Large Vs The Small

India had a glorious past. A walk through our heritage sites, temples, forts will evidence that. The rich literary heritage, classical, colloquial also indicate the freedom the society had, how it executed its freedom with much grace & responsibility. India’s geography, its valleys, forests, the Himalayas, the Vindhyas, the Sahyadris, the Nilgiris are unique for such a large country. These give raise to mineral rich perineal & seasonal rivers. The population is generously developed with so much rich fertility of the land. And it also coexisted with equally thick animal and plant population. The bio diversity of India is one of the best and unique in the world.

With so much natural richness India today is stooped in poverty. Rural migration to urban areas is steadily increasing. More than half the population is living in unhygienic conditions. The child deaths due to malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, cholera are indications of our poverty. Even the child trade, child labor is rampant despite legislations against it. These are not one off incidents rather regularly occurring that it is no longer news items for new papers. That means it is systemic in nature. Even if it is one off incidents in some good states & areas the root cause is the systemic failure and not by fluke.

That means with so much rich geological diversity for life to thrive have we created a system of failure for a large population? Is this poverty due to nature fury or is it all man made? Has all that rich biodiversity been privatized by the rich? Or is it all polluted? Has it all become unhygienic, unlivable? Why are the rural population driven to cities to live in slums?

The answer lies in the Large Versus the Small. In the glorious past, India had a large number of smaller kingdoms. They were completely self-reliant and independent. The population was well spread across the geography in villages. And these villages were also almost completely self-reliant and self-governed. The basic needs of food, water, shelter & clothing was taken care of by the population of a single village however small it was. All of them hard worked for their living & still had time to create great assets for India in the form of literature, art, sculpture, artecrafts, great monuments etc., They stand tall even today in a large number of villages across India.

But modern civilization assets have a life of not more than 100 years. Be it any factory, city sky scrapers, large dams, fast moving cars, high flying Airplanes. Factories will last as long as they can suck the raw materials around. Cars and Airplanes ply for not more than a decade or 2. Every cement building, edifice, dams have its life. And they all serve only the rich and few medium classes. For the poor nothing of these luxuries is available. The rulers of the country argue and believe deeply that these are the harbinger of progress, wealth, upliftment of the downtrodden. And they are able to sell that dream to all people very well. The learned people, middleclass like us also believe that this is indeed the Holy Grail. The poor and the downtrodden aspire for it.  

The funniest argument is that these will provide the daily bread, clean water, and clothing for all across India. But the hard truth is that, exactly these modern luxuries are the reason and root cause of pushing India into poverty.

But where lies the answer? The answer lies in Gram Swarajya. Every grama has to become swavalambi (self-reliant). Today the government is in the business of promising distribution of grains & water to all. The government should GIVE less and enable people to produce & live by themselves. Government should only protect their harmonious living. But government today snatches their land & water to promise them to give them clean water and food. What an irony.

Public Distribution System (PDS): Concentration of Grains for distribution to the poor

The PDS aims to serve entire India. This is one very very large system. The Punjab wheat has to come to Karnataka Villages, Andhra rice needs to go to Rajasthan villages. So it is a very complex mesh of procurement, transportation, storage & distribution of grains across India. There are a dozen central departments and a dozen state departments involved in this entire complex system. The government itself admits to about 25% pilferage in this system.

Almost none of the quality grains reach the final intended beneficiary. The best quality will be replaced by the rejected worst quality on the way. At many stages they get into private mills, malls, and food processing units, industries at pittance managed by the mighty and powerful. The intended grain for the poor finally ends up in McDonalds burgers or Star hotel plates.

PDS also pushes for large production of same thing in an area. That is called mono culture. That is if Punjab is rich in wheat production, the government procures only wheat from small farmers & nothing else. So in desire of money they grow only one grain. But for healthy living they need multi grain. So government says I’ll give through PDS procured from elsewhere. The earth also becomes weak with mono culture. The farmer also becomes slave of government procurement of his produce as well as consumer of what government gives. Independence fully lost.

Large land Farming Vs Small land farming

While this is happening in the distribution system, what happens to the society of producers & beneficiaries? Are they getting rich? Not really. The farmers suicide is an indicator. The father of Green Revolution for India M Swaminathan now advocates Small Land holding, Family Farming, multi crop farming, organic farming in this paper: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/107/12/1970.pdf

The green revolution was launched to curb world hunger. He got recognized and rewarded for his great research enabling the rice & wheat revolution in India during 80’s. Now he is shunning his own propositions. Within his life time he realized that this had detrimental effect and increased poverty and is not sustainable. So he has presented several papers to UN in favour of small land holding and family farming which he says as ‘Ever Green Revolution’. But is government listening and caring? They still push for subsidies to chemical farming, factories, polluting air and river.

