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AGRICULTURE

BY SAJAI JOSE ON 26/01/2018 • LEAVE A COMMENT

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Raghu Raman put forward a starkly apocalyptic vision of the country’s future. Credit:
File photo

Recently, writing against the backdrop of the unprecedented spike in

Delhi’s air pollution, Raghu Raman, the president of Reliance
Industries’ risk, security & new ventures division and former CEO of
India’s National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), put forward a starkly
apocalyptic vision of the country’s future:

India is sitting on several time bombs. Climate change, toxic

environments, burgeoning aspirations, jobless growth,
crumbling infrastructure and of course, pollution being just a
few of them. The current models of social consumption and
growth are simply unsustainable. More importantly, not only
are these issues interlinked but in most cases, have reached a
gridlock wherein no single component can be solved in isolation
without impacting stakeholders affected by other problems.

In the article titled ‘India’s is Hurtling Down A Path of Self-

Destruction’ (https://thewire.in/196791/india-environment-self-destruction-
collapse-jared-diamond/), Raman makes his case by drawing from the
work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond’s
study of Easter Island, the Pacific Island society that supposedly
collapsed owing to over-exploitation of natural resources. He

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concludes that the gridlock-like situation makes collapse inevitable,

because:

… that’s what collapsing societies do. They hurtle down the path
of self-destruction in pursuit of short-term disastrous objectives
in unison, even while they realise the looming catastrophe as
individuals.

Raman’s short piece, well worth reading in full, is a remarkable

statement; both on account of its unyieldingly pessimistic outlook and
the fact that it comes from a senior executive of India’s leading
corporation. It should have made the headlines; but except for some
murmurs in social media, it drew no response even from the pink
papers – otherwise overly attentive to the pronouncements of
business leaders.

Are we really doomed?

Raman’s analysis is not without its problems. Diamond’s work on

Easter Island, for example, has been rejected by
(https://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-easter-island-a-sustainable-society-has-
been-falsely-blamed-for-its-own-demise-85563) experts who have researched
the phenomenon, who trace the origins of such interpretations to the
West’s colonial imagination. But that’s a quibble; what should really
concern us is Raman’s main thesis.

So, are we doomed as a country? Just how valid are Raman’s claims,
which also extend to the rest of the world? Consider these facts:

In the summer of 2016, temperatures in parts of western India

exceeded 50 degrees celsius, with Phalodi in Rajasthan setting a
new record for the country at a scorching 51 degrees celsius. In
Gujarat’s Valsad, people were forced to abandon their sandals
while crossing roads, because they got stuck on the melting tar. In
the last four years, heat waves killed more than 4,600 Indians, the

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overwhelming bulk of them working class people in Andhra

Pradesh and Telangana.
Farmers in South Asia are expected to use between 80 and 200%
more water by 2050. Yet, Indian farmers are drawing water from
the Upper Ganges aquifer (large underground deposit of water)
at 50 times its recharge rate. A NASA study in 2009 identified a
third of the world’s major aquifers to be in distress, with the Indus
basin – which includes Punjab and Haryana, India’s granaries –
ranked the second-most over-stressed.
The UN estimates 6 million hectares (14.8 million acres) of new
farmland is needed globally every year to keep up with food
demand; instead, we are losing 12 million hectares a year through
soil degradation. In India alone, a whopping 25% (82 million
hectares) of total land (329 mn ha) is undergoing desertification
while 32% (105 mn ha) is facing degradation.
Scientists are keeping a close watch on two little known glaciers in
Pine Island Bay, Antarctica, which are so huge that “they act as a
plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into
the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every
coastal city on the planet.” If global warming continues to
accelerate as it is doing now, those two glaciers could melt in as
much as 20 to 50 years – much too sooner than humanity can
adapt.
Globally, between 1990 and 2015, we lost the equivalent of 1,000
football fields’ worth of forests per hour, according to the World
Bank. The Hindustan Times says India alone may have lost close
to 10.6 million hectares in just 14 years – between 1999 to 2013.
Deforestation increases soil erosion, affects rainfall patterns and
river flows, apart from destroying wildlife habitats.

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Between 1990 and 2015, we lost the equivalent of 1,000 football fields’ worth of
forests per hour. Credit: Reuters

These figures merely skim the surface of a crisis – more accurately, a

set of interlinked crises – that is of truly earth-shaking proportions.
The crises are not merely ‘environmental’ – after all, the fate of
humanity is inextricably linked to that of nature.

As the trends above show, these crises are not future events either.
And worse, on almost every one of these fronts, the trends are not
only accelerating, but show no sign of abating. Every year, we are
breaching more and more planetary boundaries
(http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/planetary-
boundaries/about-the-research/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html), which can be
seen as the earth’s health indicators, pushing our natural systems
further towards a terminal state.

