J.C. KUMARAPPA IN THE CONTEXT OF
CONTEMPORARY AGRARIAN CRISIS
T.G. JACOB
Introduction
The agrarian crisis that is currently raging in the country has a fairly long history. In fact its history goes back more than half century, i.e., to the Nehruvian political economy with its Five-Year plans and foreign experts entering the country during the early 1960s. The formal beginning of this crisis can be located to the time when the Ford Foundation started its first full-scale overseas office in Delhi in 1960. From that point there was no looking back for the advocates of transformation of Indian agriculture which has the longest recorded history of its practice on the planet. The subcontinent, the cradle of agriculture of the whole world, became the victim of the global interests of the Western chemical industry. Indian agriculture with all its antiquity and variety was opened up as their market. To make this a pan-Indian process research institutes, agricultural universities and ground level implementation units like Block Development Offices were put in place over a period of time. Agrochemical industry technology and machinery were purchased or multinational corporations were invited in all humility to establish their own production units in the country with incredible dream-like concessions. Union Carbide was one such giant corporation which established its own plant in the heart of the once beautiful city of lakes known as Bhopal. But let us keep this gruesome story out and go back to agriculture as such.
Kumarappa’s Critique of Nehruvian Political Economy
When the Nehruvian government introduced what is commonly known as ‘green revolution’, followed by a white one under the guidance of experts from the United States, it is not that there was no dissent. Certainly, there was a well-articulated, scientifically argued model of village-based land reform and development propounded by Gandhian political economists, the chief among them being J.C. Kumarappa. Due to his amazing intellectual capability he could clearly visualise the futuristic results of the Nehruvian agrarian economic macro policy when it was in the making during the 1950s. What Kumarappa visualised was much before American experts dancing around Nehru entered the centre stage of the economy and society by the mid 1960s and who since then have only grown in monstrosity. By the beginning of the second decade of this century the suicides of primary producers are not reckoned in terms of hundreds of thousands but millions. Agriculture as a viable economic activity is being forcefully questioned by these ever-increasing number of suicides due to the bankruptcy of the producers and this was exactly what Kumarappa foresaw half a century before. This alone enthrones him on a unique pedestal in the history of Indian economic thought. In the midst of the American dance around him Nehru labelled Kumarappa “a mad man”, which was nothing but emphatic rejection of the Gandhian vision for India. It was a case of colossal ignorance about the country which he was presiding over. Kumarappa and his like were eased out of any policy-making roles and large numbers of Gandhians were accommodated in institutions created for fossilising Gandhi. This was planned to kill any challenge from the Gandhian developmental model and it succeeded too.
Political Economy of ‘Green Revolution’
The background to the unleashing of new productive forces in agriculture is historical in nature. The colonials left Indian agriculture in utter misery when they packed their bags. The entire colonial period is known as the age of famines with the Bengal Famine (1943) claiming more than a million lives. All over the country the rural scene was bleak to the extreme and this obvious reality was what prompted Gandhi and his close followers to focus on rural reconstruction as the primary agenda of politically independent India. Reclaiming the hundreds of thousands of villages from the pit of poverty and destitution became for them a necessary precondition for any serious lifting up of the country as a whole. By the mid-1950s food scarcity had become vicious forcing the Nehru government to appeal for charity from abroad. Food riots had become endemic threatening the very survival of the fledgling government. The United States while shipping fodder-grade food grains exerted great pressure to shift from traditional agricultural production processes to chemicals-based water-guzzling production processes. The thesis that only modernisation of agricultural production can keep the crisis at bay found acceptance in the ruling circles in the country overruling and ousting preeminent agricultural scientists like Dr. Richharia and bringing in and enthroning American trained experts like M.S. Swaminathan. The Indian Council for Agricultural Research came under the tutelage of American research institutions like the International Rice Research Institute located in Manila, Philippines. ‘Green revolution’ which was initially implemented in select areas with ample water availability was now designed on a much larger scale. What subsequently came to be known as the “great gene robbery” was executed and the character of seeds changed.1 With that everything else also changed. Production increased and the acute food scarcity could be mitigated, though starvation and starvation deaths did not vanish.
