The Hindu Business Line : The new industrialisation

Like the seemingly contradictory variedness of life in India, so too the responses of villagers threatened by industrialisation reflect almost the entire gamut of consciousness. In Orissa, over the weekend, three POSCO officials, all Koreans, were kidnapped and later released in a grim and perhaps hopeless replay of bravado. After the incident, the Korean steel major, setting up a $12-billion plant near the Paradip Port, issued an angry statement for the first time after k eeping silent over the previous four such incidents.

Across the country in Maharashtra, four villagers near Pune who had violently protested the proposed SEZ by Videocon experienced a leap of faith.

They have now sought the revocation of the SEZ and the de-notification of 5,000 acres of acquired land that they insist they would like to develop themselves. Instead of learning from the inert receptiveness of farmers happy with a lumpsum payment or from the violent rejection of land sale as in Nandigram, the farmers of the four villages found their inspiration in Magarpatta City, the hugely successful township created and run by the Magar farming community in the Hadapsar suburb of Pune.

Paradise Lost…

The Pune villagers are not the first to be so inspired. Some months ago, farmers in Raigad also drew the right lessons from the Magarpatta township that has turned the original 400 farmers threatened by expanding city limits into shareholders in a private limited company.

The teaching moment comes in the knowledge that it takes a collective sense of loss and prospective gain to get going and take charge of your own destiny. The Magars still retain ownership of their lands, and the township they have built with expertise from around the world could be the envy of any well-run urban local body, hard as that entity might be to find.

… and reinvented

The lessons of the Hadapsar experiment are basically rooted in the knowledge that farmers and other village stakeholders can best protect their interests by reinventing them collectively.

No political party or ideology or even business school taught the farmers the elements of enterprise building; just necessity and the urge to perpetuate their livelihood by putting their lands, either threatened by urbanisation, or endangered by soil erosion or prohibitive inputs, to other uses.

That lesson is equally valid for the Orissa farmers who perceive POSCO as the villain in their lives, apotheosised as such by the name of the organisation that claims responsibility for the kidnappings and detentions — POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti.

The lesson is not that the farmers can build a steel plant themselves but that collectively they could bargain for better compensation and also plan to live with the idea of a steel plant in their midst by visualising the opportunities it would generate for new sources of livelihood.

The steel plant will require ancillary units, secondary support activities, shops, petty establishments, and the like. The advantage of the collective endeavour can never be exhausted, especially when it locates itself near a greenfield project and bargains on behalf of its members.

View from the top…

Blinded by ideology, weary clichés and opportunism, mainstream parties and marginal groups have failed to recognise the new inchoate consciousness that is spreading, slowly to be sure, among farmers, despairing about the possibilities of sustaining livelihood and aware of encroaching industrialisation and urbanisation.

Bound by their own formulaic answers, policymakers in State capitals and New Delhi can at best legislate to improve existing laws on compensation and rehabilitation, unmindful of the skewed balance of bargaining strength between the buyer, a self-aware corporatised entity, and the seller, an atomised often market-ignorant landholder.

This gap in bargaining prowess is often filled in by those marginal parties that exploit the confusion for ends that are still unclear, apart from blind opposition to newer possibilities. So far, barring Tamil Nadu, where the State government has had open hearings on the Tata’s proposed titanium project, most State governments are far too busy signing investment deals with industry to bother about the most important asset required for new ventures — land.

But not the foreign investor; that is why the American partner for the proposed Videcon steel plant in West Bengal is reportedly waiting to see how the land acquisition pans out before committing any investments.

The recent policy on resettlement and rehabilitation of the potentially displaced adds a splash of novelty to the old package of compensation and little else. The proposal to include a choice of compensation through shares worth 20 per cent of the land value will make the farmer as much a stakeholder in the project as the old Integrated Rural Development Programme turned landless labourers into poultry farmers with the offer of a pig or cow. And in any case, how much less of a fraud would the volatile equity be on the farmer selling his land than an outright grab?

The new policy on resettlement and rehabilitation now endorsed by the Cabinet is like a Band-Aid for a patient racked with a virulent fever. For decades, successive governments have had to tackle the problem of displacement by public sector projects, the Sardar Sarovar being the most prominent. Precisely because of its star-studded opponents, the issue of displacement riding on the back of a larger issue of land for non-farm activity remained hidden from public view. The question of empowering displaced persons with options was not even considered.

With the rapid growth in industrial output over the past few years and the growth in incremental investments that accompanied the pick-up in output slack over the past four years of rapid growth, the vulnerability of displacement through land acquisition surfaced from the deep, of all places most violently in Nandigram in west Bengal.

Complacent State governments and an even more smug Commerce and Industry Ministry simply assumed that once capital was assured with the promise of tax privileges, the Special Economic Zone would become the economy’s special purpose vehicle, racing it along to a ten per cent growth and full employment.

…and from below

What no policymaker ever imagined happened. That farmers with their little patches of unprofitable land could oppose projects vaunted for their employment potential rocked the self-perception of policymakers in Kolkata and Delhi.

Instead of viewing the sporadic violence as symptoms of a deep-rooted suspicion of the urban centre, a fear common to almost every peasant-based economy industrialising furiously, governments have imagined that the problem lay in the inadequacy of compensation.

At the heart of the problem is the fear of dispossession, in the most literal sense of the word. That fear, spilling into random violence, visits the Chinese countryside ever so often and it is ruthlessly suppressed. In India, it is ignored.

The syncretic society

Self-appointed publicists like to believe India has moved into the modern age. The Indian peasant, the petty trader collectively organising against the big retail chains are reluctant journeymen on the modernity highway and carry all the anxieties associated with modernism; the loss of communal identity, of social space and the diminution of the self before the large corporation.

To his credit, the Indian farmer in some parts of the country is hacking his way to an anxiety-free modernity through collective action; a journey to a redemptive future from a bleak and tense present. These are the voices the organised economy and its authors teetering on the edge of a land crisis, must listen to.

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