tiny numbers. Poverty and hunger are no longer central agenda items – that was the ‘old’ middle class, well-educated and embedded in the public state structures. Instead, infrastructure issues such as electricity, roads and water are the new mainstream agenda issues. Disregarded in public policy and political programmes, for example, are the lamentable states of school education, health care and social security. The “biases of public policy towards privileged interests… (includes) the neglect of agriculture and rural development, the tolerance of environmental plunder for private gain” and the showering of public subsidies on already privileged groups.

  The new middle class is arriving and the implications of this arrival is far reaching for all India. Although ‘their agenda’ might be dominating the media outlets, there are other stories that come and go. In the last year or so, it has been the weather that has emerged as an item of national concern – and with good reason. Droughts and water seem to be monopolising stories in the popular press. If it’s not an absence of water, it is stories about too much water. Following the heaviest rainfall in over a century in November 2015, the Adyar River which flows through the middle of Chennai surged flooding the city with muddy waters and causing hundreds of deaths. The international airport was closed, power supplies were down and roads across the region were flooded. The elephant in the room – climate change – is a bigger problem than insurance schemes, the fate of NREGA, bigger even than floods and unpredictable monsoons. India has over the last few years struggled to cope with extremes of water availability (too much or too little), heat and with urban pollution. Climate change has begun to creep up the national policy agenda. While never being invisible it has now assumed greater importance. The crux of these problems in India and throughout most the world is the pact made between what resources are available and what we need. Our insatiable appetite for resources of a non-renewable nature has finally caught up with us.

  India has a fast-growing economy, a national power shortage and the world’s fifth largest coal reserves with little access to ‘cleaner’ fossil fuels such as gas. It also has some 400 million people with no access to electricity. 85% of the coal production is from opencast workings. Coal production is set to double by 2020. By 2030 coal use is predicted to be 2.5–3 times current levels, suggests a recent report. Much of the richest untapped reserves lie under heavily forested areas of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. As a government document dramatically put it, “It is estimated that more than half of India of 2030 is yet to be built.” The country’s admired economic success needs energy, desperately and a lot of it. “Coal has captured India,” warns some of the press headlines. Development means more coal has to be mined, more ore extracted, more steel produced and more environmental damage.

  Power cuts are almost a daily occurrence. As mentioned earlier, the most famous of these was “the largest power blackout in human history” in August 2012, which left 700 million people across 21 of India’s 28 states in darkness. Traffic lights, air conditioning, cold storage, television – everything shut down. A major, maybe even dominant global economy cannot function in this way. It is estimated that even today, some 800 million people use traditional fuels – fuelwood, agricultural waste and biomass cakes – for cooking and general heating needs. All are inefficient sources of energy and release high levels of smoke. The World Health Organization calculates that some 300,000–400,000 Indian people die each year from indoor air pollution and carbon monoxide poisoning through use of traditional stoves using these traditional fuels. These chronic health problems are unlikely to decrease unless cheap electricity and clean burning fuels are made available and adopted in rural and poor urban areas. It is estimated that only 52% of rural households have access to electricity. Overall, some 35% of the population still live without electricity.

  Coal and lignite remain the main source of electricity generation – 70% – but is of poor quality with a high ash content. Not surprisingly, India is the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter. Despite government policy of focussing on developing alternative sources of energy such as nuclear, solar and wind energy in future years, progress is painfully slow and subject to a number of blockages and delays. Given that India is projected to be the second largest global energy consumer by 2035, it is unlikely that power failures and intermittent blackouts are a thing of the past.

  Looking out for the environment

  Finally and at long last, it has begun to be acknowledged in the country that any discussion of power and energy involves climate change considerations. It represents something of a b
reakthrough. After decades of campaigning by environmental groups and activists, climate change issues are emerging as important policy agenda matters. Surprisingly, Dréze and Sen in their An Uncertain Glory had very little to say on this topic. It was mentioned at various times but never figured as a major concern or focus in their publication. Anyway, in 2015 the Indian government finally submitted its climate change plan to the United Nations ahead of international discussions to agree on measures for tackling global warming in December 2015 at Paris. The government has committed to reduce its ‘emissions intensity’ up to 35% by 2030. Included in the submission is the focus on clean energy including solar power. It also prioritised the planting of more forests by 2030 to absorb carbon emissions. India also reminded the developed West that it “must take moral responsibility for the state of the world today”, an important perspective which tends to be forgotten at such gatherings. India’s submission was generally welcomed in the country although there were those who felt that more could be done, especially in the need to phase out HFCs which are used in air-conditioning units.

  Coal is a problem for India, not only because of its poor polluting character but because of its abundance. It has the world’s fifth-largest coal reserves and very few cleaner fossil fuels such as natural gas. Some 400 million tonnes of coal are imported. In the drive to force up economic growth rates, the BJP government is looking to double coal production by 2020. Over a six-month period, the government has given environmental clearance to 41 new mining projects. As the government minister boasted in 2015, “a new mine will be opened every month through till 2020.” The government’s determination over its current and future energy needs are continuingly expressed. “Energy requirements have to be met,” stated the government minister. India has a “right to growth,” stated Modi. It is the West who is responsible for reducing carbon emissions: “They must vacate the carbon space because we are coming. We are developing.”