Bring Them Home

As the lockdown extension by another 15 days is being considered, it appears incredible that what should have been done 30 days ago is still not the most visible part of the government’s response.

Heart-rending images of stranded people from all over the country, desperately trying to make sense of the sudden loss of home, hearth and livelihood, are everywhere. And they can’t get to where they might experience some semblance of normality, their villages, the streets they grew up in, the communities where their loved ones live.

Coronavirus has brought a dreaded disease into our midst. But it has also done something else. It has made impossible the traditional means of succour human beings are used to in such circumstances. A hug, a conversation, a hand upon the shoulder, a few demonstrations offering guidance, an affectionate sharing of food, these are the things human beings have valued as they wrestle with adversity. The new coronavirus has made us afraid of all that.

For people stuck in cities, in suspicious and inhospitable surroundings, these deprivations are far worse than they might be in their own villages. Those villages have also perhaps turned suspicious and inhospitable, but they are still their own. That is where people should be in this time of distress.

Everyone should be home at this time.

For a country with the resources we have, this should not be difficult. Large fleets of state transport buses lie unemployed in thousands of bus yards across the country. The bus drivers would be at risk, but providing suitable protective equipment to that tiny number of people should not be difficult. And re-jigging the time-tables, with suitable cooperation between state transport undertakings, so that buses can transfer travellers at appropriate transfer points, seems to be well within the capabilities of most of them. This is not much more complex technically than arranging for massive pilgrimages from across the country. And with fuel prices in free-fall, not extremely expensive either.

The mistrust and wariness of villages towards their arriving sons and daughters should not be under-estimated. We have seen images of posters outside villages asking arriving people to stay out. We have heard reports of returnees not being allowed transit through villages. However, this is precisely the prejudice that effective leadership dispels. This is what politics ought to be about. Calls from the political class, and especially the PM, to whom the nation has so widely and frequently responded so far, need to encourage communities to take back our own, with suitable precautions and care.

In a village, those protocols of care are far easier to enforce than in the anonymity of the city where they are seen as authoritarian and lacking in affection. In a village, everyone is a brother, a sister, a cousin, a nephew, a son or a daughter. Surrounded by them, it is far easier to accept limits on one’s behaviour for common good than it is in the city. Also, villages know how to look after their own. The resources required to establish the temporary quarantines and to care for the infected, if any, will not overwhelm these communities.

Of course, the government will need to support the village communities in doing this. Large amounts of government funding, to the extent of its capabilities, are already being pre-empted for mounting an effective response to the disease. The question is whether it will be used up in centralised responses, centred largely on larger population centres, and driven by a limited number of possibly fallible experts, or more distributed ones with a greater reliance on the wisdom of smaller communities.

It is the normal reaction of a government to seek to centralise rehabilitation response to disaster. In times of natural calamities like floods and earthquakes, when entire communities are wiped out and rendered incapable of caring for themselves, it makes sense for a central authority to take charge. That works for a short-term effort, concentrated geographically in a small area, with well-known sets of responses, honed over several similar experiences.

The coronavirus challenge is nothing like that. It has affected large parts of the world simultaneously, it is likely to persist over a long period, and effective response protocols are essentially unknown at the moment because we know so little about the virus. At such a time, it makes sense to trust a widely distributed wisdom to respond effectively, while ensuring plentiful communication of the developing understanding about the disease.

The social and emotional connections that the people returning will experience in their villages are nowhere to be found in the desperate spaces that they now inhabit. The skills that they have learnt in the cities may or may not be immediately relevant in the villages, but they will certainly bring fresh sets of heads and hands to the challenge and the opportunity of living in the village.

Because this is not a short-term challenge, it is also an opportunity to help foster a new approach to village economies. It has long been impossible for villages to resist the siren call of the cities’ economies. Now that those economies have collapsed and the perils of urban overcrowding have registered rudely on the national consciousness, perhaps it is possible to take a fresh look at how rural economies might re-imagine themselves.

By now, we know that this lock-down is not the last. We know that whether we extend this one or relax it in phases, or bring it back later, the infection will rise and ebb and bring rising and ebbing need for fresh lock-downs from time to time. This is a challenge that will last at least 12-18 months and possibly longer. Our responses must not be those that are not feasible over at least a similar period. Getting people to their villages, integrating them safely with the people already there and supporting their efforts at building a viable economic infrastructure that works over the next 12-18 months is critical. If we keep them penned-in in the cities in the hope that they can re-join the industrial/service urban economy quickly when this is over, we display a misunderstanding of when “this will be over”.

