As we get into “large” projects, the issue of the global, local and national comes into focus. Take the Golden Quadrilateral, changing the face of India. These are not questions of a national project at the expense of the local in financial or real terms. Large investments mobilising global and national technologies and operations systems, have to be carefully integrated with local specificities.As is often the case, hardware and physical investments, though not easy in a poor country, are only the beginning of the problematique. The real challenge is in the “softer” details, the integration with the landscape, the cultures and the local economies. This is particularly difficult because typically these systems have been created for developed economies and governance systems and the software for a poor peasant economy has to be developed. It can be done, for modern technology is basically user-friendly and can be easily scaled at different levels, large and small. But it has to be done and needs a certain amount of creativity. The Asian Institute of Transport Development, for example, organised a study of project-local links of the Golden Quadrilateral from Agra to Dhanbad.A large project has a focus and a drive with it. Large resources, a carefully chosen technology, a system of construction and a way of operations and so-called contract management. Those who manage these with success are men of vision and drive and single-minded focus. That is the way the Konkan Railway or the Delhi Metro was built.The local areas have a different ethos. The soil, the water, the rainfall determine many characteristics and possibilities. Their cultures and governance structures limit, as it were, the realisation possibilities. The late Rajiv Gandhi had this remarkable concept of organising a focus and support system for support to such latent possibilities through a technique and system called agro-climatic planning, added on to his emphasis on panchayati raj and decentralisation. The Golden Quadrilateral, in this phase, covers 21 districts in UP, Bihar and Jharkhand. There are five agro-climatic sub-regions. In a similar case of a large project integrated with local possibilities, my friend Syed Raza Hashim divided the Narmada Command into 13 sub-regions.Given our suspicious mindsets, we always consider it a large versus small paradigm. Only the gifted work it out as large plus small. A lot of work is going into conceptualising the large and the small in the quadrilateral. It is quite obvious that the existing national highway led to improvement in welfare. We had seen in this column that a Jat farmer in Chittorgarh, another section of the quadrilateral, who was suffering penury a decade and a half ago growing a low yielding bajra, had shifted to ghee and vegetables after the four-laning, because the markets of Udaipur were in his reach. This could happen more systematically if the hiccups in the information base are fully sorted out.The focus in a road project is on transport and trips, just as in large irrigation planning we insist that the focus is on delivering water to the field. This is important since in such work, everyone wants his pet theme to be looked into. Transport, it is obvious, is the mirror face of location and so it was pointed out that location of activity, for work, for trade, or for services, would be important and behind this would be the agricultural details, agro-climatic possibilities leading to outcomes and also delivery systems.So you need to develop mindsets and data bases and conceptual systems to integrate local possibilities with large investments. It will happen through time anyway, but policy and planning hasten the process. Analysis of data systems and behaviour becomes important, because we have to develop our own ways. As the Mekong planners said it was in the best practice Indian water projects that Asiatic peasant agriculture was integrated into modern water conveyance techniques.This is important for in a command where there would be four thousand farmers in the west, there would be four lakh farmers here. So is it with the roads. This requires inventiveness. An interesting idea some of the experts have come out with is to track like families with like, in the “influence zone” of the road with a larger “control zone”. Economists and statisticians believe that if someone is like somebody else, s(he) is redundant in information. If, like me, you are completely dominated by your wife, there is no point in studying our behaviour, for a study of the lady is all that is required. The experts turned this theorem on its head to find out who are alike, to track the future. Very clever, but you need ideas and methods when you have large numbers. And well begun, they say, is half done.