‘Green Revolution’ was a transformational economic programme designed and imposed from above by developing productive forces in agriculture without radically transforming the production relations, which were holding back the growth of productive forces up to that time. This contradiction was thrown into the limelight by the outbreak of Naxalbari and the spread of the peasant rebellion to different parts of the country establishing a dual system of political power in some pockets of the rebellion. For some time Naxalbari and its aftermath assumed the status of the most serious challenge to the ruling classes of the country and tremendous state violence had to be unleashed to contain and suppress it. The systemic weakness of attempted economic transformation was exposed through this rebellion in the sense that transformational programmes imposed from above without changes in relations of production was found to be politically costly. Along with outright repression what came through subsequently was an intensification and further escalation of the imposed economic dynamics of ‘green revolution’. At the same time the structural contradictions that gave rise to Naxalbari gave place to qualitatively and quantitatively new contradictions by the mid-1970s itself, just one-and-a-half decades after the launching of the ‘green revolution’.
Post ‘Green Revolution’ Scenario
It was during the second half of the 1970s that the new contradictions first broke out in the showpiece areas of ‘green revolution’ – Punjab, Western U.P., Haryana, parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the Cauvery delta – where the primary producers had already become integrated into the different markets. In these areas the producers were surplus producers and the surplus was being extracted through the power of market forces. That was why the slogan of remunerative prices gained widespread currency among these producers. The gap between costs and income was becoming notable despite the subsidies. In other words, the terms of trade between agriculture and non agricultural sectors were becoming adverse to agriculture and it was a growing phenomenon. The credit, inputs and output markets were all becoming extractive channels to exploit the primary producers, and they rose up in protest against this structural straitjacket. A new genre of protests known as “farmers’ movement” entered the political lexicon. This came up because of the oppressive character of the market forces, which the farmers saw as plundering them. The farmers’ movement or agitations were unlike Naxalbari and its offshoots, but they were not unconditionally non-violent. At times they were violent but it was not violence with the declared aim of capturing political power. They are economic struggles in which violence is not anathema. In fact, one sees both Gandhian and violent methods, when forced upon the agitators, conjoined in these struggles. But such struggles are devoid of any ambitious political programmes unlike the Gandhi-led and Naxalite movements. The Naxalites or Maoists are ideologically motivated to overthrow the existing state power; the farmers’ movements could be contented with a fair share in the wealth which they themselves mainly produce.
But the catch lies herein: the logic of capital accumulation in the system as a whole works according to the class interests of the dominant wielders of economic power which is the corporate bourgeoisie; state power is geared to protect and further their interests of which the extraction of surplus from the agriculture sector is a prime component. This extraction of surplus is facilitated through control of the market forces, and challenge to the dominant forces controlling the markets is in essence asking for redistribution of wealth created or radical restructuring of the structure of the market mechanism, which will have serious repercussions on the character of state itself. This is against the logic of the politico-economic system, which is one of channelizing the entire socially available surplus into the coffers of a few. This is the rationale operating in the country that is marked by the highest inequality index in the whole world and with the fastest growth of billionaires. The farming sector as a whole is a milch cow for the corporates with the crores of disparate farmers in an apparently powerless position to block the siphoning of the fruits of their labour and resources. This was not an unanticipated situation, at least as far as Kumarappa was concerned, when macro policies under the guidance of US experts was implemented by the Nehru government in Delhi.
Take the case of chemical inputs in agriculture. Since the ‘green revolution’ was launched in select pockets in the early 1960s it has spread to larger and larger areas under governmental sponsorship. The spurt in output can be termed spectacular and this was a great incentive for farmers to adopt the chemicals based production process on an ever increasing scale.2 At the same time, the per acre requirement of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, energy and water also spectacularly shot up. Studies on Punjab show that since 1970 the average prices of agro chemicals are now more than 300 per cent higher. The ever increasing extraction of ground water has contaminated the water sources as well as drastically pushed down the water table level thereby escalating the cost of extracting it. Now it has come to the point that credit extending agencies like banks insist on the debtors spending the major share of the credit money on chemicals and oversee the obedience of the debtors to their dictates. This means that the credit givers have turned agents of the chemicals producers and the farmers have lost the freedom to decide on how to produce and what to produce. In other words, the primary producers are being manipulated en masse to comply with the interests of economic fascism. The situation is not confined to factory made inputs; the same applies to the outputs market and the credit market. The grip is octopus-like leading to bankruptcy and related consequences. In India one of the consequences is that of self-destruction. That is why the number of suicides has reached millions.
