news details |
|
|
| Land, language, progress | | Infrastructure deficit triggers a debate | |
by B.G. Verghese
There is a furious debate raging across India. The headlines talk of and variously juxtapose SEZ, land, infrastructure, farming, modernisation, food security, dams, compensation, rural-urban, public-private, “jobs” vs “employment” (a distinction little understood), rural vs urban, agriculture vs industry, labour vs capital, mother tongue vs English.
Translated, the dialogue is essentially about tradition vs modernity, the past vs the future. What the debate is not about, as mistakenly projected, is “us” vs “them”. We are all in this together. And again, posing the question as this versus that is to proclaim a false dichotomy. The choice is not this or that but this and that, in somewhat different proportions.
The debate has been triggered by an infrastructure deficit that has clearly retarded growth, income and employment generation, India’s global competitiveness and poverty alleviation. At the same time it has exposed dead habit, revivalism, social divisions and many inequalities.
Many tend to hug our shameful poverty in the strange belief that it exemplifies simplicity and virtue. At another level, people are afraid of change. Every established status quo gathers around it a body of vested interests that fears anything different. This is what the Luddites believed at the commencement of the industrial revolution in England.
Neo-Ludditism confronts India today. We must, of course, also heed Goldsmith’s lament: “Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey; where wealth accumulates and men decay”. The human and social decay we have permitted over the years must be corrected.
But the prospects are grim if we wilfully disregard this other truth, that India will be undermined and its prospects dimmed if it does not accumulate wealth to sustain its burgeoning numbers. We must promote equitable growth or let men decay. Landed farmers commit suicide, children remain unschooled, beggars abound and millions go to bed hungry.
The argument that more and more farmers need the land that SEZ’s divert to feed more Indians is specious. The stock of arable land is limited and increased farm production must increasingly come from greater productivity per unit of land and water. This would increase the labour intensity of agriculture and generate more employment while further investments create more gainful jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors. Indian agriculture can do with fewer farmers on uneconomic land holdings and dams are necessary as one element in water conservation and the provision of irrigation, water supply and sanitation.
Likewise, the infrastructure deficit must be made up and maintained in good order. To this end, special economic zones are being promoted to develop the necessary infrastructure and foster industrialisation, exports and concomitant urbanisation and services.
Some 181 SEZs have been approved thus far by the Commerce Ministry and the Prime Minister has forecast an investment of the order of Rs 14,50,000 crore by 2012 on this programme. A regulatory framework is planned to ensure equity, appropriate compensation and resettlement of those displaced. R&R must move away from the futility of “land for land” to re-housing and stakeholder participation for those displaced, with training for new employment opportunities created by or around the new facilities or industries being created. To say that this has not been done or well done in the past is no cause for despair or to perpetuate an unsustainable, subsidised status quo, but to ensure that a suitable and just rehabilitation package is implemented on the ground.
It has been rightly urged that good arable land, especially if irrigated, should not be acquired unless absolutely necessary and that excessive land acquisition for an SEZ or other “public purpose” should not mask land grab or profiteering in real estate. Some part of the appreciation in land values with development should be given back to those from whom it was acquired in the first instance. Innovative ideas have been mooted to achieve this objective within an enlarged concept of corporate social responsibility. Meanwhile, to decry industry, urbanisation or private enterprise as pandemics and see the Tatas, POSCO or Reliance necessarily as vectors of some dreaded disease is to betray a fevered imagination.
SEZs cannot be a panacea for all the country’s ills. But they represent a new strategy that has worked well elsewhere to stimulate growth, not at the cost of farming or the poor but as part of an integrated programme in which human resource development and poverty alleviation remain core values. Projected rural hubs and retail trading with linkages to rural supply and national marketing chains must be harnessed for gharibi hatao.
An ostrich-like attitude is similarly evident in the Karnataka move to make Kannada the sole medium of instruction in all aided schools and to abolish English teaching in them. Fortunately, better counsels have prevailed and the delirium has passed. Bangalore’s outsourcing boom rests, among other things, on its ability to provide a work force proficient in English. Gujarat and West Bengal earlier foolishly tried to promote the mother tongue at the cost of English and came to grief. Linguistic revivalism is as bad as religious fundamentalism and can only narrow the mind and divide people in a richly multicultural nation.
To live in the past is to forego the future.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
