Can Technology Save our Village Economy?

“In those times, secondary production used to happen in the villages itself. People were not dependent on cities or other villages for most of their needs. They used to wear self-made clothes, eat self-processed food and live in houses made up of locally available resources. Travelling to distant places was unusual and migrating for work was simply not a trend,” exclaimed Upamanyu Ji while narrating his village experiences in Chamba three to four decades back. “But now things have changed. The urban-centric industrial revolution has almost completely taken away secondary production from the villages. Now goods manufactured in Mumbai are cheaper here than the ones manufactured locally. Huge machines and skewed government policies have done immense damage to the local village economy.”

“But, isn’t the technology good for us? Does it not save energy and increase output with better quality? What about economies of scale? Don’t we need to produce in large numbers considering our population size in mind? And what about the jobs created by the industry?” I was coming up with plethora of questions. Upamnayu Ji’s words had so challenged my mind that I furiously started thinking of ways to defend modern economic systems. 

“To answer these questions, we must first understand the ways in which we have developed our technologies. In earlier times, there used to be technologies that supported small scale production done my masses. There was very little automization in it. All our kumhars, luhars and badais used to earn their livelihood within the villages only. Today, we have started coming up with more and more automized large scale production based technologies. Such technologies not only require very little human labor but also boast of economy of scale benefits. Modern industries use these technologies to eliminate ‘human factor’ and derive more and more profits by encouraging consumerism through advertisements. In addition, they receive immense support from governments in order to make their product cheap in comparison to local produce. Otherwise, you tell me, how is it possible that biscuits manufactured in Mumbai are cheaper in Chamba than the ones manufactured in Chamba itself?”

“Therefore, we must not blame technology. We should rather blame the direction in which we have developed our technology. Instead of developing technologies for centralized industries, we could have thought about improving the efficiency of our villages’ luhars, kumhars and badais. It is not the technology that causes blunders, but the ways in which we decide to use it. Today, all our R&D units, including the ones owned by our Government, focus on developing large and automized machines.

“In past few years, the need of owning money has increased in the villages. Earlier villagers were outside the money cycle as they used to co-operatively manage their collective produce among themselves without using the currency. Now the use of currency is inevitable as very few people in the villages produce goods for themselves. All of them have now become dependent of markets. It has resulted into a system in which there is ample scope of ‘cash outflow’ but very little scope of ‘cash inflow’.

“Due to this little scope of ‘cash inflow’, you see all these development programs launched by Governments and NGOs. The very first measure taken by our Governments was to provide secure jobs to villagers. Doing this ensured a consistent ‘cash inflow’ into the village economy. Though ‘Government jobs’ as a measure looks very lucrative from outside, it creates huge imbalance within the village eco-system. The most visible imbalance is access to ‘cash’ that makes ‘others’ who don’t have government jobs servants of the ‘ones’ who have. These days, you can easily see huge pakka houses of Government job Holders standing next to kachha houses of others. Other than Government Jobs, ‘Cash Crops’ and ‘Tourism’ are other measures that promise to provide relatively consistent ‘cash inflows’ to the village economy. 

“In a nutshell, times have changed so much that now ‘cash inflows’ to a village have become more important than ‘cash outflows’ as they have already been taken care of by all the psychologists who design advertisements for our industrialists. In absence of ‘Government Jobs’, ‘Cash Crops’ and ‘Tourism’, our villagers are left with very little choices of survival. In such circumstances, they either try to exploit whatever they have in the nature around them or simply migrate from the villages to reside in the urban slums. And then come our NGOs in picture. They try to bring in money into the villages by promoting livelihood programs that sometimes support secondary production. In some cases, this secondary production also utilizes locally available raw material and takes care of the local requirements.” 

I was beginning to understand the logic that Upanmanyu Ji was trying to make. The shift of secondary production was making sense. “But then, don’t you think that the efforts of NGOs are like a drop in the ocean? Can we find our answers through these efforts? ,” I bombarded Upamanyu Ji with another set of questions.

“Yes, you are right. The problem cannot be solved unless we change the direction in which we develop our technologies. We need to focus on intermediate technologies that encourage de-centralized production keeping quality in mind. We need to restore entrepreneurship in villages. But it is not going to be easy. It will require a strong political will and combined efforts of our technologists, educationalists and economists.”

“So, are you talking about bring long-forgotten Atta Chakki, Charkha, Silbatta and Ghada back?”

“Yes, but in a modernized format. We will have to develop technologies to make them effective. In some cases, we will have to come up with better solutions keeping decentralization in mind”, concluded Upamanyu Ji.