What kind of India do we seek?

In Kachchh, a gathering of organisations opens up space to ask this and other big questions, and a daring to imagine alternatives to modern ‘development’

By Yogendra Yadav :

Kachchh invites you to ask big questions. This is the site for a fusion of horizons. Here, sea meets desert under an uncluttered sky. Shifting topography, recurring earthquakes, the intermingling of races and cultures from Gujarat, Sindh and Rajasthan to Afghanistan, Iran, and East Africa and a line in the sand that marks the boundary of nation-states serves to remind you of the transient nature of everything. Kachchh releases you from the prison of the here and now, from the cycles of breaking news, election results, scandals and wars, and lets you sit back and reflect.

So, we asked big questions: What does our future look like? What should it look like, if we could shape it? What kind of India do we seek? Can we envision something beyond the stale dream of a modern, developed, superpower with cutting-edge technology and an x-trillion dollar economy — a mirage that we have been chasing, breathless and mindless? Is another world possible?

“We”, here, meant a group associated with Vikalp Sangam, a confluence of over 90 organisations and movements that share a quest for transformative alternatives. These are activists, scholars and development practitioners who do not merely complain and protest; they actively seek alternative “ways of meeting human needs and aspirations, without trashing the earth and without leaving half of humanity behind”. And they do not seek it just on paper, but on the ground. This was the 10th anniversary of Vikalp Sangam, a moment to remember the journey and to reflect on the future.

Kachchh provides stark options to think about our future. From an outsider’s gaze, this largest district of India is a backward wasteland — vast swathes of unproductive arid land unfit for cultivation — waiting to be reclaimed for “development”. Following the earthquake of 2001, all kinds of modern, multi-storied buildings and industries (led by, who else, but Adani!) have come up here. From a different point of view, however, Kachchh is diverse and vibrant, home to many ecological practices, crafts and art that we need to learn from. When I read that someone called Kachchh a “museum of environmental hardship” the first image that flashed in my mind was the breathtaking museum of Kachchh embroideries in that extraordinary LLDC complex at Bhuj that could put any of our metropolitan museums to shame. Kachchh is a museum of human resilience and creativity under conditions of hardship.

More than high-rise buildings and factories, for me the symbol of modernity in Kachchh is a thorny tree that you see everywhere. The scientists call it Prosopis juliflora. Locals call it gando bawal (or kharo babul), the mad tree. Native to Mexico, this tree was imported to India and showered on to Kachchh — literally, thanks to government helicopters — ostensibly to prevent desertification. Today, this invasive and impossible-to-uproot tree is omnipresent in Banni, the largest grassland of India, displacing other native trees and grasses, extracting the scarce underground water, besides harming animals who consume its leaves. This is what we call development.

Are there alternatives? Are there ways to support local farming practices and pastoral communities like Maldharis? Kachchh is also home to many experiments in alternatives. As many as 13 organisations hosted this decennial Vikalp Sangam. Sahjeevan is involved in organising the Maldhari community in demanding community forest rights that they are entitled to under the Forest Rights Act. They have also initiated a project to replant native (meetha) babul to replace the invader tree. Khamir, whose campus hosted the confluence this time, is involved in the promotion of traditional handicrafts and the preservation of culture, community and local environments. They have revived cultivation of and weaving in Kala cotton, a local variety destroyed by industrialisation. Other organisations are involved in increasing the participation of women in decision making and making self-governance a reality.

The deliberations in this decennial meeting were obviously not limited to Kachchh. A team from Gadchiroli in Maharashtra and another from Karnataka shared the success stories of how Adivasi communities acquired community forest rights and have managed their common resources for collective good. Activists from all over the country discussed alternative experiments, success stories and challenges in ecological agriculture, water, environment, energy, health, education and democracy.

Over the last 10 years, Vikalp Sangam has documented nearly 2,000 such stories from all over the country on its website https://vikalpsangam.org and showcased some of these in a documentary “Churning the Earth”. These stories include a Goa-based couple (who else but Sikhs from Jalandhar) that grows their veggies and fish without using soil and any chemicals, a successful off-grid, small-scale, rooftop, solar experimentation around Kolkata, revival of traditional architecture in Spiti and Ladakh, recharging of “dead” rivers in Alwar district of Rajasthan, an alternative hospital run for and by Adivasis in Tamil Nadu, models to integrate hawkers and street vendors in urban planning, and hunnarshala to promote craft learning in mainstream education. A similar initiative, ASHA (Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture) has held five Kisan Swaraj Sammelans to bring together successful models in alternative agriculture. Just last week, a People’s Festival of Innovation was held in Delhi that showcased a wide range of affordable, grassroots innovations. We are not short of alternatives.

You might ask: Are all these real alternatives to modern development? Can they take on the challenge of scale and survive in the face of giant corporations in a globalised market economy? Does the practice of majority-based democracy leave any room for concerns of future generations and nature? Valid questions. But you must also ask another set of valid questions: Can anyone seriously think of offering to every Indian the lifestyle available to everyone in the Global North? Is this model worth replicating? Can we afford to go on with the destruction of nature, lives and livelihoods as an inevitable cost of “development”?

Once we recognise the unbearable weight of these questions, a quest for alternatives does not remain an obsession of a mad minority. Once we realise that alternatives are not about going back to our past, but about imagining and shaping our future, this becomes a collective search. How do we make these radical alternatives feasible? Can we think of a “scale out” rather than “scale up” model? What is the roadmap of transition from where we are to where we wish to go? Someone has to begin thinking about these questions. Someone has to risk being called “mad” and think of alternatives before all of us are left with nothing to think about. Kachchh invites you to ask these big questions.

Postscript: As I was writing this article, I heard about the passing away of Dr Rakesh Sinha, an engineer and a thinker who argued that unemployment was inherent in the modern, large-scale, industrial model of development; who believed in an alternative paradigm of economy and technology.

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*National Convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan | Member, Swaraj India | Swaraj Abhiyan| Jai Kisan Andolan