The Hindu Business Line : The Lord's answer

AT a press meet on the 15th floor of RBI Towers, Lord Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), argued strongly for stepping up rural migration to urban centres, with the human inflow being absorbed by low-tech export-oriented industries, as a way out for the Indian economy. A manufacturing growth of 15 per cent a year could take the economy on a high spin, the professor thought.

Every Indian city is packed with human beings drifting in from villages, as farming is not paying; that is what one had read and seen live in India Interior. Developed economies possibly protect farming more than industry but the professor was stating something different. But one did not raise the point, being generally awed by any economics professor and surely more by a gentleman who teaches at Harold Laski's LSE.

After coming out of the hour-long chat, one thought of the Gandhi (the Mahatma, not Sonia) prescription to make villages and farms viable for a strong Indian economy. Agriculture and the services sector together account for 75 per cent of the GDP, and if those employed in the sectors do not have enough income on hand can they afford to buy industrial products? Lord Desai (he was created Lord Desai of St Clement Danes in April 1991), with an arresting halo round his head, cannot be all that wrong. Statistics and economic models may have overtaken the Lord and is an affliction economists are born with. For old man Gandhi, human beings could never be clubbed into Leontief or Mahalanobis models as they were living, breathing entities.

When Lord Desai argued for doing away with the Planning Commission, one sat up and felt like applauding. The Planning Commission is a Nehruvian curse and this writer has prayed to gods in heaven and earth for the curse to be lifted. That has not happened and will not as gods are more scared of the almighty World Bank officials making an entry into the Commission.

After a session in economics and banking, one generally walks into the Horniman Circle garden, opposite RBI Towers, for a snooze. The garden is a pleasure and is well maintained by the Tatas. One did not sleep but thought of my migrant friend, Lachman Singh, and others from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh whom one knows intimately, living a hard life in Borivili. Give them a chance to profitably till their lands and they will quit. Perhaps, one of the first few Tamil migrants who moved to Mumbai is my friend Murugan Nadar Muthu. He came to Bombay in 1944 at the age of 16, set up his vettalai-pakku shop at Cawasji Patel Street and is still at it after 60 years. After passing Class 5, he left his Alamkulam village in Nanguneri taluk for Mumbai to stay with an uncle at Dharavi, and Murugan Nadar Muthu has not yet left Dharavi. Till some 10 years ago, he had his kiosk near Mahesh hotel on the same street, when he shifted shop to Anand Bhavan hotel, the famed eating address of a generation of PAs (personal assistants) out of Tamil Nadu and Palghat.

In the 70s and 80s, this writer, along with many others like Dharmarajan and Soori from the Times of India, used to have our Friday lunch at Anand with the fare of onion sambhar, avial, rasam, potato curry, a sweet and papads served on plantain leaves. After lunch, one would walk over to the kiosk of Murugan Nadar Muthu for a beeda and a smoke. Saints talk of god-realisation and many of us realised it every Friday in those years.

This day one picked up two beedas from Murugan for Rs 2 and got into a talk. "Antha kalam, pathhu pathinainthu per kadai le lunchtime varuva, peshuwa. Athe mathiri, sayankalam, chenthu arattai adichchutu than powa. Ippo yarum kandukarathe illai (Those days, a crowd of some 10 to 15 would meet during lunch hour and in the evening for a chat. Nowadays, nobody bothers)," Mururgan said in Tamil.

From the time one knows him, the tall dark-skinned man has been in khaki or coloured shorts with a white bush-shirt. The present-day Mahesh serving quality fish food in the city had in its earlier avatar been Madras Brahmin Coffee Hotel, run by a family from Palghat. The Hotel had given him a small space just outside the entrance to set up his business. The hotel changed hands to be managed by a second Kerala-based family who in turn sold it to the owners of Mahesh, going by the tale told by Murugan. He has three daughters and one son, all settled at Putthaneri, near Nanguneri, from where he took his wife, who is no more. He lives with his grandson, who's working in a private bank, and plans to go back to Putthaneri in two years. "Aayachchu, inimel ponum," he told me.

Does Murugan fit the Lord's bill?

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