India needs to shift its economic model

Instead of debating at length the slowdown, its causes and remedies, we can take another perspective than a simple cyclical crisis in the context of a totally new global environment. Well beyond Modinomics or Modipolitics, India seems to be facing a structural challenge of its economic model whose evidences can be seen every day on the ground in the countryside, in medium-sized cities and, of course, in megacities in deep crisis. But solutions and opportunities emerge also from everywhere and suggest a cautious optimism for those who have confidence in the common sense of people.
 
Concerning the challenges, it is enough to travel in “real India” to observe: 

• Massive unemployment and underemployment of young people, while India is unfortunately at its peak of demographic transition. So, the challenge of the demographic dividend has become the challenge of demographic liabilities, including from the socio-political point of view of a lost youth tempted by extreme adventurism (see Shankar Acharya’s “The job crisis worsens”, Business Standard, November 19).

• The massive accumulation of environmental liabilities in the form of the accumulation of waste everywhere in the open air, a water crisis in both quantity and quality, an air crisis with particle indices now among the most dangerous in the world, detestable indicators of food quality and nutrition in general, with tangible signs of deterioration in the average health of the population, either through excessive sugar and fat consumption or malnutrition of the working classes. Finally, urban congestion whose costs are added to gross domestic product (GDP) but never subtracted to the real welfare. Today, each growth point is probably offset by a corresponding deterioration in the quality of life in India. Paradoxically, the objective of maximising growth is nothing less than a goal of deteriorating the quality of development.

• Rural stress related to the Green Revolution model has become a daily reality in the rural world, which represents half the Indian population. Thousands of suicides are in reality only an epiphenomenon of a much larger depression that can be observed in Indian villages deserted by young people or by men who have left for the city to provide a minimum subsistence to their families.

• With the inhabitants of urban slums, at least 500 million Indians are currently deprived of basic needs such as housing, food, education, and have such low subsistence incomes that they are still not integrated into the market economy with daily income levels ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 200 per person per day. And all the noise around the populist programmes of toilets, gas bottles or small pucca houses of the PMAY-G does not hide their miserable character for those who visit the Indian countryside. As with the demographic dividend, dividends from the Indian market have not yet materialised to the point that prices are increasingly declining with clear limits on the viability of companies, whether they are mobile phones or basic cookies like Parle.

Natural farming as a systemic paradigm shift

 
It is clear that the business-as-usual scenario has no chance of meeting these challenges. It would be necessary to have a proactive long-term vision, but unfortunately any transformation from above seems impossible because of a short view of the political class, which has its eyes fixed on the rolling electoral tests and seems to enjoy purely ideological confrontations. On the other hand, it is extremely reassuring to observe a deep movement from below (bottom up), where civil society and the business world are forced to be innovative to adapt to the crisis of the Indian productivist model of the 1990s. We are thinking of innovative business models along the lines of the Patanjali chain of stores, one of the few economic successes of recent years that has spread simple and healthy products in depth throughout India. But it seems obvious that the emergence of a mass movement around natural farming (NF) is today the real breakthrough innovation that could lead to a possible change in the Indian economic paradigm.

 

What are its solutions and why natural farming is much more than an agricultural issue. The results of our field surveys with Vijay Kumar in charge of Zero Budget Natural Farming in Andhra Pradesh (ZBNF) or the Indian guru of NF, Subhash Palekar, show that NF is a systemic response to the following challenges: Employment, gender equality, aspiration of young people to live a better life, quality food, better health, a response to climate change and environmental degradation, and the relocation of the Indian economy around dynamic rural areas and second- and third-level cities to overcome the structural urban crisis in India. It also includes the conceptual breakthrough of the great Indian economist Raghuram Rajan, as expressed in his book The Third Pillar: The urgent need to revitalise the community economy between the state and the market that have become incapable of bringing prosperity to all. The writer is an economist at French Institute of International Relations