None of this will make sense to those who believe that the disease will go away in a couple of months and we can safely return to the old order. However, what the disease has shown us is how fragile and vulnerable the entire structure of that old order is. We ignored warnings of an outbreak precisely like the one we have now for over a decade, chiefly because we did not understand, because we were unmindful of, that vulnerability. Now that we know, it is an opportunity to save ourselves from a similar future.

This is a homecoming worth our blood, sweat and tears.

Tending the Flowers

On April 21 this year, Government of India recognized a significant movement in Chhattisgarh by honouring ex-collector of Suguja district, R. Prasanna, with Prime Minister’s award for Excellence in Public Administration. The award was given for the initiation of Surguja Fulwari Initiative, seeking to set up day-care centres called fulwaris (a small garden) for children below three years. (They also serve as nutrition, weight monitoring and information centres for pregnant and lactating mothers). It is an idea that the state government has since expanded to 89 tribal blocks across the state.

The programme was launched in the face of dire statistics. In 2011, one out of every ten children in Surguja could expect to die before (s)he turned 5, mainly from malnutrition and related complications. Half the children in the district were classified as malnourished. The composition and quantity of food available to the babies clearly needed attention, as did a variety of feeding, social-emotional stimulation and other critical child-care practices. Prasanna imagined a programme of voluntary community action, supported through Panchayats, to supplement government’s existing nutrition programmes.

In this, he found a ready resource in State Health Resource Centre of Chhattisgarh (SHRC). SHRC had created a high quality training, development and support structure for the 70,000-strong Mitanin cadre of community health workers in Chhattisgarh. This was tailor-made for direct access to communities in attempting a change of practice and creating more empowered communities.

The programme thinks big. Coming from a civil servant, it is noteworthy for the belief it places in the ability of communities to take charge of their affairs and run them collaboratively. It not only imagines the community running the day-care centres with only financial help from the government, it also seeks to integrate this with improvement in cultivation practices and natural resource management. The belief, of course, is that all of these different strands are necessary for dealing with the malnutrition crisis at its root.

Towards this end, the cadre of Mitanins and their facilitators have undertaken extensive community contact, seeking to communicate the objectives of the programme. Since a fulwari can be set up only if the community agrees to operate it, a formidable amount of consensus-building at the hamlet level is necessary. While this means that this initiative does not roll out at the speed of a typical government programme, the community empowerment and collaboration processes it fosters at the local level are highly meaningful. In 2013, an initial 300 fulwaris were set up. By now, these have expanded to nearly 3,000 across the state.

Community-driven programmes must deal with their own challenges and the fulwari programme has seen plenty of them. Perhaps the most formidable is common to most government programmes, especially where community has a significant role: the flow of funds from the government tends to be erratic. This forces the local communities to pool in scarce resources to run them as long as they can before closing down temporarily and, in rare cases, permanently.

Other challenges also exist. Consensus-building is hard; maintaining it is much harder. Those involved must commit themselves to on-going dialogue. Caste and class divisions in the hamlet are put to test starkly in the fulwaris as children and adults mingle in one space. Sometimes, they overwhelm; more often, communities have found enough goodwill to carry on. As anywhere else, there are contributors and there are free-loaders; they must maintain enough civil interaction for the whole to function smoothly.

In the face of all of this, it is quite extraordinary that more than two-thirds of the fulwaris opened remain functional. In those that do, the immense possibilities of government action coupled to community responsibility are visible every day. And even where they have closed down, the community learnings from the experience ensure that the next wave of initiatives will find a much more fertile soil.

Disclosure: Centre for Learning Resource (CLR), where I serve as Director, has been associated with the fulwari programme for over two years. With UNICEF support, we began in 2013 with a baseline survey of the child-care situation in Surguja. Subsequently, we have been involved with designing the structure of a typical day in the fulwari and a process for developing the capacities of the mothers running the fulwaris.

Our involvement seeks to ensure that each day, the children receive a comprehensive experience of joyful growing-up; wholesome food eaten with attention to hygiene, lots of play and play materials, lots of talking and story-telling and lots of affection. It also seeks to create conditions for pregnant mothers to receive advice on wholesome child-care (as well as their own care) even before the child is born.

For all of us at CLR who have been involved, it is a joy to have had the opportunity.

