# 34 Robinson Crusoe in India

600 million Robinson Crusoes

It takes two to tango. It also takes two to have an economy.

If you’re alone, like Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island, there’s not much economics to be had. You can catch fish, or harvest coconuts, or decide to take time off and go for a walk along the beach. You subsist, because the fish in the lagoon give you enough protein to keep some muscle on your body, and the coconut fat keeps the calorie counter ticking. You have sharp reflexes, so your haul of fish is always plentiful, but you hate climbing those palm trees; when the air is still, and the windfall of coconuts sparse, you feel a hunger for carbs and fat that no amount of fish can still. Then you have to lever yourself up the slippery trunk of a palm tree, reach out for those plump brown coconuts, your heart pounding with fear. No matter how much you stretch, they remain out of reach. You shake the frond, and after several dizzying minutes, a sole nut falls to the ground.

At the end of the month, you do a tally of your pickings - 120 wriggling silver fish, and 60 coconuts. “90!”, you think, “if I could only gather 90 coconuts a day, 1 each for breakfast, lunch and dinner, maybe my pants wouldn’t keep slipping off. Thank the Lord, there’s no one around to comment on the holes in my underpants.”

One day, just as the sun is rising above the horizon, along comes Man Friday, recently escaped from the colony of convicts. You strike up a conversation - if a combination of sign language and pidgin Spanish can be called a conversation - while holding up the waistband of your trousers with your right thumb. From the little Spanish you remember from school, it seems like you’ve agreed to share the beach in peace. You head into the lagoon for your daily catch, while Friday snoozes under a coconut tree. You spend longer than usual in the water, because the fish are plentiful, and there’s an extra mouth to feed. When you return to the shade of the tree, Friday is stirring, unlike the air. 

“No coconuts”, you signal to him. 

“No problem”, he signals back, and shimmies up the tree.

Within minutes, two massive coconuts thud onto the beach.

Coconuts for breakfast! Luxury!

Now it’s your turn to snooze in the shade. When you awake, the sun is high above, and you spot Friday wading in the lagoon. Every time he ducks into the water, he comes up empty-handed. You watch him for a long time, and when he returns, it is with one scrawny fish. You point him towards the grove of coconut trees above the sloping beach, and point yourself towards the lagoon. Within an hour, you’re sitting down to a rare feast of 2 coconuts each, and a rich haul of fish.

Man Friday, you realise, can harvest 10 coconuts a day, no problem. And if you spend an extra hour in the lagoon, you can bring in enough fish for both of you to eat your fill. Soon, you can discern a new bulge in his calf muscles from all that tree climbing and the ample fish protein. And you no longer have to hold your pants up with your thumb. In fact, you can see the first signs of a belly above the waist band; if it keeps on like this, you’ll have to schedule a jog down the beach before breakfast every morning.

Economics has come to Easter Island. In effect, you are trading your expertise in catching fish for his advantage in climbing coconut trees, and you both end up a great deal better off.

You have enough leisure to practice the songs you learned in the school choir; in the evenings, Man Friday hews combs and other artefacts from coconut shells.

When a few more convicts escape from the jail across the break water, you have something of an economy going. One man builds little shacks so you can remain dry when the rains lash the island; another digs out canoes from palm trunks that were felled by the storm; a third can take the boats into deeper waters, and bring back entire shoals of fish. You can now retire from wading in the lagoon, to become the book-keeper for the community, setting the exchange rate between fish and coconuts, shacks and canoes, combs and a recital of choir songs. With your new, sedentary job comes a pudgy roll of fat above your waistband. Maybe the next wave of escaped convicts will wash up a personal trainer…

The modern economy encourages each of us to specialise in the one or two things we do really well, and trade them for the infinite goods and services produced by other specialists. Hand-hewn coconut combs for a root-canal procedure; thumris for grass-fed ghee; fitness training for Alexa speakers; travel insurance for triple glazing. All of these trades facilitated by the medium of money, since Robinson Crusoe’s account books and high-school education cannot possibly set exchange prices between the billions of daily transactions in a 21st century economy.

Those who exist outside of this monetary system are effectively shut out of the benefits of trade, as barter - to the extent it still survives - is restricted to the most basic of rural produce. When people are unemployed, and have no monetary income, they are unable to participate in the modern economy as we know it, a trading machine that offers infinite choice, but needs to constantly be fed with money. Our public distribution system will keep starvation from the door of the unemployed, but only cash will give them the richness of choice that is the hallmark of the prosperous world. 

Less than 40% of adult Indians are employed. This is one of the lowest labour force participation rates in the world. Of our roughly 1 billion adults, less than 400 million are employed. The other 600 million have no jobs, no monetary income, and little choice. That’s more than the adult population of Europe, 600 million Indians empowered with about as much economic agency as Robinson Crusoe and his tiny beachside economy.

We can build rural toilets that don’t flush, we can promise to pipe water into them, we can distribute cooking gas cylinders (sometimes); we can run rural hospitals that people would rather not use, and perhaps keep malnutrition at bay. But unless we can offer hundreds of millions more jobs, a huge swathe of our citizens will be spectators at the Grand Mall of Modern India -  watching the parade of consumption through its gleaming windows, but unable to pass through its bustling check-out counters.