Gujarat Model and Alternatives from within
Gujarat Understood through a prism of Development and Institutions
Munish Alagh
A Country
which loses sight of its ideological bearings is in much danger of sinking into
the abyss of decline and deterioration. National Policy Statements are often
not simply statements which express a country’s ruling parties political
ideology, but also the Orientation and Thinking of its People. Recent dominant
societal and economic trends in India are examples in recent political discourse
of such a trend. In India a very clear worrying trend towards socially
conservative policy and an economic policy encouraging crony capitalist
tendency in the name of the Gujarat Model is rearing its ugly head.
Countries
choose different strategies towards economic growth, as any Masters Student of
Economic Growth would tell you, Economic Growth can be analysed in terms of the
Neo Classical Model (Solow Swan) which explains that increasing capital
relative to labour leads to Growth as well as that technological progress can
increase the level of this growth, meanwhile an alternative approach based on
Human Development which following from Romers Endogenous Growth Theory which
allows for increasing returns to technology, further also introduces Human
Capital as a variable. Robert Barro and others took this concept of human
development further. Human Development is crucial for Economic Growth and a
Model of Growth which is based on Crony Capitalismideals basically does not
encourage any kind of innovation in ideas and human capital.
The Problem
with the Gujarat Model of development is that its flawed at the very start, the
Bharatiya Janta Party of Narendra Modi wants to move away from Nehruvian
ideals, so that’s fine, but any approach to development which encourages
spending of huge sums of unaccounted money on things ranging from a political
campaign, to land for favourite businesses and aims to take away land from
farmers and make the marginalized “clear out” for the sake of development
raises questions which make further more detailed questioning regarding Agricultural
Support and non farm employment raised here more relevant.
India is a large country with economic and
institutional policy traditions which are based on and lead to their relevance
and future dominance of the world stage, City States like Singapore and Dubai
can afford policies based on ignoring nuanced and innovative thought and in its
place introducing practical result oriented steps, our country cannot. It’s not
that Singapore and Dubai have not been innovative or approached development
positively, but my major criticism against the development in these countries
is that this development has at the very first instance failed to address very
important issues regarding the deep rooted development of their own people:
lack of democratic freedoms, discouragement of any kind of dissent, ignorance
of the rights of the poor, the working classes and the dispossessed and in the
case of Dubai lack of any kind of real intellectual capital and development of
its indigenous ethnic population, in this sense Dubai is a classical prototype
of Gujarat where too the indigenous population lacks in true indices of
development like Education.
In Gujarat ‘might is right’ is the approach followed, do not
question power of the elite established class otherwise you will be
dispossessed is the war cry and is much more going to be the slogan or the
message of the future, let us look at this Model(?) In terms of two interesting
approaches and alternatives from within Gujarat. As I have written in my thesis
published by Academic, Farmers need their hands strengthened: a large stock of
grains needs to be gathered by providing price support and this needs to be
bought up by the government and stored efficiently and well, besides this
microlending to impoverished farmers, security of land tenure et al needs to be
strengthened as opposed to dispossession of farmers as indulged by Modi. The
Kheda and Bardoli Satyagraha in Gujarat itself were examples in which Gandhiji struggled
for the rights of farmers as opposed to riding roughshod over their rights and
privileges which were being threatened by the British. Another danger is the
crony capitalism of the likes of Adanis and Ambanis in the Modi Model. As
opposed to this is the model underlined by me in my project of “Retail
Franchising in a Minority Community in villages of North and Central
Gujarat” a research project I have
undertaken with ICSSR support. The project underlines the case of Nadim Jafri a
young Muslim entrepreneur who has undertaken project which aims to build up
microentrepreneurial franchisees from young village farmers of the Chilea
community of Shia Muslims in the villages (Nadims brother is the sect head of
the Chilea Muslims.) Thus these young farmers develop in the villages itself
upscaling their facilities while remaining in the comfortable location and
building up a franchising enterprise with their own investment of between 15 to
35 lakhs. This is indeed an alternative paradigm which needs to be studied.
Finally, I will say that all over the world: in Canada, in
France, in the United States, the idea of freedom and plurality is being
challenged with simply one approach and that is: “My way or the Highway”. The
biggest example of such arm twisting is in Gujarat, this needs to be challenged
and we must build up strong alternatives both by private initiative and by
groups of commited and motivated young men and women who are motivated for the
cause of a more humane, inclusive approach.
