ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS 2014 - An Unspoken Indian Story (PART-3)

What is Localisation ?

 Localisation, a trend diametrically opposed to globalization, is based on the belief that those living closest to the resource to be managed (the forest, the sea, the coast, the farm, the urban facility, etc), would have the greatest stake, and often the best knowledge, to manage it. Of course this is not always the case, and in India many communities have lost the ability because of two centuries of government-dominated policies, which have effectively crippled their own institutional structures, customary rules, and other capacities. Nevertheless a move towards localization of essential production, consumption, and trade, and of health, education, and other services, is eminently possible if communities are sensitively assisted by civil society organizations and the government. There are thousands of Indian initiatives at decentralized water harvesting, biodiversity conservation, education, governance, food and materials production,

Irreplaceable ecological functions of nature need respect and protection energy generation, waste management, and others (in both villages and cities). Indeed the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution (mandating decentralization to rural and urban communities), taken to their logical conclusion, are essentially about localisation. To give some live examples:

Sustainable agriculture using a diversity of crops has been demonstrated by Dalit women farmer of Deccan Development Society, communities working with Green Foundation in Karnataka, farmers of the Beej Bachao Andolan, and the Jaiv Panchayat network of Navdanya.

Thousands of community-led efforts exist in Odisha, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Nagaland, and other states, at protecting and regenerating forests, wetlands, grasslands, and coastal/marine areas, as also wildlife populations and species.

‘Communitization’ (providing greater local control) of education, health and other aspects has been successfully tried by the governament of the north-east Indian state of Nagaland.

Water self-sufficiency in arid, drought-prone areas has been demonstrated by hundreds of villages, through decentralised harvesting and strict self-regulation of use, such as in Alwar district of Rajasthan by Tarun Bharat Sangh.

                         

Moving away from the classic model of a city parasitically dependent on the countryside for all its needs is Bhuj (Kachchh, Gujarat). Groups like Hunnarshala, Sahjeevan, Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, and ACT, have teamed up to mobilize slumdwellers, women’s groups, and other citizens into reviving watersheds and creating a decentralized water storage and management system, manage solid wastes, generate livelihood for poor women, create adequate sanitation, and provide dignified housing for all. Here and in Bengaluru, Pune, and other cities, increasingly vocal citizens are invoking the 74th Amendment to urge for decentralised, local planning.

                         

For localization to succeed, it is crucial to deal with the socio-economic exploitation that is embedded in India’s caste system, inter-religious dynamics, and gender relations. Such inequities can indeed be tackled, as witnessed in the case of dalit women gaining dignity and pride through the activities of Deccan Development Society in Andhra, dalits and ‘higher’ castes interacting with much greater equality in Kuthambakkam village of Tamil Nadu, and adivasi children being empowered through the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s jeevan shalas. In any case, there is little evidence that globalisation has in any significant way reduced caste, religious, and gender exploitation, and indeed not brought in new forms of inequality

Working at the landscape level

The local and the small-scale are not by themselves adequate. For many of the problems we now face are (Links between nature and culture are essential to human well-being )at much larger scales, emanating from and affecting entire landscapes (and seascapes), countries, regions, and indeed the earth. Climate change, the spread of toxics, and desertification, are examples. Landscape and trans-boundary planning and governance (also called ‘bioregionalism’, or ‘ecoregionalism’, amongst other names), are exciting new approaches being tried out in several countries and regions. These are as yet fledgling in India, but some are worth learning from. The Arvari Sansad (Parliament) in Rajasthan brings 72 villages in the state of Rajasthan together, to manage a 400 sq.km river basin through inter-village coordination, making integrated plans and programmes for land, agriculture, water, wildlife, and development. In Maharashtra, a federation of Water User Associations has been handed over the management of the Waghad Irrigation Project, the first time a government project has been completely devolved to local people.

Building on decentralized and landscape level governance and management, and in turn providing it a solid backing, would be a rational land use plan for each bioregion, state and the country as a whole. This plan would permanently put the country’s ecologically and socially most fragile or important lands into some form of conservation status (fully participatory and mindful of local rights and tenure). Such a plan would also enjoin upon towns and cities to provide as much of their resources from within their boundaries as possible, through water harvesting, rooftop and vacant plot farming, decentralized energy generation, and so on; and to build mutually beneficial rather than parasitic relations with rural areas from where they will still need to take resources. The greater the say of rural communities in deciding what happens to their resources, and the greater the awareness of city-dwellers on the impacts of their lifestyles, the more this will happen. 

Ultimately as villages get re-vitalized through locally appropriate development initiatives, rural-urban migration which today seems inexorable, would also slow down and may even get reversed…as has happened with villages like Ralegan Siddhi and Hivare Bazaar in the state of Maharashtra, those in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh where Samaj Pragati Sahayog is active, and those in Alwar district of Rajasthan where Tarun Bharat Sangh works.

