Mountain Village, by Jorg Peter, Pixabay
It Takes More Than a Village
I returned to my home in the mountains last week, to vibrant spring flowers, and the quacking of ducks in the lily pond. When the verandah grew warm in the sloping sun of the evening, with my guests, I retreated into the living room.
“I have an air-conditioned seat”, Chippy said, as the breeze flowed in from the garden, carrying the fragrance of white roses arranged in a vase on the window ledge. I plugged my computer into a wall socket, but it wouldn’t charge. Strange. I flipped a light switch, to realise there was no current. Even stranger - the inverter should have kicked in.
“Do you have frequent power cuts here?” Chippy asked. Since Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh, electricity supply has been pretty reliable. Between the grid and our solar panels, the back-up system should keep going for several days. I went round to the back of the house, to find that the inverter was inert. I punched the power switch on the front panel, jiggled the re-set button on the back. No blinking lights, not a beep - my 10 month old inverter was dead as a dodo.
“Lalit, was his name Lalit?”, I challenged my memory to recall the name of the young electrician who had installed the system. I found his number on my phone, and called. No response. I dialled his mentor, Pranay, who lives across the hill, and had advised me on the installation.
“Yes, it was Lalit, but he’s moved to Dehradun. Try turning the reset button on.”
Since I had already tried that, I called Jagat, our faithful old electrician, to help me confirm that the wiring was intact. He tightened a few screws, tested the leads coming in from the mains, but beyond that, he was as clueless as I.
“You’ll have to get someone from Haldwani. Or call the manufacturers.”
I wasn’t planning to stay for long, so I decided I’d put off this chore till my next visit, but it did get me thinking about the economy of a village. Over the last decade, a steady flow of city people have built second homes on our hillside, but the density of demand for a skilled technician would not be a fraction of what Dehradun would offer Lalit.
When my cook complained of persistent pain in his abdomen, I sent him to the rural hospital run by Aarohi, the NGO set up by my neighbours 25 years ago. The doctor prescribed a series of tests, some of which the dispensary could perform; others would need him to travel to Almora, a 25 km ride through the valley, and over to the crowded market town on the opposite ridge. As the world develops increasing degrees of complexity, only large markets can offer the range of products and services we take for granted in a metropolis.
If our village of Satoli tried to practice Atmanirbharta, or self-sufficiency, our concern over Vikky’s stunted growth, two decades ago, would have stopped at the jhaad-phoonk of the local shaman. Instead, I had driven the 11 year old to Almora, to Doctor Gosain, who diagnosed spinal tuberculosis. The medication took a while to kick in, and his family became sceptical about their value. Black magic, they were convinced, had brought this blight upon him. But my wife’s unflagging moral suasion worked, he completed the prescribed drug regimen, and grew into a lanky lad, a full head taller than his father.
Not that anyone in our village believes in Atmanirbharta. Like consumers everywhere, they revel in the choices offered by trade and free movement, across the lines that define district, state, or nation. They ship their apricots and plums to Bhowali and Bombay, and their working-age lads to Dehradun and Delhi. They talk to each other on mobile phones shipped from China, and wear poly-fill jackets produced in Vietnam. The local bakery uses wheat from FCI godowns, probably procured in Punjab, and palm oil grown in Indonesia.
The mustard oil pressed from the local crop is a great deal more expensive, and reserved for special occasions; only the rich can afford to wear garments woven from the hand-spun wool that is part of the heritage of Kumaon. Self-sufficiency is a prescription for little choice, high prices, and poor lives. We’ve seen this movie before, those of us whose lives were governed by the Import-substitution model of the Indian economy. We drove in Ambassador cars designed in the 1950s, and coveted the most trivial of imported consumer goods, like Camay Soap, and perfumed erasers.
There’s no going back to that time. One wonders, then, what to make of the government’s mantra of Atmanirbharta. In yesterday’s Business Standard, TN Ninan wrote, “To make sense as policy, Atmanirbharta has to be carefully defined - which government ministers don’t always seem to do.”
I think he is being too kind. Shibboleths have a great deal more political value than carefully drafted policy. The PLI, or Production Linked Incentive, for example, is likely to turn into a rent-seeking scheme, which will prove difficult to reverse. Import tariffs protect inefficient producers, while penalising the consumer, on price, and quality. The government agencies that draft economic policy need much deeper research into why our manufacturing sector is not globally competitive.
In the early decades of independent India, high import barriers and subsidised manufacturing were justified by the ‘Infant Industry’ argument - that colonisation had crippled our ability to compete in global markets, and we needed the umbrella of protection to grow that competence. Today’s political narrative of a resurgent India would not permit the use of words such as ‘infant’ - or even ‘immature’ - to describe our manufacturing sector, but the manner in which we are retreating from free trade shows a diminishing sense of confidence. Rather than administering the hard pills of economic reform, we have reached for the easy nostrums of protectionism.
Atmanirbar in my opinion is manufacturing those critical components which insulate the country from foreign blackmail - I believe that this is a defensive strategy and not a go too strategy for our economy.
I believe each time the government intervenes in the economy , in whatever guise, it must study the impact of the policy in the long run. MSP being a case in point.