Among the many crises that are converging on the 21st century,
climate change stands out for being the most urgent and far-reaching
(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-
humans.html) in its impact. A phenomenon primarily attributed to the
burning of fossil fuels, it brings with it a host of inter-related
challenges – shifting rainfall patterns, megadroughts and floods, sea
level rise, acidification of oceans, and so on – any one of which would
qualify as a major global crisis.

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Of late, the warnings have reached fever pitch. In November 2017, the
Union of Concerned Scientists issued a dire ‘second warning
(http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/letter-to-humanity-warning-climate-
change-global-warming-scientists-union-concerned-a8052481.html)’ about “the
existential threat of runaway consumption of limited resources,”
signed by 15,000 scientists from 184 countries, including many Nobel
laureates.

In short, we are well past the stage where such concerns about our
collective future can be dismissed as ‘alarmism’.

Industrial civilisation as a ‘nine-day wonder’

The main driver (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr

/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot) of the 21st century’s
converging crises is the global industrial-capitalist system, and the
pernicious ideology of perpetual, exponential economic growth that
governs it. In 2016, in an op-ed piece
(https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/infinite-growth-in-a-finite-
world-hopium-economics-has-given-us-deeply-in-debt-individuals-businesses-and-
nations/) in the The Times of India, international banker turned author
Satyajit Das laid out in jargon-free terms how this came to be:

Economic growth is a central assumption to political and

economic systems… But strong growth is not normal, being a
recent phenomenon over the last two centuries… It was based
upon the profligate use of mispriced natural resources such as
oil, water and soil. It relied on allowing unsustainable
degradation of the environment. The human race refuses to
accept that it is not possible to have infinite growth and
improvement in living standards in a finite world.

Exploitation and inequality is innate to the industrial-capitalist

system; a fact well-known at least since the time of Marx. But the
question of its environmental impacts and viability has received far

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less attention, historically speaking. Interestingly, chief among those

who sounded the early warnings about modern industrial civilization
were a bunch of illustrious Indians: Tagore (http://www.tonu.org
/tag/robbery-of-the-soil/), Gandhi and J.C. Kumarappa (https://scroll.in
/article/826426/defying-capitalism-and-socialism-kumarappa-and-gandhi-had-
imagined-a-decentralised-indian-economy).

In 1909, in his characteristically homespun manner, Gandhi had

described industrial civilisation as a “nine-day wonder”
(https://thewire.in/66777/gandhi-was-perfectly-sensible-to-call-industrial-civilisation-
a-nine-days-wonder-mark-lindley/). Today, this deeply unfashionable view
has returned with a vengeance, and Gandhi and Kumarappa are now
seen as beacons by those who are seeking alternatives to the present
system.

In fact, there is rich irony in the fact that it took more than half a
century for Gandhi’s warning to echo through the halls of the
scientific establishment. That came in the form of a 1972 study, which
sought to simulate the consequences of unchecked economic growth.
The results, published in a report titled ‘The Limits to Growth
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth),’ implied that industrial
societies were thoroughly unsustainable and headed towards collapse,
if they didn’t change course. Predictably, its findings were duly
ignored.

Today, however, many analysts believe that we have finally hit the
‘limits to growth’ predicted in the study 45 years ago. Their
painstaking research connects the ongoing global economic slowdown
to underlying resource constraints. (Some of these analyses can be
read here (https://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/03/29/how-resource-limits-lead-to-
financial-collapse/), here (http://richardheinberg.com/220-peak-everything) and
here (http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.in/2013/09/mineral-resources-and-limits-to-
growth.html)). Closer home, researchers at The Energy Resources
Institute (TERI) have issued a similar warning (https://thewire.in/12382
/curbing-consumption-is-the-only-way-out-to-avoid-climate-change/) for India:
curbing economic growth and consumption is the only way to avoid a
catastrophe.

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Primarily, there are three reasons why long-term economic growth is

not viable:

1. The ‘pie’ is shrinking; the non-renewable resources – metals,

minerals and fossil fuels – which hi-tech industrial societies
depend on are increasingly scarce and inaccessible (See here, here
and here).
2. There is greater competition for these shrinking resources – once
monopolised by the West – as the rest of the world apes the
western economic model; which means that with time, fewer and
fewer of these will be available for each.
3. The catastrophic environmental impacts of economic growth –
climate change, deforestation, pollution and toxicity, etc – are
putting in place new and more urgent limits on the production and
consumption of these resources.