The chemical farming will lead small farmers into long term debts. Debts will lead to suicide or giving up their land for big land lords. Then become their slaves.

Big land lords want subsidies in chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The chemical factories will lobby with the government for fast and high productivity per acre through chemical farming. Politicians succumb to their lobby money. Politicians are people leaders and they know very well the problem and the solution. But still since they succumb to lobby money, they paint the picture to small farmers to get loan, take subsidy, and assure them that their government will protect them. So the vicious circle starts.

The education about organic farming is slowly but steadily growing. I hope a day comes when people will vote out a politician who promises subsidies and vote to power someone who gives them freedom from subsidies to chemical farming. And hence leading to shut down of these chemical factories.

Large Dams: Concentration of large amount of water for distribution to Arid regions

Here again Government believes in Concentration of Water Wealth of equity distribution to all. It is a myth. Whole lot of movements in India & the world has happened against the large dams. In many cases government has dropped the idea. But still in north east there are more than 100 large dams sanctioned and in various stages of implementation even now. The UPA, NDA are all same when it comes to adopting modern civilization of earth destruction and humanity destruction for the benefit of few.

Typically a large dam submerges very large fertile land, usually forest land. The benefit is for some 5 to 10 times larger area if properly executed in the plains. So cost benefit looks good & stops on paper only. Beyond this only problem, issues, destruction, arise.

Typically the dam construction is first step. But the benefit is realized only after canals, sub canals, sub-sub canals are constructed reaching every acre of the plains that is planned. But rarely that happens. Even in KRS, in one of the ambitious overhead canal they left water recently first time after its construction after so many decades. Funnily they immediately shut it because of leakage. They never attempted to leave water again in that canal. So many kilometers of cement canal, pillars are standing as mute reminder of our failure. While on way to Mysore from Bangalore you can see that overhead canal cross over the highway even today.

Recently, Deve Gowda our beloved former Prime minister was booked for not implementing Benne Hole canal after a very large sum of money was sanctioned and spent when he was PWD minister. But he successfully argued that it was constructed and got out of it. How? Because the canal needs maintenance. So he argued without maintenance mud swept over, bushes, grasses grew. So the canal vanished.

The answer lies again in small tanks construction and maintenance. The ancient system of linked tank (Kere, Kunte, Yeri, Pushkarani, etc.,) system brings up the water table. All the districts in India had linked tank system. Even in the arid plains there used to be tanks. A tank typically used to be life line for surrounding 3-4 villages. And 4-5 linked tanks used to irrigate all agriculture done by those 15-20 villagers. Some of the old & famous surviving tanks have some inscriptions of that day’s king or paleygar who commissioned it. For example, Chitradurga’s Chandravalli tank has Mayura Varma of Kadamba’s inscriptions. That means it served several generations life for almost 1500 years now. Can you compare it with our Benne Hole example!?!

Large Conglomerates: Reducing jobs, eliminating large number of small players; eliminating competition; reducing quality

During last UPA regime due to the concerted efforts of the opposition they shot down the FDI in retail. It is a good thing. We are already under so much poverty by embracing modern ways of things. To top it if we bring in foreign investment also they’ll release us only after sucking out all blood. British rule already taught us before. But we don’t seem to learn from bad experience of recent past nor from good example of ancient times.

Large conglomerates are entering simple retail industry. The large conglomerates will have the financial muscle to arm twist the government and banks to sanction large loans. Then they ensure the direct farm to shop delivery of farm products. This will give raise to large farming, contract farming & eliminate small farmers or make them slaves. Then in the procurement & transportation, there a number of small business owners who get eliminated. Then in the distribution it will eliminate the stockists and the small shop owners. The small petty shop owners will be generally all family members involved. And all of them will need to find new jobs or get enslaved. So in this entire process, the job loss will be more than 50% of the jobs originally held. The consumer hopes to get the benefit of those channels removed. But do you really see that? All the profit get pocketed handsomely by the corporate but still show losses in the books somehow for tax avoidance. So government also looses by tax collection at various stages by the small businesses.

So the net effect is whole lot of job loss and hence increasing poverty; Increasing wealth of the wealthy creating a greater divide between the rich and the poor; the government loses tax revenue.

Final Conclusion

So through these examples, it is clear that Small land farming, Small tanks, Small businesses create harmony, independence & interdependence, fosters innovation, sustenance for generations, quality. Most importantly it creates wealth, job sustenance, it eliminates poverty. It creates freedom to live. After all that’s what our forefathers fought freedom for.  Why do we give it away to another set of goons?