When we move from business for profit to business for people

There were no aam janatas, no darbars, no confabulations with political heavyweights. People sized up the situation and tackled the problem in spite of the lack of official ‘‘help’’. When it came to the crunch, it was the spirit of the local community that triumphed. And I have no doubt that if they had been involved in creating Disaster Management Plans, life in Mumbai would not have broken down at all.

I am not encouraging Governments or civic bodies to abdicate their responsibilities. But I am advocating that the principal role of these bodies is to create a template and provide facilitating conditions and then let those who are most closely affected implement the solution most suited to their needs. It’s a question of structure, scale and involvement.

And I find that without thinking too much about it, we are doing it more and more. Mohalla committees restore peace in riot-affected areas; ALMs take over the responsibility for sprucing up their neighbourhoods; Village Panchayats run by women who see the management of the village as an extension of the management of their households run very well.

Localized methods of rainwater harvesting, built and managed by the people most affected, are transforming many areas of Rajasthan, so much so that there is no water shortage in Gopalpura, one of the most drought ridden villages in Rajasthan, while there is not enough water in Cherrapunji, which is the wettest place on earth! Why? Because the villagers themselves have figured out ways to treat water with the respect it deserves.

The common success factor in all these examples is that burning issues are effectively tackled because the implementation is on an intimate, involved and human scale. So if you want to empower India, empower its people to deal with the issues that most impact them. Gandhiji realized this when he summed up his economic ideas by saying ‘‘We cannot serve humanity by neglecting our neighbours’’.

It is fashionable to deride Gandhi as retrograde and anti-industrial. But increasingly Gandhi is appearing to be simply ahead of his time. He was arguing for economic activity that made the most rational sense for the people directly affected by it. With issues of sustainability threatening to overwhelm the world today, it is perhaps time to explore Gandhian thought once again, as his admirer Schumacher did when he wrote his seminal work ‘‘Small is Beautiful’’.

Schumacher gives an interesting example of the way a traditional economist would look at freight and infrastructure, versus an economist who looks at it from the perspective of Gandhi’s idea.

A traditional economist would advise that longer the haul, the lower the freight rates should be because this encourages scale specialization and ‘‘optimum use of resources’’. However an economist promoting sustainability would encourage local short distance transportation and discourage long hauls, because the latter would promote urban migration, concentration of employment and the growth of a rootless and uneconomic way of life.

Any one who has lived in Mumbai long enough to see how it is under siege from the onslaught of rural migration, would have very little difficulty is seeing the sense in this. Real empowerment should result in making life better, not harder and more arid.

And as I have questioned before, should we not pay attention to managing existing infrastructure thus reducing the angst in people’s lives rather than focusing solely on mega projects which come with a set of implementation challenges? Perhaps we should start thinking on a smaller scale in many areas of our national life.

Decentralization is more complex than simply breaking up a larger unit into smaller units. It’s rather the idea of ‘‘smallness within bigness’’. As I have seen in the course of running a business, for a large organisation to work, it must behave like a related set of smaller organisations. Big ideas can be spelled out at the top, but it is small and dedicated groups and task forces that best implement them.

What works for a company also seems to work for a city, and what works for a city may well work for a nation. Think national, act local may well be the slogan for the future.

Empowerment has to have empowerment at the point of impact—which is the daily life of every Indian. It’s a simple concept with complex consequences—a shift in our concept of appropriate technologies, a shift of scale from sweeping to human, a shift from business for pure profit to business for people. There can be many differing views on scale, but ultimately what really works for human betterment is what counts. Small is not just beautiful; small can actually be big, if you want to bring about change that matters.