India After Gandhi (40 page)

Indian peasants had mixed feelings about the new seeds and fertilizers. But they unambiguously welcomed fresh supplies of water. At the same time as S. C. Dube was studying community development in the UP, the British anthropologist Scarlett Epstein was living in Wangala, a village in southern Mysore lately the beneficiary of canal irrigation. Till the water came, this was like any other hamlet in the interior Deccan, growing millet for its own consumption. With irrigation came new crops such as paddy and sugar cane. These were sold outside the village for a handsome return. Paddy gave a profit after expenses of Rs136 per acre; sugar cane as much as Rs980 per acre. These changes in local economics fostered changes in lifestyle as well. Before the canals arrived, the residents of Wangala wore scruffy clothes and rarely ventured outside the village. But ‘Wangala men now wear shirts and a number also wear dhotis; their wives wear colourful saris bought with money and they all spend lavishly on weddings. Wangala men pay frequent visits to Mandya [town], where they visit coffee shops and toddy shops; rice has replace dragi as their staple diet.’

These and other changes were made possible only by the extension of irrigation. As Epstein found, the coming of canal water was the turning point in the history of the village. Events of note, such as weddings, deaths and murders, were dated by whether they happened before or after irrigation.
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Assured irrigation and chemical fertilizers increased agricultural productivity. But they could not solve what was a fundamental problem of rural India: inequality in access to land. Therefore, landless peasants were encouraged to settle in areas not previously under the plough. In the first decade of Independence, close to half a million hectares of land were colonized, principally from malarial forests in the northern Terai, the central Indian hills, and the Western Ghats. Previously these areas had been inhabited only by tribes genetically resistant to malaria. With the invention of DDT it became possible for the state to clear the forests. These lands were naturally fertile, rich in calcium and potassium and organic matter (if poor in phosphates). In any case, there was no shortage of peasants who wanted them.
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A second way of tackling landlessness was to persuade large landholders to voluntarily give up land under their possession. This was a method pioneered by a leading disciple of Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave. In 1951 Bhave undertook a walking tour through the then communist-dominated areas of Telengana. In Pochempelli village, he persuaded a zamindar named Ramchandra Reddi to donate a hundred acres of land. This encouraged Bhave to make this a country wide campaign, known as the ‘Bhoodan movement. The saint trudged through the Indian heartland, giving speeches wherever he went. He must have walked perhaps 50,000 miles, while collecting in excess of 4 million acres. At first his mission was reckoned a success – like community development, a noble Gandhian alternative to violent revolution. But later assessments were less charitable. Like some other saints, Bhave preferred the grand gesture over humdrum detail. Critics pointed out that the bulk of the land donated to Bhave had never been distributed to the landless; over the years it had slowly returned to the hands of the original owners. Besides, much of the land that stayed under Bhoodan was rocky and sandy, unfit for cultivation. In few places were the intended beneficiaries organized to work the land they had been gifted. On balance, the Bhoodan movement must be reckoned a failure, albeit a spectacular one.
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A third way of ending landlessness was to use the arm of the state. Land reform legislation had long been on the agenda of the Congress. After Independence, the different states passed legislation abolishing the zamindari system which, under the British, had bestowed effective rights
of ownership to absentee landlords. The abolition of zamindari freed up large areas of land for redistribution, while also freeing tenants from cesses and rents previously exacted from them.

After the end of zamindari, the state vested rights of ownership in their tenants. These, typically, came from the intermediate castes. Left unaffected were those at the bottom of the heap, such as low-caste labourers and sharecroppers. Their well-being would have required a second stage of land reforms, where ceilings would be placed on holdings, and excess land handed over to the landless. This was a task that the government was unable or unwilling to undertake.
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Even after a decade of planning, access to land remained very unequal. Table 10.2 indicates the percentages in five size classes of both the absolute number of holdings and the combined operational area of those holdings.

If we define those who own less than four hectares as ‘small and marginal’ farmers, and those who own more than four hectares as ‘medium and large farmers’, then Table 10.2 can be compressed into Table 10.3. This reveals a slight diminution in inequality, with a 3.6 per cent drop in the numbers of small/marginal farmers and a 4.6 percent increase in the land held by them. The operative word is ‘slight’; so slight as to be almost imperceptible, and, in a democracy committed to the ‘socialistic pattern of society’, simply unacceptable.

The Nehru-Mahalanobis model emphasized heavy industrialization, state control, and ultimately, a subsidiary role for the private sector. Behind it rested a wide consensus – and not merely in India. That in a complex modern economy the state must occupy the ‘commanding heights’ was a belief then shared by governments and ideologues all over the world.

