JOIN USKhadi as compass to a better future
On May 1, a group of social scientists, policy analysts, agriculturists, progressive religious heads and writers came together to rebuild a sustainable rural economy in Badanavalu, a backward village about 200 km from Bengaluru, the IT capital of India. The move is a part of the Badanavalu Sustainable Development Movement launched on April 19.
Eminent theatre personality T P Prasanna is spearheading the movement which espouses a lifestyle based on the socio-economic model that Mahatma Gandhi proposed. Badanavalu, once the epicentre of khadi movement in the erstwhile Mysore State which drew the Mahatma twice to it between 1927 and 1934, is now a forgotten village in the Chamarajanagara district, among the most backward in Karnataka.
"Gandhi came here after listening about the villagers' active involvement in the khadi movement. He helped launch eco-friendly production units, including weaving, spinning and match-stick-making units," said G S Jayadev, founder of Deenabandhu Trust, which is playing a major role in the movement along with farmers’ organisations. Venkataraju, a retired health education officer and khadi enthusiast, said the cottage industry had employed a few thousand people across several other towns. “In 1934, the unit earned Rs 50,000 by selling hand-spun khadi, which was a fortune at that time," he added.
Today, only a handful of people, mainly old women, work at one of the three buildings which still have roofs. The village seems to be abandoned during daytime as over 60 per cent of its workforce travel 35 km to Mysuru to work as daily labourers. The evening train at 7:40 pm brings them back, with men and women too fatigued to look anything beyond their own feet.
Prasanna warns that dystopia is the last stop of the development bandwagon led by governments that depend on multinational companies for survival. Hence, the conceptual framework of growth needs a paradigm shift.
“Why smart cities? Why not smart villages?” he asks. A serious question for the Narendra Modi government, which recently allocated Rs 48,000 crore to develop 100 cities, considering the crises in rural India masked by the tantalising numbers of India’s GDP growth.
A 2014 survey by the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, says 92 per cent of the people who opted for the government's rural job scheme in Maharashtra reported their main occupation as farming, which lays bare the agrarian crisis in the state. Further, 75 per cent of the assets created by the scheme were directly or indirectly related to agriculture. The rest of the 25 per cent was dominated by rural sanitation.
A cursory look at the offi-cial website of the scheme (nrega.nic.in), shows the figures are similar in other states. The new government cut the funds for the scheme by 45 per cent in the 2014 Budget, which made the hike in allocation in the next budget look paltry. It is anyone's guess over the impact such cut will have on villages in general and agriculture in particular.
Sustainable development
Though the idea of sustainable development dates back to UN’s Stockholm conference in 1972, the focus of inter-government organisations is on energy needs. The cultural dimensions have been neglected. It is in this context that the Badanavalu Movement stands apart. It aims to reverse man’s excessive dependence on machines and technologies like genetic modification.
According to Jayadev, khadi is not the solution for all the problems. “But it can show the way towards a society where the haves do not grow at the cost of have-nots.” The corrupt version of development in rural India, with all its irony is starkly visible in Badanavalu, where many still defecate in the open.
Faeces, empty liquor bottles, plastic covers and garbage litter on the side of the road. Our villages have SUVs, LED TVs and gadgets made in the Silicon Valley and get all products and facilities that promote big industrialists. But they are yet to have toilets, because toilets do not make money.
Today, environmental destruction is seen as a "sacrifice" and reckless industrialisation and urbanisation as "inevitable". Writer and intellectual Nigel Marsh points out that the life we live after such plunder is depressing: “There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like.”
The UNDP's 2014 Human Development Index rank, aimed at measuring a country's growth not in terms of economy but on the basis of life expectancy, education and standard of living, puts India at the sorry position of 135 of the 187 countries and territories. It shows how long and difficult the road ahead is for the country.
The Badanavalu Movement has definitely ignited a ray of hope. More than 5,000 people, who came from all over Karnataka, expressed their interest in exploring an alternative way of life so that the future generation inhabits a more accommodative earth.