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Young World
What manner of men
VENU GOVINDU and DEEPAK MALGHAN
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J.C. Kumarappa was one of those rare individuals who practised what he preached and showed great probity in his personal and public life.
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For Kumarappa, violence was not just physical violence. Any activity that harmed human beings and nature was considered violent. Thus a farmer selling milk to a dairy while depriving her own children its nutritional benefits would be committing a violent economic act. A government that subsidises electricity mostly used in urban areas and by rich landowners at the expense of the poor would be another example. Similarly, a farmer trying to increase his yield by indiscriminately using chemical fertilizers and pesticides would be indulging in violent economic activity because he is poisoning the soil and the people who will consume his produce. Such a perspective is important since we often fail to recognise the violence inherent in current forms of social and economic organisation and the severe problems it causes. How many of us would look at a swank golf course or massive flyovers with speeding cars as violence? On the contrary they are viewed as symbols of progress in a modern economy. But Kumarappa challenges us to scratch the surface - to look at the underlying `moral content' of these structures. Are we comfortable with the fact that a golf course catering to a handful of people is built on prime public property, guzzles precious water and pollutes ground water with chemical fertilizer runoff? Is it appropriate to spend crores of rupees on flyovers used by private cars while neglecting the needs of public transportation used by many more citizens? Some of the violence is not even so subtle; consider the `Gulf Wars' caused by the world's dependence on petroleum as a source of energy. Kumarappa is well known for his advocacy of an "economy of permanence" which would have public welfare as its objective instead of only profit motive.
Consisting of small, local units and supplemented by a few industries this economy would make judicious use of human and natural resources without damaging the environment.
Moreover the ecological damage caused by industrial production is often severe. The biggest barrier to equitable distribution of wealth is the high concentration of our productive resources in the hands of a few which inevitably leads to severe exploitation of the poor and the weak. Although the modern economy is blind to this problem, no enlightened society can ignore it and should not separate the means of producing wealth from its distribution. Kumarappa had grasped this idea early on. We should view his insistence on a village based, decentralised economy in this light and not as an old-fashioned idea of no importance today. Today its relevance is obvious when we consider the shameful situation of our go-downs overflowing with food grains while millions of Indians are hungry in a year of drought.
Kumarappa was also one of those rare individuals who practised what he preached and showed great probity in his personal and public life.
In 1934, after the Bihar earthquake, Kumarappa was maintaining the accounts of the relief efforts. When Gandhi and his party arrived, Kumarappa refused to pay for their travel expenses. On hearing this Gandhi demurred since he had travelled to Patna for the sole purpose of helping with the relief work. Kumarappa explained that to maintain discipline in the operations, he had set a limit on the daily allowance of volunteers at three annas per day and would refuse to pay anyone who exceeded it! On hearing this Gandhi agreed with his decision. In contrast look at contemporary India and its rulers. If the integrity of our decision makers is any indicator of the moral content of the present economy, is it a wonder that we see mostly violent and exploitative economic systems around us? Many of the ideas and questions that Kumarappa discussed in his large body of writings more than 70 years ago are very much alive in our modern debates on sustainable development and environmental consciousness.
It is this farsightedness and contemporary relevance of Kumarappa to our crisis-ridden world that makes it important for us to reconsider the life and work of this profound thinker and practitioner of an "economy of permanence".
For the younger generation of today -to ensure their own future, the thinking of leaders like Kumarappa is relevant both to their personal lives and in national economic decision-making.
Concluded
(The first part of this article was carried in the YW January 4 issue.)
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