In the United States, purposive government intervention had brought the country out of the horrors of the Great Depression. In Britain, Keynesian economics had been energetically applied by the Labour government that came to power in 1945. An appreciation of the state as a positive agent in economic change was also heightened by the recent achievements of the Soviet Union. At the time of the first war Russia was a backward peasant nation; by the time of the second, a mighty industrial power. Particularly impressive were its military victories against Germany, which had a far longer history of technological and industrial development. For the Western democracies, the feats of the Soviets only underlined the importance of the state direction of economic development.
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To be sure, there were dissenters. In the West there was Friedrich Hayek, who advocated a retreat of the state from economic activity. His ideas, however, were treated with benign – and sometimes not-so-benign – contempt. (He could not even get a position in the Department of Economics in the University of Chicago, being placed instead in the ‘Committee on Social Thought’.) And in India there was B. R. Shenoy, the sole economist in the panel of experts who disagreed with the basic approach of the second five-year plan. As one commentator wrote, Shenoy ‘appeared to be committed to laissez-faire methods in so
doctrinaire a manner that no one, outside certain business circles, took much note of his criticisms’.
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In truth, Shenoy’s arguments went beyond a mere belief in laissez faire. While he opposed the ‘general extension of nationalisation on principle’, his main criticism of the plan was that it was overambitious. It had, he thought, seriously overestimated the rate of savings in the Indian economy. The shortfall in funds would have to be made up by deficit financing, contributing to greater inflation.
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Another dissenter was the Chicago economist Milton Friedman. Visiting India in 1955 at the invitation of the government, he wrote a memorandum setting out his objections to the Mahalanobis model. He thought it too mathematical: obsessed by capital–output ratios, rather than by the development of human capital. He deplored the emphasis in industrial policy on the two extremes – large factories that used too little labour and cottage industries that used too much. As he saw it, the ‘basic requisites’ of economic policy in a developing country were ‘a steady and moderately expansionary monetary framework, greatly widened opportunities for education and training, improved facilities for transportation and communication to promote the mobility not only of goods but even more important of people, and an environment that gives maximum scope to the initiatives and energy of farmers, businessmen, and traders’.
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Independently of Friedman, a young Indian economist had taken up one aspect of this critique – the neglect of education. The constitution mandated free and compulsory schooling for children up to the age of fourteen. But the sums allocated for this by the second plan, wrote B. V. Krishnamurti, were ‘absurdly low’. He called for a ‘substantial increase’ in the allotment for education, the budget being balanced by an ‘appropriate curtailment in the outlay on heavy industries’. Attention to detail was also crucial – to the enhancement of the social prestige of the schoolteacher, to higher salaries for them, to better buildings and playgrounds for the children. As Krishnamurti argued:

A concerted effort on these lines to educate the mass of the population, specially in the rural areas, would undoubtedly have far-reaching benefits of a cumulatively expansionist character. This would greatly lighten the task of the Government in bringing about rapid economic development. For in a reasonable time, one could expect that the ignorance and inertia of the people would crumble
and an urge to improve one’s material conditions by utilising the available opportunities would develop. If this were to happen, the employment problem would take care of itself. The people of the country would begin to move along the lines of those in the advanced democratic countries such as Great Britain and Switzerland.
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If B. V. Krishnamurti had been a professor in the centre of power, Delhi, rather than a lowly lecturer in Bombay, he might have got a hearing. In Friedman’s case, his high position and prestige were offset by foreign economists of equal distinction but of opposing views. He was to them what B. R. Shenoy was to Indian economists – a lone free-marketeer drowned out by a chorus of social democrats and leftists.
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A critique of a different kind came from the Marxists. They thought that the Mahalanobis model gave not too little importance to the market, but too much. The second plan, they felt, should have mandated a thoroughgoing process of nationalization, whereby the state would not merely start new industries, but take under its wing the private firms already in operation. They wanted the working class to be involved with planning, on the model of the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe.
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Then there were the Gandhians, who provided a precocious ecological critique of modern development. In the vanguard of this ‘early environmentalism’ were two of the Mahatma’s closest disciples, J. C. Kumarappa and Mira Behn (Madeleine Slade). Through the 1950s they pungently dissented from the conventional wisdom on agricultural policy. They argued that small irrigation systems were more efficacious than large dams; that organic manure was a cheap and sustainable method of augmenting soil fertility (when compared to chemicals that damaged the earth and increased foreign debt); that forests should be managed from the point of view of water conservation rather than revenue maximization (by protecting natural multispecies forests rather than the monocultural stands favoured by the state). These specific criticisms were part of a wider understanding of the world of nature. As Mira Behn wrote in 1949:

The tragedy today is that educated and moneyed classes are altogether out of touch with the vital fundamentals of existence – our Mother Earth, and the animal and vegetable population which she sustains. This world of Nature’s planning is ruthlessly plundered,
despoiled and disorganized by man whenever he gets the chance. By his science and machinery he may get huge returns for a time, but ultimately will come desolation. We have got to study Nature’s balance, and develop our lives within her laws, if we are to survive as a physically healthy and morally decent species.
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