Opinion Young Indians are risk takers. But they have no shelter from the storm

In 20th-century writings about Western modernity, the idea of risk — the human-made dangers to physical and mental health — had considerable currency. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944-2015) suggested that environmental disasters such as the one in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine were crucial for understanding the future of Western modernity. The kinds of risks that societies are willing to put up with may, according to this line of thinking, define how they think of human activities in the present and future. What kind of activities are least harmful and the need to evaluate industrialisation beyond the frameworks provided by scientific expertise were some of the issues raised by the “risk society” debate.

With the current global economic turmoil ushered by Donald Trump’s tariff war, riskiness has taken on a different, much more global, hue. The most dramatic change within non-Western contexts — and certainly in India — relates to the rise of new cultures of aspirations and the transformation in ideas of risk and nervousness in the face of it. The remarkably wide participation in the share market in India is an index of changing attitudes towards risk.

A very wide cross-section of people now play the stock market and take part in a variety of risk-taking activities that relate to making money from fluctuations in the global financial system. It is quite common to come across villagers who live on the borders of expanding cities — Gurugram, for example — who are enthusiastic buyers and sellers of foreign currencies, their bank accounts linked to purchases and sales via apps that are easy to access and operate. The US dollar may be bought at a “low” rate and then sold once its value increases. The profit is deposited directly into the participant’s bank account.

It is also just as common to find women, who might otherwise live under traditional circumstances, their lives dictated by strict routine, taking part in such activities that link them to multiple unknown actors and processes around the world. And, of course, young people are particularly enthusiastic participants in the new economies of danger. Risk has become a kind of emotional and sensory experience, in a way that was not true earlier.

However, unlike in many other societies, the Indian risk culture is a much more precarious space. It has become entrenched in a society where, over the past three to four decades, a vast number of traditional means of mitigating risk have become unhinged. On the one hand, since the mid-1990s, when new policies that were to change the nature and form of Nehruvian economic thinking began to take effect, there have been changes in aspirations that encourage greater risk-taking. However, during the same period, whatever minimal structures of support that functioned to help people in times of trouble have also been dismantled.

Consider illness. While always imperfect, a certain degree of family support — both from immediate and extended kinship networks — was invaluable in ensuring that affected persons managed to tide over difficult times. This happened both through monetary and other ways: A family in distress, because the key income earner could no longer work, might have been provided with financial help as well as “rations” for everyday sustenance. However, large-scale movement of people — fuelled by entirely legitimate aspirations for a better life — across and within regions has meant a more atomistic existence and the lack of networks that existed to lessen the impact of catastrophic events. People still fall ill but falling ill in a city a thousand miles from your family networks and having to turn to unaffordable private medical care is a recipe for disaster.

What we have, in effect, is a circumstance where there is greater appetite for risk that exists alongside a significant reduction in the capacity for dealing with the harm that risky activity frequently brings. Beyond the actual activities that people may take part in, and which may prove disastrous in how their lives are affected, there are also broader social and political consequences of risk in the present times. Theorists of Western modernity were to suggest that environmental disasters made the general populace more sceptical about “expert” opinion: Risk led to critical perspectives on established ways of thinking about the world. In the Indian circumstance, however, the rise in risk culture seems actually to reinforce the authority of god-like figures who might promise shelter from the storm. And, as other forms of support have evaporated — including the state’s withdrawal from legitimate welfare activities — we are living in times where promised shelters might only be part of a perfect storm.

The writer is distinguished research professor, SOAS University of London