[Assam] Essay by Sanjib Baruah

[umesh sharma]

It has to many big words for my liking. With my limited English (I do not understand the jargon of development) the only comment would be - that roads can be lifelines of an economy - as well as rail/water transport.

Umesh Sharma



Washington D.C. 



1-202-215-4328 [Cell]



Ed.M. - International Education Policy

Harvard Graduate School of Education,

Harvard University,

Class of 2005



http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)



http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)









www.gse.harvard.edu/iep  (where the above 2 are used )

http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/







http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/

--- On Fri, 27/2/09, Chan Mahanta <cmahanta at charter.net> wrote:
From: Chan Mahanta <cmahanta at charter.net>
Subject: [Assam] Essay by Sanjib Baruah
To: assam at assamnet.org
Date: Friday, 27 February, 2009, 3:01 PM

*** What do netters think?

cm


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Eastern Quarterly
(Publication of the Manipur Research Forum, Delhi)
Vol. 5, Issue I, April - June 2008, pp. 61-65

'A Road, Smooth and Sleek like a Snake':  Development and the Rhetoric
of Vision

Sanjib Baruah

"The World Bank will be replacing the old rundown road with a new road
that will be smooth and sleek like a snake."

                                                -Zoramthanga, Chief Minister of
Mizoram

Zoramthanga's choice of metaphor, though wonderfully resonant with the
Northeast Indian landscape, is perhaps unusual.  But to readers of 'vision
statements' about the region's future, the spirit may be familiar. 
Development in this genre of writing, like Zoramthanga's image of a road of
the future, is a fantasized object, not a realistic vision of the future that
people can relate to.

The editors of Eastern Quarterly [EQ] deserve our gratitude for organizing a
discussion on a new document, Peace, Progress and Prosperity in the North
Eastern Region: Vision 2020, put together by the National Institute of Public
Finance and Policy [NIPFP] and brought out under the auspices of the Ministry of
Development of North Eastern Region.

B. George Verghese, one of the authors of Vision 2020, opens the EQ discussion.
 "The stage appears now to be reasonably well set," he writes,
"for a major thrust forward. Things are changing and there is ground for
cautious optimism. Development and opening up to its neighbours could provide
impetus for the next stage."  In contrast to the radical views of the other
contributors, Verghese's approach might seem conventional-though his ideas
on institutional reforms are anything but that.  I will refer to those proposals
later in the essay.  He estimates that the Northeast will have to grow by 12 to
13 percent every year in per capita income and basic social indices, if it were
to catch up with the rest of India by 2020--assuming a 9 per cent growth rate
for India. "Closing the gap," he believes, "will not be easy but
is doable." However, the centre will have to make major investments.

Contrast this way of thinking about development to that of Prasenjit Biswas who
rejects the very idea of a region lacking development. The idea of
"lack," he says, "is not simply a negative idea, it is rather a
complex outcome of developmental practices." On a similar note, Rohan
D'Souza rejects the foundational notion of economic backwardness. Once the
absence of markets is "declared to be indicative of backwardness," it
"leads almost automatically to the desire for markets for
development."

Politics of Representation

The major question that Biswas, D'Souza and others raise is this: Can
development theory and practice ignore the politics of representation?  I mean
'representation' both in the political sense, and in the sense of ways
of seeing, and portraying. The way we represent poverty and underdevelopment has
consequences. Some of our official categories and those of the social sciences -
Economics in particular - are good at capturing certain realities, but not
others.

Let us take the example of a poor community with a degree of reliance on a
public lake where people fish.   We can see the people as a community that
survives, using a mix of market and non-market goods. Or we can see them as part
of an aggregated mass of people "living below the poverty-line."  If
taking the latter view, a development agency decides to finance commercial
fishing--even on a modest scale--it could make one or two people rich, a few
more would find employment, but many more people might be worse off if they
catch fewer fish, because of the mechanized fishing methods now in use in the
same water.  In terms of basic nutrition, they would be worse-off. 
Theoretically, the dynamism that the new enterprise could bring to the local
economy might in future compensate for that. But the stakes are simply too high
to take leave it at that.

Development, in my view, is not just one thing: self-evident and predictable.
It is not good or bad in some a priori sense.  If it is about removing major
sources of un-freedom, "poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic
opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation,"  we must ask very
concretely, whether it enables or restricts freedoms and capabilities.  These
questions must be asked about each and every intervention that claims
development as its goal. The answers will not be easy: inevitably, there will be
winner and losers.  But at least one thing is obvious. The state should not
regard itself, to use Monirul Hussain's words, as the "development
giver," and treat the people as "development takers."  And since
increasingly, the central government is the major source of funds for the
development of the region,  and the bureaucrats in Delhi are key players,
questions of voice and representation are more important than ever.

It is not enough to point at elections, and ignore substantive questions about
representation. "The restless and discontented," says Verghese,
"fall prey to adventurism and subversion." Others understand the
strength and persistence of insurgencies, at least partly, in terms of the
diffuse presence -- in the background -- of an inchoate constituency that feels
un-represented. Let us assume for the moment that Verghese is right. But does it
allow the authors of Vision 2020 to go from there, and make a set of assertions
implying that it is what, the people of the Northeast want?  As Rohan
D'Souza suggests insightfully, the authors of the NIPFP document appears to
have the remarkable ability not only to speak for the people of the Northeast,
but what the people want, happens to match exactly with what these
"visionaries" want to see in the region.