The conclusion is as inescapable as it was expected. The planet

simply lacks the capacity to support the economic utopia promised to
everyone by the champions of growth. However, to continue
espousing this model knowing it has thrown planetary systems off-
kilter – as India’s elite decision-makers do – is beyond myopic; it’s
lunatic.

But, as even the most casual survey of the ‘rich lists’ show, it’s a
lunacy that has served its proponents only too well.

A feast of vultures

A Feast of Vultures: that’s the title of a recent book

(http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/2TIvyIJAi68p4EtUVwyijL/Book-review-A-Feast-
Of-Vultures.html) by the investigative journalist Josy Joseph. It
documents from the inside the spectacular corruption and economic
feeding frenzy that followed when India threw open its resources to
private players in the name of ‘economic reforms’. It’s no coincidence
that the same period has seen the wealth of India’s neo-rich soar to
previously unimagined heights.

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According to the charity Oxfam’s annual report (https://thewire.in/216160

/richest-1-cornered-73-wealth-generated-india-2017-oxfam-survey/) on inequality,
India’s richest 1% cornered 73% of the wealth generated in the
country in 2017. Meanwhile, 67 crore Indians comprising the
population’s poorest half saw their wealth rise by just 1%. The study
estimates that to earn what a top paid executive in a leading Indian
firm earns in a year, it will take a minimum wage labourer in rural
India an astounding 941 years.

These grim figures are very much in tune with global trends: 82% of
the wealth generated last year worldwide was cornered by the top 1%,
while 3.7 billion people that account for the poorest half of population
saw no increase in their wealth at all.

Number one among India’s super-rich is Mukesh Ambani, the owner

of Reliance Industries; as of this year, the world’s third largest
(http://www.livemint.com/Companies/wPa7m4ZN1knkekIFTgqvuO/RIL-worlds-3rd-
largest-energy-firm-Platts-rankings.html) fossil fuel company. His family is
not only Asia’s wealthiest (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mukesh-
ambani-family-tops-forbes-list-of-asias-richest-families-pip-
lees/article20465328.ece), their net worth rose by $19 billion this year to
reach $44.8 billion. Based as it is on the performance of the Reliance
empire, the family’s net worth is now close to the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) of the state of Punjab ($ 47 billion), one of India’s
richest and home to almost three crore people.

The wealth it added to its stash in the last year alone is greater than
the GDP of Uttarakhand ($18 billion). As the 2017 Forbes ‘India’s 100
richest (https://www.forbes.com/india-billionaires/%2312a9ee84643b)’ list
shows, the fortunes of other tycoons too are growing at a similarly
heady rate.

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‘The ideology of the cancer cell’

Large parts of these vast fortunes piled up by India’s own band of

robber barons (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-
commentary/india-struggles-through-its-own-era-of-robber-barons/article4252238/)
can be directly traced to the ongoing fire sale
(http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/the-great-environment-
scam/article5075991.ece) of the country’s natural resources and a whole
range of not-so-visible subsidies they receive from the government –
from heavy tax rebates to land secured at throwaway prices to bad-
debts written-off.

While this process of state-enabled plunder is concealed from the

public eye through elaborate bureaucratic skulduggery, the modus
operandi itself remains devilishly simple: Collude with the state to
transfer publicly owned resources into one’s own hands at a pittance;
privatise the profits; and ‘socialise’ the costs – ie, the loss of homes
and livelihoods, depleted resources, polluted air, water and soil.

And yet, this process that enriches the few at the cost of the many,
while permanently destroying the country’s environmental fabric, is
roundly cheered by our self-declared patriots and a section of the
metropolitan pundit class. What is, as a matter of fact, one of history’s
most outrageous examples of forced wealth transfer, is perversely
celebrated as ‘wealth creation’, and its chief beneficiaries glorified as
‘nation builders’.

But, violent and exploitative as it has been, the true scale of the
criminality of these policies are becoming evident only now, in the age
of climate change. Today, alarming events like Delhi’s air pollution
spike show that those accumulated ‘socialised’ costs are coming back
to bite us, just as saner voices had always warned they will.

In fact, India’s situation is rapidly approaching that of China, whose

wrong-headed political and economic policies are an inspiration for
our elites and middle classes. Three decades of rapid growth has

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thrust that nation into what has been described as a ‘communist-

capitalist ecological apocalyspe‘ which now threatens to undo its
economic achievements.
The idea of infinite economic growth on a finite planet is a
mathematical impossibility. Indeed, as the American author Edward
Abbey had warned, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of
the cancer cell.” And yet, this delusional and ultimately suicidal
ideology is now an article of faith for most Indians, thanks to a cynical
and self-serving elite who have systematically injected it into society
via the media, advertising, and educational institutions.