‘Green revolution’ means production for the market. A very interesting illustration is provided by the initiation and demise of cocoa cultivation in Kerala. During the 1980s cocoa cultivation, which was unknown in India up to that time, was propagated by government agencies like Block Development Offices, and banks offered attractive credit. At that time the buyer of raw cocoa was a monopoly multinational company called Cadburys. When the farmers, under the incentive of high prices, took to cocoa in a big way in the foothills of the Ghats especially, output reached the required optimum. It was then that the buyer imported shiploads from Africa and the price of raw cocoa came tumbling down, with the result that overnight the crop became totally uneconomic. The farmers had no way but to destroy the fully grown plants. The same is the story of vanilla in the same region. Every cash crop cultivator is on and off subjected to the same ruthless plunder. This applies to coffee, tea, pepper, coconut and every other similar crop. This is a merry game for the corporates who are the principal gainers from this grossly unequal and distorted market structure.
Producing for the market and having absolutely no real influence on the market conditions is the predicament of the vast number of primary producers. This situation makes them helpless and easy prey to superior capital interests who are able to distort the market conditions to suit their accumulation drive. This is the fundamental contradiction engulfing the agricultural sector in the country after the undermining process of traditional agricultural production processes was launched under imperialist guidance. Though there was a Gandhian alternative economic and political model very much in discussion before and after 1947,3 this was unceremoniously brushed aside as “utopian” and the American model of “modernisation”, wholehearted supported by the apologists of the Soviet model of reckless industrialisation at the expense of primary sector, was imposed on the country. At that time this went under the ridiculous label of ‘Nehruvian socialism’ which certainly did not have anything to do with socialism but was only state capitalist intervention to facilitate global and national corporatism. The subsequent trajectory, as anticipated by thinkers like Kumarappa, amply proved this course of the economy. The present all-round crisis of agriculture is the mature fruit of this course.
On the one hand, we have increasing production and increasing costs of production and on the other hand there are the gross inequalities and distortions in the market structure. Farmers dumping vast quantities of perishable agricultural products like tomatoes are common news. However, the prices of value added agro-based factory products never come down but only steadily increase. It is not that this value adding is very complicated or forbiddingly expensive. It is not so. The technology for value adding to agricultural products is relatively simple and inexpensive. But it is ironical that such processes are confined to corporate agro corporates. A ready illustration comes to mind. It requires only two and half kg dried coffee beans to produce one kg of instant coffee. The price of one kg of instant coffee in the market amounts to more than Rs 4000 while the price of one kg of dried coffee beans is less than Rs 100. During the early 1980s there was a move to organise an instant coffee plant in Wayanad, Kerala with coffee growers as shareholders. The move gathered momentum and the collection of seed capital went ahead. At that time the sole producer of instant coffee was Nestle, a Swiss multinational. All the political parties jumped onto the bandwagon because they all wanted a share in the pie. Nestle became hyper active and easily purchased every political leader involved including the socialists and communists. The whole project died without even a whimper and the political class became rich overnight. They also propagated that the technology of making instant coffee is too expensive and unreachable by ordinary mortals. While being a vulgar illustration of the anti-people agenda of power wielding and power aspiring political parties it also pointed at the need for radically different organisational methods and approaches to empower the farmers.
‘Green revolution’ has taken away the vital ingredient of ownership and control of seeds from the producers. Now biotechnology through propagating genetically modified seeds, a further extension of ‘green revolution’ or what is called the second stage of the same, is attempting to completely destroy any semblance of seed autonomy. Changes in seed technology not only make the dependency for seeds ever more abject but also make the dependency of the entire production process follow the pattern faithfully. All this is happening without any corresponding improvement of the situation of the producers in the overall market conditions engulfing them. In fact, with every additional dose of intervention by external forces the primary producers’ insignificance in the overall market structure worsens. Sustainability and self-reliance becomes ever more unattainable for the producers. Or, to put it in the parlance of market analysts, agriculture becomes a gamble. It has already become so in the case of market dependent crops all over the country. It is bound to become more so in the coming years if no structural overhauling takes place. Unfortunately, any such radical overhauling seems very distant under the given conditions. The policy-makers are ever more determined to push for agriculture to become even more of a gamble. The increasing uneconomic character of agriculture is sought to be made into a permanent character of the sector. This can very well be a push for corporatisation of agricultural production and land ownership. In any case, land grabbing by corporates as an important component of the accumulation drive is gaining strength with every passing day.