Colonising Our Own

It seems likely that, the formalities of protest over, the political class of India will gradually agree that the proposed land bill, with cosmetic changes, is necessary for the well-being of the country. The bill will then continue to clothe the state with the powers for acquiring land that the British gave themselves a century and a quarter ago. They were a colonial power, and their Dharma was to suck the inhabitants of this country dry. What has given successive “by-the-people-of-the-people” governments of this country the nerve to continue using it for the same purpose for nearly 70 years?

Governments over the years have tried to convince us that the protests against the land acquisition law come from those who are against progress and development. The more zealous have managed to tinge such protests with an unpatriotic, even seditious cast. In his address to the farmers, Mr. Modi sought to scare them with a future without roads, schools and homes if they did not sign on to the land bill.

This is insincere and untrue. In fact, the arguments against India’s land acquisition law have never been about development. They have always been about whether those who are displaced have any right to say no, just like we assume everyone else does.

They say we need four things to produce things. We need land on which to put our machines and the workers. We need money to buy the facilities and generally run the place. We need labour to actually produce the stuff and entrepreneurship to imagine it all and make it happen.

The argument is that when a particular piece of land is required for “economic development”, it is an obligation of the citizen who owns it to make it available to the state, regardless of whether he wants to do so. Let us apply this notion to all the other things we need for producing things and see what happens.

Let us first take labour. We are quite familiar with poor people, whose only asset was their hands and ability to work hard, being asked to contribute that asset without their consent. Through history, we have variously called it slavery, indentured labour, begaar, bandhua mazdoori and other similar names. Today, each one of those practices evokes a horror inside us. The world has gone to considerable lengths to ensure that, at least overtly, this doesn’t happen ever again. Nice people don’t, simply don’t, acquire labour without consent.

How about money?. Those who seek to acquire capital without the owners’ consent quickly become international pariahs. Countries that failed to repay money they had borrowed have had generations blighted in their struggle to repay. Equally, elaborate laws prevent an individual from trying to take someone’s money without his consent. We all think those laws are a good thing.

Coveting the fruits of someone else’s entrepreneurial skills without his consent also falls foul of modern commandments. The hyperactive movement, right around the world, to protect intellectual property rights has only gotten more pervasive over the years. Of course, it would help a lot of people if the drugs were a bit cheaper, or the fancy phone didn’t sell for ten times its production cost. But entrepreneurial skill is sacrosanct, not to be taken without due reparations being made.

Why, then, is it acceptable to take land without due reparations? As we have said earlier, no sane person would today suggest forced labour, and conscripting capital and entrepreneurship would set up our ruling class against the might of the global ruling class. Land, however, is easy to take; the affected constituency is entirely domestic, fragmented, powerless and used to being ignored.

That constituency is not just farmers, as has been made out. Among those affected, farmers are among the better organized, which is perhaps why the political class at least recognizes them as stakeholders. However, the question of consent and acceptable reparations for land affects the farmer, the forest dweller, those who eat the produce of land, those who drink the water that flows on it, those who walk and sleep on it and those who consider it mother. That makes it just about every one of us.

As we might expect, different holders of land rights are affected differently. Suppose the rights of the state to acquire land was applied to acquire and demolish every other row of houses in Mumbai’s Cuffe Parade. Suppose we paid Rs.20,000 a square foot, about 25% of the current market value of the properties. (This is about the percentage a recent study suggested independent India has paid those whose lands it acquired under the land acquisition act).

For those who didn’t have to give up their homes, the outcomes would be highly beneficial. Roads could be widened, traffic would flow smoother and people would save hours that they currently spend sitting in their cars. The air would get distinctly cleaner without the exhaust from cars. The streets would be quieter. There would a lot more green cover. The demolition, the creation of open spaces, as well as the construction of new houses for those who were displaced would all contribute to additional GDP.

How would it be for those whose homes were acquired? Having received just a few crores of compensation money, how would they cope? Where would they go? How could they bear to travel to the north of the city from their offices at its southern tip? Wouldn’t the world come crashing down?

Well, you should ask some of the people who were actually driven off their homes, forests, farms and shanties what it means for the world to come crashing down. There is the householder who has slowly watched the water of the dam come into his home and lap at his feet because he refused to leave when ordered to do so. The authorities raised the water level anyway, offering him the choice of either drowning or fleeing. There is the traditional forest-dweller, who was pushed out of the forest, the only thing he understood and depended on for food, recreation, social support and spiritual succor. Dumped upon a piece of barren, rocky land, he must quickly learn the art of settled agriculture if he wishes to survive. This skill is something that has taken settled communities centuries to perfect. There is the farmer who was making ends meet on a small patch of fertile land. After years of struggle to get the piece of compensation land promised to him when he was pushed out, what he gets is rocky and useless for what he knows best, cultivation. And his new home is a bewildering ghetto, where the supporting social structures and the emotional links of his old village have disappeared completely.