Governance, local to national

Central to the notion of RED, is the practice of democratic governance that starts from the smallest, most local unit, to ever-expanding spatial units. In India, the Constitution mandates governance by panchayats at the village and village cluster level, and by ward committees at the urban ward level. However, these are representative bodies, subject to the same pitfalls that plague representative democracy at higher levels. It is crucial to empower the gram sabha (village assembly) in rural areas, and the area sabha (smaller units within wards) in cities, or other equivalent body where all the adults of the individual hamlet or village or urban colony are conveniently able to participate in decision-making.

All critical decisions relating to local natural resources or environmental issues should be taken at this level, with special provision to facilitate the equal participation of women and other underprivileged sections.

Already there are examples of this, such as:

The Gond adivasi village of Mendha-Lekha (Maharasthtra), adopts the principle of ‘our government in Mumbai and Delhi, but we are the government in our village’. All decisions are taken by consensus in the full village assembly, based on information generated by abhyas gats (study circles). In the last three decades the village has moved towards fulfillment of all basic requirements of food, water, energy and local livelihoods, as also conserved 1800 hectares of forest.

                         

                         

Apart from the urban examples mentioned above, some cities have moved towards participatory budgeting, with citizens able to submit their priorities for spending to influence the official budgets.

Larger level governance structures need to essentially emanate from these basic units. These would include clusters or federations of villages with common ecological features, larger landscape level institutions, and others that in some way also relate to the existing administrative and political units of districts and states. Governance across states, and across countries, of course presents special challenges; there are a number of lessons to be learnt from failed or only partially successful initiatives such as river basin authorities.

The Concept of Radical Economic Democracy  (RED)

RED requires not only a fundamental change in political governance, but also in economic relations of production and consumption. Globalized economies tend to emphasise the democratization of consumption (the consumer as ‘king’…though even this hides the fact that in many cases there is only a mirage of choice), but not the democratization of production. This can only change with a fundamental reversal, towards decentralized production which is in the control of the producer, linked to predominantly local consumption which is in the control of the consumer.

Village-based or cottage industry, small-scale and decentralized, has been a Gandhian proposal for decades. Such industry would be oriented to meeting, first and foremost, local needs, and then national or international needs. Since this would be a part of a localized economy in which producer-consumer links are primarily (though not only) local, the crucial difference between such production and current capitalist production is that it is for self and others, primarily as a service and not for profits.

Groups of villages, or villages and towns, could form units to further such economic democracy. For instance:

In Tamil Nadu, the dalit panchayat head of Kuthambakkam village, Ramaswamy Elango, is organizing a cluster of 7-8 villages to form a ‘free trade zone’, in which they will trade goods and services with each other (on mutually beneficial terms) to reduce dependence on the outside market and government. This way, the money stays back in the area for reinvestment in local development, and relations amongst villages get stronger.

In Gujarat, the NGO Bhasha is promoting the idea of Green Economic Zones to encompass dozens of tribal villages, based on the “concepts of sustainability, ecological sensitivity, and an ingrained understanding of the cultural roots of a people”.

The Nowgong Agriculture Producer Company Ltd (NAPCL) in Madhya Pradesh and the Aharam Traditional Crop Producer Company (ATCPC) in Tamil Nadu are examples of farmer-run companies that enable producers directly reach their markets.

Money may remain an important medium of exchange, but would be much more locally controlled and managed rather than controlled anonymously by international financial institutions and the abstract forces of global capital operating through globally networked financial markets. Considerable local trade could revert to locally designed currencies or barter, and prices of products and services even when expressed in money terms could be decided between givers and receivers rather than by an impersonal, non-controllable distant market. A huge diversity of local currencies and non-monetary ways of trading and providing/obtaining services are already being used around the world. 

Financial management itself needs to be radically decentralized, away from the mega-concentrations that today’s banks and financial institutions represent.These globalized institutions and the free rein given to
their speculative tendencies, have been at the heart of the latest financial crisis. But simultaneously, across the
world a host of localized, community-based banking and financing systems have also cropped up over the
last couple of decades.

This info is a dialogue with  the work of Ashish Kothari 

He has been Co-Chair of the IUCN Inter-commission Strategic Direction on Governance, Equity, and Livelihoods in Relation to Protected Areas (TILCEPA) (1999-2008), and in the same period a member of the Steering Committees of the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), and IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy (CEESP). He has served on the Board of Directors of Greenpeace International, and currently chairs Greenpeace India’s Board. He has also been on the steering group of the CBD Alliance.