Do you think the current path of development that India has embraced, especially since the reform era workable for the future? Discuss in the context of population explosion and food security. (200 words)
Refer – The Hindu
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 7 years
KEY POINTS
· The recent spate of peasant protests across the country points to the unviability of the path of development that India has embraced, especially since the reform era.
· The vision assumes that India is pre-destined to follow the path of industrialisation that the Western world and East Asia have taken.
· The stated goal is to ensure that only a tiny fraction of India’s work force remains in agriculture.
Why it is a wrong approach?
· In a generation, India’s population is likely to be around 1.6 billion.
· Even if just two-thirds of this population is to find its livelihood outside the villages, 1 billion people will be living in cities, compared to the present 400 million.
· This would mean that some 200 million more jobs will have to be created in the next quarter century, at the rate of 8 million new jobs every year.
· In recent years of the reform era, the net rate of job generation in the organised sector is under 0.5 million per year. Further worry is with the fact that it is the era of disruptive robotisation.
· It is also difficult to provide the infrastructure of clean air and water, sanitation and power, roads and communication, housing and social security for some 600 million more people.
· If villagers (especially young ones) have been successfully dissuaded from agriculture, it will constitute a whole generation of young Indians without any knowledge of manual agriculture. This has far-reaching implications.
· There exists another argument that agriculture would be virtually fully mechanised, as in the ‘developed’ world.
· Running agricultural machinery would require huge energy resources.
· Even if only half the energy is drawn from fossil fuels, it would make crushing demands on the world’s remaining oil and coal reserves, in a cruelly scarce era.
· It could be argued that India will import food. It is worth keeping in view that India has had only two years of trade surplus during the last four decades.
· Even if India finds the foreign exchange, no country is in a position to supply food for, possibly, over half a billion people.
· Meanwhile, such a fossil-fuel-driven agriculture would make extraordinary demands on climate space precisely at a time when the latter is at shrinking phase.
Way Ahead
· In light of such an alarming outlook, the policy makers need to take a long, hard look at the current path of development.
· Alternatives do exist, practised and conceived in India. Some of those examples are
a) Achievement of complete food security by Dalit women farmers of Deccan Development Society.
b) Small peasants of Timbaktu Collective in Andhra-Telangana.
c) Generation of decent livelihoods through crafts.
d) Small-scale manufacturing.
e) Community-based tourism.
f) Traditional health services by Jharcraft.
g) Kudumbashree, Maati, Khamir, SRUJAN, Qasab, and others.
· These initiatives have stayed or even reversed rural-urban migration, created rural prosperity, attempted gender and caste justice, without trashing the environment.