This is why the Cuffe Parade land will never be acquired. It is extraordinarily painful for those who pay the price for the better life of others. Cuffe Parade residents know how to protect themselves. Therefore, the land must be taken from those who don’t know how.

Eminent domain is a respectable-sounding phrase, used around the world. It makes it possible for governments to require that individuals or communities give up their assets or rights if the governments deem that a larger purpose is served by such sacrifice. Of course, different countries place different restrictions on the exercise of that right. India’s law, being largely unchanged from the colonial-era legislation even after the UPA’s amendment of 2013, probably ranks among the worst.

Implicit in the submission of a people to the will of a duly constituted government is a social contract – that the people entrusted with that power will use it as trustees of the people, they will display great wisdom in their understanding of the world and great compassion and concern for those that have given them that power.

The exercise of eminent domain requires it to an even greater degree. That is because it expressly involves imposing costs on one (usually small) group of people so that a larger number may benefit. In such a circumstance, the larger community must act with great restraint and deep sense of responsibility for those that are bearing the costs. The government must be the bearer of that concern and its actions must be steeped in it.

Given that the history of land acquisition under successive governments in independent India is such a blot on our democracy, there is little reason to trust that this government will act from such a concern. Indeed, the desperation to avoid a meaningful dialogue among the stakeholders and somehow ram through a new, illegitimate law, suggests that misery will continue to haunt the exercise of these powers.

We haven’t yet learnt how to stop colonising our own.

Who Sold My Silence

A few years ago, I visited a newly-built mall in one of the leafier parts of Bangalore. It was packed with people, as you might expect, and the traffic outside was a crawl. After a bit, we decided to step outside for our lunch and found a Darshini (a local eatery) a few metres down the road. We sat down to eat and got into a conversation with a man sitting at the next table. (You can do that in Darshinis)!

He said he had been coming to the Darshini for several decades, since he was a child. He talked about how quiet it used to be, even very recently, and how the walk along the street had been a most rejuvenating and regular early morning affair. He talked of the clean-smelling air in the morning and the fragrance-laden one at night – experiences that had defined the neighbourhood for him for decades.

“Many of us used to gather regularly here at the Darshini every morning”, he said. “It was a very good place to share what was happening in our lives with our friends and neighbours.

 “It is all gone now”. He looked really wistful. “Since the mall construction started, there is so much traffic and noise. It starts even before we wake up and doesn’t end until well after midnight. The air has become so dusty, first because of the construction of the mall and now because of the traffic, that we keep our windows closed all day. And nobody wants to come to the Darshini anymore, because you can hardly hear what anyone is saying.

 “But what can we do?” he continued. “They bought the land. It is their right to do whatever they want to with it”.

He said this hurriedly, unprompted, as if he was afraid he might be seen to be questioning this right.

That conversation has haunted me for the several years that have passed since. It wasn’t just that this man’s access to silence, clean air and meaningful community had disappeared overnight. What made it deeply disturbing was his belief that that was the natural order of things — with no hope or right of redressal.

There was a time, a long time ago, when land and air and water and open skies and silence were shared resources. They helped us live, grow our food, quench our thirst and rejuvenate our spirit. We then figured out a way to make land a personal (and, therefore, transferable) resource by dividing it, perhaps because it was easy to divide. We haven’t yet figured out how to divide air, open skies and silence, though we are furiously at work trying to divide water.

But something remarkable has happened along the way. Because we haven’t been able to divide silence, air or water, we no longer know how, or indeed whether, to value them.

Someone clearly sold the parcel of land that the mall was erected on. He did it legally, according to accepted practice and socially-sanctioned norms.

But who sold my silence? Or was it always worthless, to be appropriated by anyone who chose to do so?

Was the feeling of support and belonging that I felt among my friends and well-wishers an illusion, not even worth a protest when it was snatched away?

And why am I so scared to say that the open skies and the silence are precious to my existence and my sense of meaning in life, not an incidental “buy-one-get-one-free” appendage to your sale of land?

Who sold my silence?