The Hindu Business Line : Tribal rehabilitation

The first choice of activists championing tribal causes is to halt all development in tribal areas. Their second is to demand land for land as compensation. But by tying the tribal people to agriculture, their activist patrons are foreclosing a modern future for them. We need entrepreneurs who see an opportunity in every threat, instead of the other way round, says P. V. INDIRESAN.

TRIBALS DISPLACED from project sites should ideally be rehabilitated collectively, by developing large townships for them, with all the basic civic amenities and facilities.

In most parts of the country, tribal people are angry; they feel cheated. Many of them have taken to arms. Their supporters are no less furious. They are pressuring the Government (at times successfully) to halt development projects in tribal areas. The Government is nonplussed. It has pumped in much more subsidies in tribal areas than elsewhere, all to no avail. Nobody is happy, not even hopeful.

Mahatma Gandhi being both spiritually and politically dead, few people have any faith left in non-violence. The recent events in Nepal will almost certainly give a further boost to the cult of violence. On the other hand, as Jesus said: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.

Few people realise how true His words are: The most powerful and violent animals, the tigers and the lions, are getting extinct. It requires great efforts by conservationists to sustain even the few hundred of them left. In contrast, the meek, like cattle and sheep, are proliferating in millions. There is a lesson here that most people do not see.

Supporters of tribal causes are in distress for other reasons. Their first choice is to halt all development in tribal areas. Their second, and a very reluctant option, is to demand land for land as compensation. Nothing can be more short-sighted. The future is not in agriculture, whose share in the economy is shrinking all the time. The future is in industry, in the services, in joining the knowledge economy.

Turning the threat around

By tying the tribal people to agriculture, their activist patrons are foreclosing a modern future for them. The problem with activists is that they see a threat in every opportunity. Instead, we need entrepreneurs who see an opportunity in every threat.

What do the tribals want? What do activists want for the tribals? One answer is that both groups want the tribals to continue as before. That is exact antithesis of progress. It is not freedom either, because freedom implies choice; continuing as before is no choice at all.

Tribal people should have the option to join the mainstream, to explore the four corners of the world, and not be confined to their forests. They should have the freedom to become scientists, engineers, doctors, investment bankers and whatever else other people do. No Naxal dream, no programme devised by activists will take any of the tribal people to such new frontiers.

It is no secret that most Naxal movements are funded by extortion. Most of that extortion is abstracted from government projects, to fuel corruption and violence. Thus, the more the government invests in tribal development, the richer the Naxalites become, and the less popular the government.

If the state had a vision for the future, it would encourage the tribals to leapfrog into the new economy of industry and services. It had an excellent opportunity to do so in the case of families displaced from the Narmada dam site. Unfortunately, it missed the bus. In spite of quite a generous relief package, it has received more brickbats than accolades.

In the Narmada dam case, displaced families have been offered a minimum of two hectares of cultivable land plus one hectare for every adult child. Even landless labourers are entitled to one hectare of land. In addition, everyone gets a 500 sq m residential plot.

The offer of extra land for each adult child is a bit odd in these days when we want to encourage small families. It can also unsettle social conditions in the village by making a poor farmer with many children suddenly much richer than an erstwhile rich farmer with few or no children.

The non-farm alternative

Non-farm employment is a better alternative. However, creating employment on a large scale is a real problem. In our large cities, government has no plans to create jobs; yet, jobs get generated in hundreds of thousands every year.

For rural areas, the government has elaborate and ingenious schemes for employment generation; yet, not much good results from any of those schemes. We should learn a lesson from this startling divergence: A large well-connected agglomeration of people generates a momentum of its own to create and multiply non-farm employment; small, poorly-connected habitats do not do so. In other words, connectivity is the key.

Second, high-income families support large numbers in secondary employment; poor families do not. That is, high-income families multiply employment, while poor ones cannot.

Third, high-wage jobs do not happen by themselves. Only modern businesses can create them. Hence, as a third step, the rehabilitation package should include attractions for entrepreneurs and modern businesses.

Township for the displaced

Suppose we combine these observed facts. As a first step, rehabilitate displaced families not individually but collectively. Invest in developing one large township for all of them, a town, rather a city of a 100,000 to accommodate them all, along with an additional 5,000 or so high-income families.

Then, consider this scenario: One 20-25 thousand MW power station is earmarked, and connectivity is established to the nearest railway junction, and to an airport too. The city is treated as a Special Economic Zone. Ample water supply too is assured. With Narmada Dam in place, none of these will be a problem. All that is needed is to reserve some of the power, water and rehabilitation land to build a city for displaced families.

All these allurements come with two conditions: One, all land, urban land, is the property of the displaced families. Two, entrepreneurs should build, or arrange to get built, houses for everyone — houses with protected water supply, electric power and sanitation and other civic amenities. Further, make provision for schools, hospitals and the like.

All this is not an imposition; it is mutual support: businesses support services; services empower businesses. Both create a market for houses and civic services, which, in turn, fuel both business and services. In short, with all three in place, jobs multiply. If even one of the three is missing, jobs shrink. That, in fact, is the principle of PURA.

Once enough entrepreneurs join in and create 5,000 or so jobs in modern industry and services, plenty of non-skilled jobs will naturally follow to employ all the displaced families. Those jobs will pay more than farms can.

As landowners of the city, displaced families will earn even more. They will be rich. Their children, at least their children's children, can aspire to reach any pinnacle of their choice.

In this scheme, displaced families get a choice to participate in industrial and service activities rather than be confined to agriculture. This scheme will need less than a tenth of the land the agricultural option will demand, and create incomes that will be several times larger. It needs nothing more than re-ordering existing government schemes. It will cost less, much less than what rehabilitation costs now.

It is all in the mind's eye: Every opportunity can be a threat; every threat can be an opportunity. If rehabilitation is treated as an isolated exercise, it will be a burden, a threat. If it is integrated with modern development, it can become an opportunity to engineer rapid growth.

(This is the 174th in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on April 17.

(The author is a former Director, IIT Madras. Response may be sent to: indiresan@gmail.com)

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