On a Flight Away from Reason

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.