India strides the earth like a future economic colossus. One of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), its sustained economic growth through the economic crisis of the first decade of the present century has sucked in restless capital in search of high returns impossible in established industrial economies. Indian corporations have become global players, buying mines, manufacturing plants and land, selling everything from motorcars to film. What is the source of all this razzmatazz? What are its effects, on Indian society and on nature? These are among the questions Churning the Earth sets out to answer.
Aseem Shrivastava is an environmental economist, and Ashish Kothari is an environmentalist, founder of the environmental NGO Kalpavikrish. Together they have written a wordy but worthy book, and tell a sobering tale. Their starting point is the neoliberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, when ‘structural adjustment’ became the price of massive loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to deal with a balance of payments crisis. The result was a deregulated economy in which corporate commence has overreached bureaucratic and democratic governance to refashion lives and landscapes over vast tracts of India. The economy that developed was one that involved massive inequality, a delirious stock market and a brittle vulnerability. Churning the Earth does not pussyfoot about: liberalization has created a wealthy elite and satisfied the demands of international capital, but left the vast majority of Indians exposed to the same old problems of hunger, entrenched poverty and unemployment, caste and gender inequalities, limited access for the poor to land and livelihoods, and political tension. Far from resembling a tiger, India's economy has grown like ‘a drunken stunted dog’ (as Shrivastava & Kothari entitle their second chapter).
Churning the Earth is long, and a curious mix of outraged journalistic and didactic styles. It is full of facts and figures, and footnoted references. It demands a familiarity with the geography and governance of India, and the peculiarities of weights and measures (lakh, crore and quintal). But the story is clear enough. The deregulated economy drew a vast number of people (some 250 million) into the global consumer economy, important participants in globally networked patterns of production, advertisement and consumption. But it left the vast majority of Indians behind.
These people, the rural and urban poor, form the moral heart of the book. The book has two parts, of unequal length. The first eight chapters review the experience of economic liberalization, set out in detail the failure of economic growth to trickle down to the poor, and the way policies have undermined India's ecological security. The country is described as ‘a house on fire’ (chapter 4), with pollution and resource depletion everywhere, unplanned and more or less unchecked. Successive chapters analyse the failure of governance to provide a secure frame for decision-making about development (chapter 5), the abandonment of agriculture (and of the vast number of smallholder farmers whose land is offered up for business investment through a series of schemes and scams such as Special Economic Zones). Shrivastava & Kothari argue that these have driven processes of population displacement and socio-economic exclusion. They draw a direct link between the rapacity of industry, variously inept, weak and corrupt governance, and the rise of radicalism, such as the Maoist Naxalite movement in north-east India.
The second part of Churning the Earth attempts to match this fierce critique with an alternative. Inevitably perhaps, this section is shorter. It is also more speculative, with three chapters that seek to explain how to achieve ‘an imaginative cooperation perhaps unprecedented in history’ (p. 246). A short prologue (opened by a long quote from the incomparable Wendell Berry) ushers in a call for ‘radical ecological democracy’. In the neoliberal economy, decisions about resource use are taken in corporate boardrooms far away from the places where they have impact. The authors' solution is a radical localism, and they discuss examples of attempts to give local communities a voice in decision-making about their future. They offer this struggle for ‘socio-economic and ecological justice’ as a sign of hope in a time of restless despair. It is never easy to set out alternative futures, but Shrivastava & Kothari do a good job, concluding “between the seemingly ‘impossible’ path and the manifestly insane one, we prefer the former” (p. 308).
The critique of India's political economy in Churning the Earth has real bite. Moreover it is not something that can be dismissed as a quarrel ‘in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’ (as Neville Chamberlain had it). The world is indeed joined in the way Shrivastava & Kothari describe, and lives in India, USA, Europe or Africa, are inextricably linked by global markets, and corporate and political structures. It is important to ask, as Shrivastava & Kothari do, what kind of world do we want, and what kind of democracy might get us there?
