The parallel emergency of rural India

The Living Stream

At the turn of the millennium, a few chief ministers of India had brought out Vision 2020 documents. Brimming with optimism that India’s future lay in the cities, they coolly noted that the proportion of people living in villages had to come down, the way it had in Western countries. In 2020, their total lack of vision couldn’t be clearer.

The millions of migrant workers fleeing the cities to reach their homes in the wake of the lockdown is a painful pointer to the policy neglect of rural India. The various efforts of the government and non-government organisations and individuals and families to aid those affected are at best short-term relief measures. The real challenge is to see what needs to be done to not force people to leave villages in search of jobs in cities.

The ‘migrant worker’ that India has woken up to recently is an anonymous figure. But he or she belongs to a village, a locality. They belong to a community with its own festivals, a spiritual life. Only desperate circumstances in their native villages could have made them relocate to a city for work.

Around ninety percent of the migrant workforce, the male migrant workers, especially those from other states, are able to visit their parents, wives and children back home only once or twice a year. Almost every migrant worker I have talked to over the years wished to return to their families after putting away enough savings. The trade-off they had settled for in the meantime was a sad one: loneliness, hellish living conditions in the city.

The long-standing neglect of the agricultural sector cannot go on. The economists who argue that the share of the rural population has to slip along with the slip in the share of agriculture in India’s GDP are being pseudo-scientists. “Half of India’s population will live in cities by 2050” is commonly offered as a precise forecast but it can become true only as a consequence of current economic policies. Alternative policies can mean a different destiny for the country’s cities and villages.

If farmers got a fair price for their crops, if the market access is made stable and the middlemen eliminated, if local credit is made easily available, if good quality primary healthcare centres and schooling facilities were locally present -- all old, elementary demands -- the government will have done a lot to secure contentment in rural areas already. Add to this the new measures needed for making agriculture ecologically sustainable, such as preventing groundwater depletion through rainwater harvesting and other water conserving methods and increasing soil fertility by curbing the use of chemical fertilizers. Random loan waivers and small yearly stipends are at best palliative measures. Durable measures for making rural life secure are what are needed.

When farmers in several villages of HD Kote taluk in Mysuru district couldn’t access their weekly payments sent by a milk cooperative from the ATMs following the lockdown, the local unit of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (Nanjundaswamy) swung into action and helped install a barter system which let farmers exchange rice for ragi, milk for vegetables and fruits. Landless labourers get food grains and fresh produce in return for some work. This new barter cooperative system was then embraced over dozens of villages in the taluk. Why do we not see the economists and policy planners show similar inventiveness in their proposed measures? The glib talk of a cashless, digital economy presumes the globalised financial system as the only model of an economy when so much space is available for working with alternative models of economic exchange and marketing. Clearly, economic planning cannot be left to economists alone.

Besides endangering public health, the Covid-19 virus has given a blow to the neo-liberal imagination of the economy that asked governments to allow maximum play for the private sector. Everyone is looking to the government to help rein in the virus. During this time, the flight of the migrant workers has revealed the parallel emergency in rural livelihoods.

Will everyone ask the government to do something about this emergency too?