The Pagladia Dam and the Politics of Development Finance

Monirum Hussain's account of the protests against the on-again-off-again
Pagladiya Dam project in Assam brings out the politics of development finance.
The dam is likely to displace more than one hundred thousand people from
agricultural lands and homes. Originally conceived as far back as 1968, it has
been shelved a number of times because of grassroots opposition--but only to be
brought back later when the political climate changes. At each phase of
confrontation between the state and the protesters, an extraordinary gap becomes
evident between official and local knowledge.  The area where initially, the
government intended to settle the displaced people was officially
"vacant," but the people about to lose their land found out that the
land was already occupied, albeit "illegally." Among the people that
would be displaced by the project are some that lack legal documents to prove
property ownership. The protesters knew only too well the reality of
bureaucratic practice; that it would be hard to resettle and compensate those
without proper land documents.

The interesting question that arises is this: why has the state and its agency,
the Brahmaputra Board, been so persistent?  The answer that emerges from
Hussain's study is simple, but quite revealing and persuasive.  The
government agencies --and the contractors lobby-seem to salivate at the
prospects of laying their hands on the money allocated to the project by the
central government. For politicians, the patronage possibilities that large sums
of money open up far outweigh any other consideration. Hence, the persistence in
efforts to revive the project.

International Finance Comes to Northeast India

If one goes by this insight, things are only likely to get worse, suggests
Ramananda Wangkheirakpam.  The coming of international financial institutions
such as the Asian Development Bank [ADB] and the World Bank, he fears, could
only mean growing "disempowerment and helplessness of the people in the
region." The ADB, he points out, has completed technical assistances
studies on sectors including tourism, roads, urban development, waste
management, waterways and governance. Their entry could mean that, decisions
that would impact millions of lives would be made in places, much further than
New Delhi. Drawing on his experience as an activist, he writes, "getting
access to key policy and project documents now requires writing to Manila and/or
Washington DC and to complain against a project one might need to even spend
meagre resources to go to these Headquarters to meet project officials."

A Reform/Revolution Debate?

If D'Souza radically challenges the very idea of development, Biswas while
sharing some of the vocabulary of post-development thinking, has instincts that
are Marxist in a more familiar sense. He is concerned that Vision 2020 seeks to
reproduce "capitalist relations of reproduction," and the language of
comparative advantage simply, a way of making the natural resources of the
region available to global markets.  His alternative does not threaten the old
left-liberal consensus on development.  The focus, be believes, must be "on
improving economic condition for the poorest, through the creation of economic
growth opportunities." That would require "structural change": a
shift of employment opportunities from agriculture to industry and service.

Thingnam Kishan Singh is radical in his reading of colonial economic history.
During that period, he says, economies of Northeast India went through "a
transition from its various pre-capitalist social formations to a
quasi-capitalist organization of productive forces." When it comes to
options today, however, he too settles for conventional left-liberal answers. 
He accepts that a low gross domestic product is not "congenial for
improving the living conditions of the people" and "people in areas
with low per capita do not live well."  He advocates strategies that would
develop a production base that uses the region's resources to benefit its
people.

As I have indicated, Verghese's proposals for institutional reforms are
innovative. Northeasterners should not shy away from debating them. He proposes
ending Inner Line and Restricted Area permits. He recommends Trusteeship Zones
for disputed areas between Assam and Arunachal, as sites for "railheads,
airstrips, communication hubs, warehouses, cold storages, entrepots, [and]
training centres." He proposes expedited cadastral surveys of land in hill
areas, and non-territorial electoral constituencies for workers brought in from
outside the state to work.

Development and the Democracy Deficit

The discussion in EQ brings out sharply one major weakness in our way of trying
to develop Northeast India: the region's democracy deficit-a consequence of
decades of insurgency and counter-insurgency.  Sources of funds being sources of
power, and development financing becoming a way of imposing other people's
priorities, are not unique to Northeast India.  But observers far less radical,
than the contributors to this issue of EQ, have been struck by how democracy
deficit presents unusual difficulties for development projects in Northeast
India.  A World Bank Strategy Report, for instance, finds "the paternalism
of central-level bureaucrats, coercive top-down planning, and little support or
feedback from locals" to be the principal obstacle to the utilization of
the region's vast water resources for sustainable development. These
observers are struck by the extraordinary phenomena of potential beneficiaries
of embankment projects, opposing them. There is deep distrust of the central
government's development-oriented institutions like the Brahmaputra Board.
As the World Bank report puts it, local stakeholders in the Northeast simply do
not believe that most developmental initiatives are designed to benefit them.

Indian elites do not like to acknowledge that. Thus our bureaucrats and
politicians quote World Bank reports on many other matters-mostly when they
appear to authorize more money--but not when it comes to this crucial political
insight. It is unlikely therefore that the radical voices represented in this
issue of EQ, will get the attention they deserve.  Given this state of denial in
our national public intellectual life, vision statements about Northeast
India's future, like the epigraph at the beginning of this essay, are bound
to sound like the marketing pitch of salesmen selling snake oil.




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