Suicides are not the only means of unnatural deaths in the villages. Diseases are another means. The irrational use of chemicals affects not only the quality of the soil but also poisons the air and water. The train from Bhatinda to Bikaner is popularly called Cancer Express. The number of cancer patients in numerous villages in Wayanad is 1.5 in an average family size of 5. Other deadly diseases like sickle cell anaemia, birth of deformed children, mental retardation etc. have become common in agricultural show piece areas. The devastation brought about by the use of endosulfan in Kasaragod district of Kerala is too well known to be narrated in detail here. The entire Vidarbha region is not only notorious for the continuing spate of suicides but also for large-scale deaths through diseases. Any number of such region specific case studies can be cited.4 What adds to the cruelty is that to date no serious attempts have been made to decipher the more than possible linkage between the use of deadly chemicals in the fields and these killer diseases. Of course, such spreading of killer diseases acts as a boost to the health industry’s super profits and thus promotes the growth rate. National ‘growth’ data has become so convoluted and perverted that even income generation from mass misery and desertification of Mother Earth is eulogised as growth.
‘Development’ Induced Forced Migration
“Urbanisation”, taken as the percentage of people living in towns and cities, is often accepted in neo-classical economics as an index of development and growth, and industrial production. After 1947, going according to this statistical index, India has registered impressive growth. The planners gloat over this. But the reality is that displacement from the rural areas is either forced or distress migration to avoid stark starvation. Displacement due to mega projects like dams, mines and large industries is in terms of crores. Apart from these ‘development’ induced forced migrations droughts and floods also contribute their share to this urbanisation. Indian cities and towns, like all Third World urban centres, are monstrosities lacking every civic amenity for the poor. The proportion of people living/dying in phenomenally filthy rat holes called slums without even the most basic amenities in cities like Mumbai or Delhi is phenomenal. This is as true of smaller cities as metropolitan cities. They are breeding grounds for all sorts of diseases with crime as one of the diseases. Agrarian crisis certainly fuels the growth of this kind of urbanisation tremendously. Pushing people from the healthy natural living conditions to footpaths and rat holes is a regressive process that is currently gaining tremendous momentum. It is only out of total helplessness that the vast majority of migrants are uprooted. This sort of growth of urbanisation can by no stretch of imagination be characterised as progress or development. It is the exact reverse of progress. It is the perpetuation and worsening of standards of misery. Of course, it is quite logical to assume that the influx of large number of people into towns and cities will encourage the casualisation of employment conditions in urban areas, which means perpetually depressed wages not only of casual labour – the predominant segment of urban working class – but also organised labour. This is always welcome to corporate capital. Kumarappa could foresee all these developments in outline even when the macro plans were being mooted.5
Kumarappa and Gandhian Economic Thought
It is worthwhile noting again that Kumarappa was a professional economist specialising in public finance when he was drawn into the Gandhian political stream of struggle for freedom from imperialism. He is sometimes called Gandhi’s economist.6 No doubt he was Gandhi’s political disciple and Hind Swaraj became a reference book for him. At the same time, we have to record that the association was based on mutual attraction and respect. Gandhi was very much in need for an economist of Kumarappa’s integrity and capability and Kumarappa was looking for a political philosophy as guidance. Gandhi invited Kumarappa to work with him, and the latter in turn adopted the former as his political guru. It was a daunting task for him, because it was not just a question of following Gandhi but developing Gandhian economic thought as a specific economic philosophy rooted in ground level socio-economic realities. This was exactly what Kumarappa did both in theory and practice. In the course of his tough studies he developed an economic model with non-violence as the corner stone and the maximum welfare of maximum people as the goal. He soon became the most trusted and able theoretician of Gandhi’s political ideas too as is shown by him taking over the editorship of his main publications whenever Gandhi was in jail or elsewhere, which was quite frequent. The economy of permanence necessarily had to be against violent, rapacious capitalism and imperialism and it was on this premise that he opposed the economic policies of the Nehru government and American experts.
