Why India can afford its villages?

Recently, I came across this interesting article by Atanu Dey on Why India cannot afford its villages. The hypothesis in this article is that the solution to India's rural problems lie in urban development. The argument is based on tracking how civilization worldwide, has had a history of urbanization and how urban centers are a cause and consequence of economic growth. The argument for rural development is also dismissed as romanticization by people who predominantly live in urban areas and don't understand the harsh realities of village life.

Ordinarily, I would have agreed with the argument completely. But I think, by going up the urbanization bandwagon blindly, we are ignoring some fundamental truths about how our society is changing -- globally.

Let me make my argumentation this way. The conventional concepts of economics that we know today have their roots in the industrial age that began in Western Europe. It is not hard to notice that the fundamental axioms of economics -- based on management of scarce resources -- reflect the fundamental challenges faced by European villages in the middle ages.

In Europe, villages, which are essentially settlements that rely primarily on agriculture, are not sustainable entities. If nothing else, nature is an adversary to be fought against. It is too cold for half of the year to even stay outdoors for long, let alone cultivate crops. So the kind of technologies, systems and supply chains that resulted from this civilization are such that they directly impact individual survivability.

On the other hand, if you were to ask me, what have been the major challenges faced by villages in India, I would use terms like saturation or stagnation. The tropical climate in which India (and most other third world countries) are based in, did not pose any significant problems for survivability on an individual scale.

Villages had to contend with adversarial challenges like wild animals, which they were able to do with far lesser amount of technology than their counterparts in the West, who had to contend with adversarial conditions on a much larger scale. In fact, dealing with wild animals is more of a management problem than a struggle against an adversary. Our culture abounds with norms and techniques for living in harmony with nature. Nature is very rarely seen as an adversary, against whom we have to be eternally vigilant about.

Not surprisingly, the major challenges faced by villages in India are societal in nature. They stem from stagnation of thought processes (what is called the local minima problem in artificial intelligence) or from saturation (perceived abundance leading to a spurt in population, tragedy of the commons, etc).

It is not surprising then that so many thinkers in our history have expounded the virtues of liberation of thought and of welcoming new ideas from everywhere and of treating guests as gods, and so on.

When Ambedkar urged his followers to shun rural persecution and move to urban centers, what it meant in effect was to escape from the local minimum of rural social connections and find a better optimality for their lives through other connections that are more likely in urban centers.

So there is a fundamental difference between urbanization in the West and in India. In the West, urban centers offered greater chances of material resources for survival; while in India, urban centers offered greater opportunities for breaking out of social stagnations.

While on the one hand, villagers migrate to urban centers to escape social ostracisms, the other reason for migration has been in search of things like fame, glamour, etc. In other words, social standing, not survival.

The problem of stagnation however, is being addressed today in a subtle fashion, by very different means -- in the form of satellite television, internet, mobile phones, etc. The very worldview of people, be they urbanites or villagers, are influenced to the same extent by these devices.

On a corresponding note, the resource requirements of urban centers are so high that it is unlikely that the world can sustain more than a few tens of mega urban centers. Much of urbanization as we know today is based on a reliance on fossil fuels to such an extent that the problem of them getting exhausted is very real.

On the other hand, technologies that are based on renewable energies like solar power or wind, are not powerful enough to sustain large urban centers. We cannot hope to power a city like Mumbai using just wind farms, and neither can we hope to convert all automobiles of Mumbai to solar powered vehicles.

But these technologies are more than suitable for small villages and towns! It is very plausible to think about even a mid-sized town like Kanakapura to be powered entirely by renewable energy sources, their water supply to be met primarily by rain-water harvesting and their internal transportation to be based primarily on solar vehicles. Connect several such towns with conventional technologies like roads and trains, and connect them all to the internet and television; they'll figure out how to do business by themselves.

On a related note, foundations like Navadarshanam, are very interesting. Navadarshanam is a foundation that runs on sustainable technologies. They generate their own electricity, their own fuel to run (suitably modified) diesel generators, etc. And yet, they don't exactly live in the stone ages. They are connected to the Internet, they have a good library, and conduct business with the external world by making and selling health foods and renting out space in the foundation for visitors. (Note: I am not affiliated to this foundation in any way, so this link is not nepotistic).

A village in a tropical environ like in most of India, is very much sustainable if it is made of people having the same levels of education and exposure that is found in major urban centers worldwide. And with today's technologies, it is possible to provide such an education and exposure, without having to uproot oneself and move to urban centers.