Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 1

The answer does not much stretch the imagination; it’s an old story really, with a few contemporary twists. Too many people, not enough land—that’s how the most ancient strand goes. The trope about the government pushing to modernize its economy and getting pushed back has been around for a couple of centuries as well; a parallel tale is that of the agrarian nation urbanizing too rapidly. But too many people, not enough water? That’s more contemporary. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Climate change will make everything a whole lot worse.

The thesis isn’t terribly original, and the equation even simpler: Scarce resources that grow ever scarcer; an enormous, burgeoning, and largely uneducated rural population being herded against its will into cities; massive generalized resentment; a society divided against itself in more ways than can be counted; and a nation with a bloody history, a long memory, and politicians eager to exploit differences within the population for a soupcon of power. I’m not suggesting that large-scale civil strife in India is inevitable, or even that it’s likely; but I am suggesting that the Indian government—and the rest of the world, for that matter—ignores the elements in this equation at its peril. The future character and composition of the Indian state, and by extension that of South Asia, may very well depend upon the Indian government’s ability to relieve or sublimate the strain of those forces that have already begun to tug at the margins of society.

As has already been noted, 56% of the Indian workforce is employed in the agricultural sector; furthermore, seven of every ten Indians live in rural areas. For many reasons the status quo will not endure; for starters, agriculture is the least productive and least dynamic sector of the economy—if India is serious about achieving broad-based, pro-poor growth, it cannot permit the majority of its workforce to scrabble away in the fields at hardly better than subsistence levels. The problem is one perhaps inherent to the sector (no major modern world economy rests on a foundation of agriculture), but it is undoubtedly one driven by scarcity: ninety-six percent of Indian farmers work plots of two hectares (five acres) or less. It is the rural population that continues to drive population growth in India, and with each successive generation of farmers coming of age, family holdings are further subdivided, shares of land become smaller, and it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living from the earth.

It is already commonplace for farmers in India’s arid and semi-arid zones to migrate seasonally to towns and cities seeking work as wage laborers in construction and other unskilled trades (in fact, within Seva Mandir’s purview, families garner the majority of their income from wage labor, not from farming). Due to water scarcity and the absence of irrigation infrastructure, most are able to only grow a single crop annually, or two at best—farmers in those regions blessed by liberal rainfall are capable of raising three. However, given the inexorable carving of the fields, perhaps it will soon become common, if it hasn’t already, for even those farmers in high precipitation areas to spend at least part of the year as wage laborers in order to make ends meet. Yet in spite of the momentum of this trend, the hoped for demographic transition is no nearer as consequence; given the option, few Indian farmers will abandon their farms in favor of the better (though still miserably) compensated life of a full-time wage laborer. They will only turn from the land grudgingly, with rancor and bitterness, if they turn from it at all.

But given national economic imperatives and the exigencies of land and water scarcity, the pressure on the Indian farmer to leave his land is daily ratcheting in intensity. In 2006, current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the former Minister of Finance who oversaw India’s economic liberalization in the early ‘90s—said, "Manufacturing has to be the sponge which absorbs people who need to move out of agriculture in pursuit of higher incomes." The government has predicted that the percentage of the nation’s workforce in the agricultural sector will fall from 56% to 40% by 2026--this perhaps reveals more an implicit goal than any expectation of organic economic reshuffling. And if India is to have any hope of addressing the astonishing poverty of the bottom third of its population, this is perhaps a low-end target. Even at that, is it a realistic one? How to induce more than 100 million people to move off of the land if they simply don't want to?

Some clues have already emerged: in several states the government, citing powers of eminent domain, has seized farmland for the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)—manufacturing and industrial centers often gifted to foreign consortiums and bundled with tax holiday bows and ribbons of relaxed labor and environmental standards. Farmers and their political allies have opposed such seizures on principle and claim that owners of expropriated land have not been fairly compensated. Last week in Punjab farmers blockaded railroads in protest of one such land grab; last March, in Nandigram, West Bengal, recalcitrant villagers refused to abandon 10,000 acres destined to become a chemical hub and at least fourteen were killed in the subsequent face-off with police. Violence flared again in November when Communist Party of India (CPI) cadres attempted to retake the land on behalf of the government; dozens more were killed and the cadres burned homes and corpses in a clumsy attempt to conceal their crimes.