Abstract
This volume seeks to build bridges between life-worlds of adivasis in India and those allegedly implied by the terms of ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’. The overall arguments are made within an explicit understanding that the terms ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ represent two starkly different world views or ‘Two Cultures’ in the words of an erstwhile Indian union minister for environment, Mr Jairam Ramesh (see Ramesh 2010), who is, of course, improvising the famous framing by C.P. Snow (1959). A compilation of 15 lectures on ecology and economics offered at the Institute of Rural Management (Anand), the book employs the term real development to seek transformation of the present developmental pattern to achieve a truly sustainable path towards collective well-being. At the outset, the authors assert that continuing the current pattern of industrialisation and commercialisation cannot be real development, since it benefits an expanding middle class and it will be ‘at the cost of a rapid destruction of ecosystems and rural communities’ (p. 1). The focus of the book is about charting a politically feasible path to transform the current developmental paradigm so as to achieve a genuine sustainable path of collective well-being, one that avoids the current ‘multidimensional economic, environmental, social and climate change cataclysm (that is) facing us now in India and worldwide’ (ibid.).
The book seeks to offer a critique of concepts such as development, growth, democracy and freedom through which the authors also attempt to reclaim their meanings through the experiences of people living close to nature. The assumption is, of course, that lived experiences of such peoples can essentially raise contrary meanings to such terms, currently colonised by economic and engineering based models that equate high gross domestic product (GDP) or techno-scientific advances to development. In this vein, through seven chapters, the authors seek to provide a holistic overview of the conflicts inherent in an understanding of the world shaped by neoliberal economic thought, and their impact on the lives of adivasis and other peoples in India through a range of issues regarding resource-use, including intensive mining for metals; large-scale power generation; transition of exchange based economy to corporatised finance and monetary system; and the informalisation of labour and agrarian systems. Recalling Marshall Sahlins’s seminal framing in Stone Age Economics (Sahlins 1974) of hunter gatherer societies as ‘the original affluent society (sic)’, the authors seek to extend the argument to India’s adivasis (p. 23) through the term ‘Adivasi economics’, to delineate the heart of tribal social systems as consisting of ‘radically decentralised’, ‘highly developed and extremely sophisticated bodies of knowledge, implicit in customary behaviour such as taboos’ (p. 21).
Within this rubric, the book arrays a plethora of evidence in a range of fields pointing to the absurdity in the current paradigm of economics that drive intensive exploitation of natural resources in the name of development. For instance, it sketches the critique on big dams and devastating hazards as well as colossal environmental and social costs posed by such mega water projects, including interlinking of rivers and the irrigation demands of the Green Revolution. The dismal limitations of cost benefit analysis that normalises impoverishment and serious environmental degradation in two important engines of neoliberal growth, namely, mines and minerals as well as generation of power, are exposed in subsequent chapters. An array of evidence that calls to question the externalisation of costs in aluminium, coal and iron ore sectors are brought together in an accessible fashion. Further, the disproportionate costs borne by the adivasis in India for the extraction of natural resources in the mega scale generation of power through coal, nuclear and gas is brought to focus. The authors rightly ask the question of how ‘long can such a lavish use of scarce resources continue?’ (p. 199).
The twin effects of accelerating destruction of the resource base and the consequences of the same on the most marginal of communities are brought together during the treatment on agriculture (Green Revolution), which has intensified the pressure of favouring rich farmers at the expense of poor farmers, leading to a systemic crisis in agriculture, informalisation of agricultural labour and large number of starvation deaths. The authors point to the links between outsourcing and globalisation of production chains and the ‘widening representation gap in the world of work’ (p. 158). The book entrusts considerable confidence in the capacity of rule of law structures to incorporate a holistic mechanism of Cost Benefit Analysis that puts adivasi communities at the heart of such assessment. It congratulates the Indian system for having ‘some of the strongest laws and regulation of any country to protect land and labour rights, as well as the environment’ (p. 209). It provides various instances, including in the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) (PESA) Act and the Forest Rights Act, to make the familiar argument that the key problem today is of its implementation, albeit with a prescriptive caveat that the ‘centralised procedures needs to draw in the perspective of customary law…and the voices of people marginalised by financial forces’ (p. 235). It rightly underlines the deep connections between mounting debt services for industrialisations of Third World countries, associated national developmental trajectories and speculative financing for extractive industries (p. 188). What putative effects may these connections have in the way laws are framed, a question that cannot merely be about implementation?
Though many might not fully subscribe to this picture of confidence in Indian environmental regulation, this is a valuable book, rich with details and experience about economic, political and cultural marginalisation of the other India, carried out through economic and developmental discourses around the management and utilisation of natural resources as also through the legal system. While the book could have been a little more theoretically engaging, it would be an apt addition in university curricula both in advanced undergraduate and master level courses that focus on developmental studies, environmental law and policy as well as tribal studies. It offers a wide terrain of cases to rethink various domains of neoliberal economics, ideas about rule of law as well as environmental regulation and policy.