As the aircraft taxied to its
take-off point, I pulled out my reading material. The Business Standard on June 12th carried on
its front page the heading “India's pvt wealth to rise 150% by 2018: Study”. Apparently, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
says in a recent study that India’s millionaire households increased from
164,000 in 2012 to 175,000 in 2013, and that by 2018, private wealth will be
around five trillion dollars in our country, ranking us 7th in this pecking
order.
India also made its entry into
the club of top fifteen ultra-high-networth households (defined as folks who
have more than a hundred million dollars in private financial wealth) – there were
284 such households, who, in a different way, have difficulty in deciding where
their next meal would be coming from, such are they spoilt for choice with a
thousand fine-dining options.
As I folded the paper, there were mixed feelings:
business newspapers tend to celebrate such news, for their editors and readers
believe fervently in the ‘trickle-down’ theory which says, make the rich
richer, and money will trickle down to the poor making them richer as
well.
As we took off, an article in
Down To Earth, well-researched and tidily written, caught my attention. The article, titled “Crushed and Torn” was a
personal journey along the closed tea gardens of West Bengal that were ‘enclaves
of death and destitution’.
The Jalpaiguri region, with 195
tea gardens, accounts for over a quarter of the crush, tear and curl (CTC) tea
produced in India. Workers in these plantations are mostly tribals whose
forefathers were brought to the region by British planters as indentured labourers
– there are an estimated 1.1 million of them.
Over the last twelve years, a number of estates in Jalpaiguri have shut
down due to bad management, some re-starting only to shut again. The owners of these estates – rich men from
Kolkata and elsewhere - did not pay the workers’ dues, have enslaved them
holding out the hope of a better tomorrow and making false promises while
picking off Government aid, and desisted from providing the most basic
conditions of living necessary for human existence.
I read of the death of a thousand
people from hunger and malnutrition. There
was no drought, famine, flood or natural calamity here in the hills, instead, extreme
cruelty and inhuman, insulting, shocking indifference that allowed affluent
humans beings to walk away from a wretched, dying community of starving men,
women and children who were headed for certain annihilation. The story had gut-wrenching accounts of men
and women surviving on half-a-meal a day of a chappati and tea leaf (yes, you
read that right), with a pinch of salt.
I saw a picture of a man’s with a bony, emaciated chest, taken days
before his death, that made me look away involuntarily. And as my flight reached cruising altitude, I
read of the large scale trafficking of women and children from the gardens, for
such was the depredation and pathetic indigence in the district.
…..and I read of a new breed of
estate owners, businessmen who know little about tea but were there to speculate
in the large real estate that the gardens possess; they have raised money from
the banks stripped the estates and their factories of assets and then run away,
perhaps to add another name to the list of India’s millionaires that the Boston
Consulting Group spoke of.
This is not economics or a
business venture gone astray. It is
murder, to be treated on par with the holocaust. And
these businessmen are murderers, with blood on their hands. India does not need – has never needed – such millionaires,
who perhaps seek to assuage their conscience with a recourse to their version
of false religion, large donations to ‘charitable’ institutions or bill boards
proclaiming public messages of altruism (as Vedanta does).
One of the first things we learn
as children, sub-consciously of course, is that life on this planet is not
fair. As we grow to adulthood, we often
seek to question, before accepting such unfairness as a part of human
existence. But the story at Jalpaiguri
is not just another story to accept as an unfortunate reality and move on.
While re-reading the article, I
thought of the cup of Darjeeling tea at the airport that had cost me Rs.
130. And I read about Jasoda Tanti, a
former tea leaf plucker in Jalpaiguri (which is, incidentally, contiguous with
the Darjeeling hills), who now sieved stones on the riverbed for a living, working
twelve hours a day to earn thirty rupees – she would have to work five days to
buy this cup of tea, made from leaves that she may have herself plucked if she
was employed. This is not a shining
example of ‘value-addition’; this is an unjust, unacceptable, indefensible,
exploitative model of illusionary economic growth that excludes the poorest and
the neediest from the essentials of human dignity. No argument – no powerpoint presentation,
data-powered, Armani-worn, academic argument – can justify this callousness,
just as no argument can counter the Mahatma’s only advice to us: Recall the
face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask
yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he
gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own destiny?
As with most problems, solutions
exist at Jalpaiguri. The Government can take over the gardens that have no owners
anymore – seven at last count, on which twenty five thousand people were
dependant - and employ all the workers who now face certain decimation, paying
them from the MNREGA program. Under the
guidance of its sparingly-employed scientists and in partnership with
committed, compassionate NGOs, the Government must then undertake a
reforestation program to turn the tea gardens back to the forests they once
were, a process that will take thirty years of nurturing. The unintended consequences of this will admirable
– land restoration, better human health, less chemicals in the soil and its
improved health and an important message to the businessmen who seek to profit
from their chicanery.
When I landed in Bangalore, there
was an Air India aircraft at a bay next to ours, the engines of which were
opened up for repair. One could not but
marvel at aircraft technology – a phantasmagorian collection of parts,
assembled with precision – and yet contrast this with the human failure to
provide the most basic of needs to a million people in the gardens of
Jalpaiguri; we do not need technology as much as we need compassion, humanism
and a deep-rooted belief in equality. And,
as a nation, we need a re-think of how we spend our money - a fraction of a
fraction of a fraction of the twenty thousand crores that is being pumped into
a black hole to keep the terminally ill Air India alive would save a million
people.
And, as for the trickle-down
theory, John Kenneth Galbraith, my idol in economics whom I rank only behind
Keynes, had this to say: Trickle-down theory – the less than elegant metaphor
that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for
the sparrows.
After note: I have written to the
Rural Development Minister at the Centre in some detail about a possible
solution on the lines outlined above. If
you feel as strongly as I do, write to him with your ideas as well. It’s the least we can do.
