Caste, Capital, and Climate: The Ensuing Battle on Climate Justice for Indian Farmers
Caste, Capital, and Climate: The Ensuing Battle on Climate Justice for Indian Farmers by NIDHI Upadhyaya
India’s fight against the nearly 200 years of colonial stronghold of the British Raj is marked by millions of citizens fighting to uproot the massive infrastructure of the Raj. The run up to its freedom was a series of protests and agitations that culminated in the success of the “Quit India Movement”, marking the process a pinnacle in civil disobedience across the world. As I reflect on developmental progress and the decolonization process India underwent immediately after, I am of the opinion that India’s tryst with decolonization continues as an effect of economic decisions her political leaders took post-independence. A significant demographic of the country, the Indian farmers, continue to face the wrath of neo-colonialism brought about by the liberalization of the country’s economy, and only local, sustained good governance initiatives have the power to address their harsh realities to fight the perpetuation of colonization via liberalization and privatization in the future.
For the political leaders of a post independent India, the most immediate priority was to create a sovereign, secular state that represented the masses, and to achieve self-reliance via economic independence. Economic prosperity was a herculean task, as poverty in the pre and post-independence era in India was endemic, mainly due to distortions in agriculture due to years of British rule and exploitation of resources. What followed as a solution on the economic and political front in the coming years was a mixture of protectionism and restriction of foreign financial aid in the name of promoting India’s economic and political economy. As a result, however, India’s economy grew by a mere 3% a year in the 1950s’, and poverty prevailed at the same level till the 1980s.
India’s stringency with investment restrictions, trade protections, and licenses slowly eased in the 1980s, but it was only a decade later when the country’s leaders truly committed to liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG) efforts to open up India’s economy. Starting in 1991, the GNP of the country boomed at an annual rate of 6.5%, poverty fell from ~45% in the 1980s and before to ~29% in the 1990s. However, the growth was attributable mainly to the manufacturing and service sector, while the agriculture sector had thus far witnessed progress only through the agricultural capitalists, i.e., the landowners. Predominantly rural states in India did not witness agricultural growth, leading to a 7% decline in the share of agricultural output in national wealth of the country in 1993.
Starting in the 1990s, the country witnessed a shocking amount of farmer suicides among the farmer community. In particular, the state of Maharashtra saw an average of 7-10 suicides a day in the region. Droughts had a big role to play in the volatility of agricultural outputs, but farmer suicides, as P Sainath mentions, were largely driven by spiralling debt, massive price shocks and price volatility, over-commercialization, and rising input costs. State driven relief package as a form of aid amounted to very little for each families, as close to 90 lakh farmers were impacted. The devastating state of affairs also took a heavy toll on farmer’s mental health and wellbeing, which local NGOs in the region aimed to plug with the help of a public-private partnership model with the government and donors. Sadly, as of 2022, these fizzled out as civil society pulled out owing to fizzling interest from the government.
In my previous job at a non-profit organization in Mumbai, Maharashtra, I worked as a philanthropy consultant to High Net-worth Individuals, Ultra High Net-worth Individuals, and Corporate Donors. In our philanthropy consulting sessions, we would come across statistics that spoke to the rise of private wealth in India, to the extent that India had the third highest number of self-made billionaires in the world, behind USA and China. Of the spread of wealth accumulation, Mumbai, the capital city of Maharashtra, accounted for the most number of billionaires in India. I was baffled by the stark irony of the realities of rural Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai. In all my conversations surrounding philanthropists’ interest areas for development, the top picks were Disaster Relief, Education, and Healthcare, with very few venturing into agriculture and climate change. Looking back at the economic trajectory of the country in the post-independence era, I strongly believe that liberalization of the economy gave an undue power advantage to industrialists and service sector giants in the country, while continuing to forget the agrarian economy.
Under the current political regime in India, farmer woes continue across the country and is leading to wide-scale protests. The protests are against government interventions to regulate the market that are dangerously close to the protectionist regime India saw in its efforts to decolonize the country. Only this time, I would argue that the protest is against both the government and the private sector for their lack of interest in investing in overall farming welfare. Given the highly political nature of the agricultural sector in India, private philanthropy has done little to enter the foray and provide patient, unrestricted capital to support farmer wellbeing and social security.
Rubayat Khan’s article on Decolonizing Development draws upon an important observation of the using the term “beneficiary” to denote the lack of agency of vulnerable communities in need of structural reforms to improve their quality of life and their exit from the cycle of poverty. While I agree with Khan in stating that donors have an implicit tendency to know what’s best and do what’s best, I disagree with the solution to the problem lying in incorporating community voices throughout all stages of project design. Agriculture in India is fraught with invisible realities of caste, class, and gender discrimination. My grandfather owned agricultural land in rural Karnataka, India, and belonged to an upper class, upper caste family of priests and scholars. He employed local farmers to cultivate crops and look after the land, however, there was very much a power imbalance owing to caste differences. There was also discrimination on the lines of gender, wherein women farmers were sometimes given miscellaneous activities such as cleaning up cow sheds and bundling fodder, which were non-technical tasks and posed health risks from exposure to cow dung and hay dust. Due to the oppression of farmers at a local level on issues of identity politics, the only “beneficiary” voice that might end up coming through is that of landowners (mostly male). These invisible realities often do not count towards program design and are difficult to hold donors accountable to, when projects are not delivering as per intended theories of change. Especially also when more and more stories of crop failures and farmer suicides, as covered by P Sainath and the volunteers at PARI are unearthed, it points towards the need for a more long drawn process of systemic reform. I would argue that the issue with the agricultural sector is endemic and has been since the British rule.
Between 1995 and 2018, nearly 4 million farmers committed suicide, a majority of whom were from ‘backward castes’. This is a silent revolution that’s been ongoing for a while, and has produced nation-wide protests that have resulted in little to no movements on the policy front. For humanitarian assistance and aid to truly deliver, we must push for a more grassroots presence of civil society actors who have the internal capacity to conduct advocacy campaigns, forge public-private partnerships, as well as work with local governments to consistently raise local issues at national platforms. To that end, the localization of development aid needs to be encouraged via heightened participation from philanthropists and foundations in nearby cities and urban spaces towards more inward looking issues, rather than applying business principles of addressing scalability, just in time granting, or creating complicated structures for disbursing aid.