“We have met the enemy and he is us”

In a manner reminiscent of that famous Vietnam war-era cartoon,

Raman too arrives at the same, inexorable conclusion. Channeling
Diamond, he makes what must be the most singular admission ever
to be made by an Indian corporate leader.

“…one of the main reasons why even sophisticated societies fall

into this suicidal spiral is the conflict between the short-term
interests of decision-making elites and the long-term interests
of society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate
themselves from the consequences of their actions. And that is
how many decision makers have behaved over centuries across
the world, including in India.”

That extraordinary statement, coming from an ‘elite decision-maker’,

is the closest we have got to a confession from an insider as to what
has really been going in the country over the last few decades. In
many ways, it confirms what the critics, from Medha Patkar to the
Maoists, have always charged India’s development model with: that
it’s violent and unjust, skewed in favour of the privileged few, and
ecologically disastrous.

It shines new light on the mindset that promises bullet trains and
‘smart cities’ while neglecting public health and malnutrition; the

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pursuit of heartless policies calculated to keep agriculture

economically unviable, driving the rural poor (http://www.catchnews.com
/pov/total-recall-how-the-match-is-fixed-against-indian-farmers-1432731942.html)
wholesale into the cities to serve as cheap fodder for India’s ‘economic
miracle’; and the permanent destruction of million-year-old
mountains, forests and rivers to create a ‘nine-day’ industrial wonder.

Ironically, these policies are being enacted in the name of poverty

reduction and ‘development’, which is flatly contradicted by the
government’s own data. In the period from 2004-2005 to 2015-2016,
tax concessions given by the Indian government to corporations
amounted to an incredible Rs 50 lakh crore (http://www.dnaindia.com
/analysis/column-sinkhole-in-the-tax-landscape-2566886) – a sum that could
have made India’s poverty history. Bear in mind that this
astronomical figure is just one form of ‘invisible’ subsidies given to
corporations, and that too for a mere 12-year period. Given this, it’s
hard to avoid the conclusion: the Indian public has been duped.

That’s why Raghu Raman’s statement ought to immediately revive the

debate about the direction of India’s development. A debate that was
virtually shut down after the ’90s, when the component elements of
the system – the famous ‘pillars of democracy’ – closed ranks to form
a consensus that we needed growth at any cost.

System change, not climate change

This is a not call for return to 20th century-style socialism, which is

perhaps irredeemably caught up in the logic of industrialism. We
need to need to find another way – rather, ways – and hundreds of
experiments and models along these lines already abound (See here
(https://systemchangenotclimatechange.org/ecosocialism), here
(https://transitionnetwork.org/), here (http://evonomics.com/will-replace-outdated-
left-right-economic-thinking-commons-paradigm/), here
(https://theconversation.com/buen-vivir-south-americas-rethinking-of-the-future-we-
want-44507) and here (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr
/12/doughnut-growth-economics-book-economic-model) for starters).

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This is not a matter of choice either. Our collective survival depends

on how soon – whether – we correct course, while ensuring a
modicum of economic security for everyone and avoiding large-scale
conflict. This is the central challenge of the 21st century not just for
India, but for every nation on the planet.

Returning sanity to our economic models necessarily involves

devolving power and redistributing wealth. That’s why this change
can never come from our elite decision-makers, but only from
ordinary citizens. Raghu Raman’s startling statement has served the
memo to the people of India on the fate that awaits them, if they are
to leave things in the hands of the elites and their short-term
interests.

The wave of climate lawsuits (https://www.theguardian.com/environment

/2017/mar/08/how-climate-change-battles-are-increasingly-being-fought-and-won-
in-court), calls for climate reparations (http://www.motherjones.com
/environment/2009/12/bolivia-paying-rain/) and increasingly successful
fossil fuel divestment campaigns (http://www.resilience.org/stories
/2017-12-14/how-bill-mckibbens-radical-idea-of-fossil-fuel-divestment-transformed-
the-climate-debate/) show that such a course correction may have begun
already. Last week, the city of New York announced
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/11/new-york-city-fossil-fuel-
divestment-spur-global-movement) that it will divest pension funds worth
$5 billion from fossil fuel companies, apart from filing lawsuits
against them for creating global warming. No doubt, these changes
only scratch the surface of problem. But, hopefully, they are
precursors of much more radical changes to come.

Just as well. Because, as the author Derrick Jensen says, for way too
long a time, “We have been too kind to those who are killing the
planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.”

Sajai Jose (https://thewire.in/author/sjose/) is a member of Ecologise

(https://www.ecologise.in/), a collective with a shared interest in
understanding the 21st century’s converging crises and exploring

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alternative pathways

What to read next:

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