NOTES ON DEVELOPMENT

Yaksh Handa

How, in the present scheme of things, some groups in the population demographic incur an unfairly higher cost for development than the rest?
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This article reaches its essential bifurcation somewhere towards the end. The former half sets a backdrop on the clarity of the theme. The latter half tries and links the title ‘Only a Few Logs That Burn’ to a sense of justification within this setting.
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In the status quo, development per se is characterised only by the right-winged notions of capitalist market expansion. The government, in its pursuit of making India a $5 trillion economy, has gone too deep into the politics of money power, and the muscle it brings with itself.
Let’s talk, for instance, of the inclusion of the Goods and Services Tax in the Indian Fiscal Framework of Taxation. On its face value, it seemed to be a tax for the entire country as a level playing field. It only presented a facade of unifying the tax for the entire country, as Canada and many other European countries have done. But the after it was implemented in the Indian economy, the aftermath, more obviously than not, was starkly different. With the imposition of the GST, the taxation system got further differentiated and complicated.
A very disappointing outcome of the implementation of the GST was the unfair parity that it created between the ‘service class’ and the ‘business-dependent middle class and agricultural class’. The service class per se is that demographic in the population that derives a stable source of income from the supply of services, ideas and skills. However, the ‘business-dependent middle class ‘is that demographic of the population that derives an unstable source of income from self-employment. This is that community that has been the worst-hit with the implementation of the GST. The ‘agricultural class’ is partially kept out of the ambit of taxation under the GST scheme. It has received the waves of shock in the form of taxation on allied agro-based industrial products, which were till now classified as agricultural products but are now characterised as products of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
A simple argument that can be raised here is that the economic well being of the masses is being ensured blatantly at the cost of a few demographics in the society who are being made disadvantaged and helpless in their entirety.
Another arena that becomes essentially prudent in our discourse about ‘social costs of development’ is of the disparity embedded in the microfinance network in India. The schemes of ‘gender targeting’ and ‘caste targeting’ raised within the ambit of increasing access to organised credit, as a part of the government’s affirmative action, have rather malfunctioned and widened the access gap. The intended beneficiaries of the schemes are now those groups that easily form a part of the most disadvantaged groups in the society.
Let’s consider the case of the Garo and Jayantia tribal groups of northeast India. The two groups mark a stark contrast to the mainstream lie of people inhabiting the metropolitans, and a significant marker of this difference is the degree of access to organised forms of credit, in essence, microfinance. These groups essentially lack the internal organisation that is forms an essential prerequisite to the establishment of a formal credit system. Thus, any schemes on gender targeting or caste targeting introduced in this setting become futile after a point in time. The entire purpose is somewhere blurred after clashes start to appear between the indigenous and customary rights, and constitutional and financial activism. It clearly tells us as to how a few groups that live on the margin of the society get pushed down further in their attempts to mobilise upwards within this social framework. In essence, this scenario describes how only a few secluded individuals, irrespective of the financial merit get no access to this organised system, and thus end up paying a ‘higher cost’ for their attempts to fit into it, quite literally.
Thus, these two analyses serve the purpose of clarifying the essence of the theme to a satisfactory extent. In this setting, it becomes easy to understand the metaphor that ‘few logs’ holds in the title. It serves the symbolism at two levels; first, literally, in the sense that every fire needs logs to burn, and in our case, the fire of development too needs logs to burn, just that only a few logs get consumed in the fire selectively, while the others don’t; and second, figuratively, in the sense that each demographic division in the society represents a log that is offered to keep the fire of development ignited, and how similarly, only of few of these many groups have to face the face of sacrifice while the others steam up with ‘development’ supposedly.
Well, then, it becomes more than clear to convincingly assert in the affirmative that a few groups in the present scheme of things do actually pay an unfairly higher price for development than the rest.