EGS: Old Wine in New Bottles

The point about the product of such aam aadami works is that their designers have completely misunderstood Keynes in thinking that digging ditches and filling them lead to capital formation, growth and prosperity. The cash doled out 2006 onwards could (barring corruption), meet Amartya Sen’s noble objective of giving the impecunious the purchasing power to partake of the mountains of food built up in this country and overseas.

What the failure or glut of rainfall have meant for this country was written about in olde English in 1630. When the monsoon failed, ‘‘Shahjehan saw in this meteorological hiccup the portent of his wife’s death’’ — and when that happened he commissioned the Taj Mahal. When one the factors of the East India Company’s Surat factory, Peter Mundy, set off for Agra in November ‘‘each village presented a sight more harrowing than the last…mothers were selling their children…the hie wias were so full of dead bodies that that we could hardlie pass them without treading on or going over some.’’

While returning from Agra in 1633, he found that ‘‘women were seen to roast their children and men travelling on the waie were laid hold of to be eaten.’’ There is a school of journalism that relishes in the use of such history as an electric cattle prod to herd today’s politicians into the pound of righteousness. For example, British rule is denigrated for its callous disregard of the plight of the aam aadami during periods of famine. Recently there was an article about Lord Lytton’s lavish expenditure on banqueting to celebrate the proclamation of Victoria as Empress of India in the drought and famine year 1877.

The police was then used to keep the hungry from swamping Poona and Bombay. Others may dig out annals of the Mughal era to relate that Shahjehan floated on the Jamuna in the bejewelled royal barge, rowed by ivory oars inlaid with emeralds, for picnics on larks’ — tongue koftas, while Gujarat turned cannibal.

Such commentators miss an essential point. Does the pathos stimulated by alluding to the callousness of a previous regime, provide the wherewithal to ushr in prosperity by diverting resources to hare-brained schemes today? As a young, left-leaning writer in 1966 I, and many others, hoped we were witnessing the nascence of a land army that would rid India of poverty.

We hoped that we wouldn’t have to live ‘‘ship to mouth’’ on PL 480 grain donated by America. Although it was known that Mao’s megalomaniac ‘‘Great Leap’’ had failed (the shroud that covered the fact that it had ended in the death of about 70 million peasants was still to be taken off), the mobilisation of the peasantry on this scale led one to believe that India could do better. We felt that because of our exposure to Western science, we would invent the appropriate technology to take the aam aadami down the road of square meals in perpetuity where that rustic, Mao, had failed. The Planning Commission talked ‘‘choice of techniques’’ and ‘‘capital-labour’’ and ‘‘capital- output’’ ratios; the politicians spoke about service to daridra narayan.

As a student of economics, recently returned from the West, the difference in productivity between an Italian labourer using a pneumatic drill in the reconstruction of war-ravaged Europe and his Indian counterpart equipped with a hammer was only too obvious. Unfortunately our babus were mandarins, not engineers. Our trendy economic diction was wrapped in a medieval mind set when it came to technology. Consequently, our inability to turn malnutrition into life-saving capital has kept us on the brink of hunger for half a century. If anything saved us partially, it was the green revolution based on Norman Borlaug’s path breaking research and seed improvement. This is today negated by population explosion.

We may be outraged at the thought of Shahjehan’s riverine picnics or think Lytton perverted for feasting in the cool of Simla while the ryot rotted in Blazewada. But how would history record the prolongation of the emaciated life span of the exploding and anaemic population of a bimaru state?

The non-road to Kalinjar, built for famine relief, was intended as a highway to health and wealth: it turned out instead as the path to penury. Surely such painful waste will be judged as a kind of well-intentioned ineptitude of feckless parliamentarians who (unlike Lytton) were voting themselves more pay for less work, in air conditioned chambers, as the peasantry slipped into hunger and floods ravaged Guajarat?

At the end of our visit, a distressed Marilyn Silverstone asked the collector: ‘‘Why did you have us stay in the Circuit House to study the famine?’’ Vexed by her altruism, in a sardonic aside he said to me: ‘‘You’re a guest of the government. You came to write on the famine, not to participate in it.’’ So ‘‘The Parliament took a view on hunger’’ would be his summation of the efforts of the authors of the EGS unless its management ensures that wages paid are an exchange for useable capital assets.