Kumarappa never accepted any given formulations, whether socialist or capitalist. He was well aware of both the Soviet and Chinese models of economic transformations. He studied both first hand but held that both were based on aggression which also meant exploitation of the vast majority for the gains of a few, and ecological disasters. He had his sympathies for both in their intentions and commitments but that did not prevent him from critiquing them. The underlying conviction was that India has to evolve its own economic model based on concrete study of concrete reality.7 On this point he was at home with Lenin and Mao but this was only a general truism. The main thing is what the concrete reality is and how to concretely study it. On both these counts Kumarappa became a path breaker and he followed his well argued out studies with illustrations to establish their validity. It was his firm belief that success of concrete implemented models is bound to create widespread acceptance of the people.8 But the post-1947 rulers were not inclined towards any such models based on humanist, ecologically friendly ideals; they were for handed down models of the capitalist imperialist variety. In this conflict of ideas on reconstruction and development political power decided the outcome, which was that Gandhi and Kumarappa and others of the same orientation were cast aside, and borrowed experts, who did not know anything worthwhile about Indian society and economy, were put in the commanding heights. The ongoing agrarian crisis is the wages of this misplaced policy which Kumarappa foresaw.
Conclusion
Kumarappa was never against industrialisation but he was not for a top down, heavy industry, big dams, ecology damning, and reckless exhaustion of reserve resources approach. For him resources are not only for the present but for the future too. He was for judicious exploitation of non renewable resources, especially non renewable sources of energy. International trade should not be at the cost of the people and ecology; industries should not displace and impoverish people. Village economy should empower villagers through promoting balanced cultivation for self-sufficiency, sustainable growth especially of small-scale industries using locally available resources, which alone can promote self-reliance, self-respect and empowerment of the vast masses too. This vision for an India devastated by centuries of colonial plunder was dismissed as unrealistic and absurd by the post-1947 policy-makers, who can rightly be called the engineers of the present all-round agrarian crisis, which is killing hundreds of thousands of primary producers and is responsible for monstrous urban chaos and deprivation.
Notes and References
1. See Claude Alvares, “The Great Gene Robbery” and also his interview with Dr. R.H. Richharia under the heading “Crushed but not Defeated” in Illustrated Weekly of India, March 23, 1986.
2. The Green Revolution has been competently critiqued by Vandana Shiva. See also my book Chaos in Nation Formation: Case of Punjab (Odyssey, 1990), pp. 114ff.
3.. In this context, apart from J.C. Kumarappa’s writings, we would like to mention in particular Bharatan Kumarappa’s Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism? Foreword by Mahatma Gandhi. [Varanasi Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1946 (reprint 1965)] and C.N. Vakil and P.R. Brahmanand, Planning for an Expanding Economy (Bombay, 1956).
4. The issue of farmers’ suicides in this country has been taken up by a number of journalists including eminent ones like P. Sainath. Research institutes like National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai have also carried out region specific studies on this subject. The issue has been covered in films and novels too. Among writings by academics we would like to mention Muzaffar Assadi’s “Agrarian Crisis and Farmers’ Suicides in India: Dimension, Nature and Response of the State in Karnataka”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 49 (4), 2006, pp. 791-811. See also my short book, Wayanad: Misery in an Emerald Bowl (Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 2006).
5. For a variety of his articles on the planning process see Pranjali Bandhu (ed.), Back to Basics: A J.C. Kumarappa Reader (Udhagamandalam, Odyssey, 2011).
6. See Mark Lindley, J.C. Kumarappa: Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist. Foreword by Amlan Datta. (Mumbai, Popular Prakashan, 2007).
7. See Bandhu (ed.), pp. 183-190, op. cit.
8. As one such model attempted to be implemented by Kumarappa along with Mira Behn and some other Sarvodaya workers was Pannai Ashram in Seldoh village near Wardha. His perspective on such an Ashram was given in his writing “The Unitary Basis for a Non-violent Democracy,” [pp. 338-342 in Bandhu (ed.), op. cit.]. Another two articles by him on this Ashram are available online at www.sites.google.com/site/sastudycentre (Archives July 2013 and January 2016).
[This article is based on a talk delivered at a seminar on Decentralisation and Alternative Development: Exploring Ideas from Gandhi and Kumarappa on 29 and 30 November 2017 at Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru and was first published in Gandhi Marg, 39 (4), Jan-March, 2018.]