SK Sharma

In the euphoria of globalisation, we seem to have largely overlooked the importance of research and innovation for small enterprise. Notwithstanding the considerable improvement in the working conditions in factories and concern in business about environmental conservation, most workers in Indian factories tend to become dehumanised. While most big business provide a good working environment for executives, it may not be so for workers in poor countries such as India where the supply of cheap labour is abundant. Moreover, the capital required to create a job in big business is substantially more than in small business.

Gandhi favoured technology that empowered people, not one that made them its slave. Alvin Toffler in his book "The Third Wave" described information technology as truly Gandhian as it empowers the people. We need to strengthen research that nurtures such technologies and small business that gives dignity to local communities.

Gandhi was not opposed to technological innovation and industrialisation but wanted industry to function in trusteeship of society. His concept of trusteeship needs explaining and management systems need to be designed to make it effective. Basically, what he implied was that industrialists may invest to produce goods and services useful to society and generate productive employment with the labour as partner in the enterprise. They should generate wealth for expansion to meet the needs of society, and for philanthropy, but not indulge in ostentatious consumption. Ghanshayam Das Birla and Jamuna Das Bajaj can be said to conform to this concept of trusteeship. Many industrialists in rich countries have also set up philanthropic foundations. This perhaps needs to be built in the public management system. One method can be that whenever the share value in any enterprise doubles, it shall be mandatory for the company to issue bonus shares of value, say, 10 per cent of the paid up capital to a philanthropic trust, preferably one instituted by those who hold the controlling shares. There can be a provison that whenever the share value drops by more than 10 per cent, the bonus shares shall not get any dividend. Such management systems can be designed to make the trusteeship concept operational.

The problem is that with our centralised system of governance, our villages and towns have been deprived of control over their local resources and decision making. Soviet type centralised planning has killed all the initiatives of the people, and its related fake discipline, development economics, has during the last 50 years succeeded in developing only poverty. It truly is poverty development economics. This has not only impoverished the people but also sapped their entrepreneurial initiatives. To illustrate, when the highly advanced German people were placed under centralised rule in East Germany, they became totally dependent upon the state for their needs. When the two Germanys re-united, it took a long time to rekindle their entrepreneurial spirit.

During the past 50 years, we have advocated small business and offered subsidies and incentives but undertook hardly undertake any worthwhile research in improving opportunities for it, especially in rural areas. The mindset has been that the rural economy is destined to be sustenance based and not growth oriented. Such a poverty syndrome has influenced all government policies in regard to rural economy, ecology and enterprise and tended to sustain a low income, low consumption rural economy.

It is true that some large farmers have wealth. Large business has also come up in rural areas. Often, factories, such as those manufacturing cement, damage farm productivity and local communities suffer pollution in the name of development.

The general mindset is of a poverty oriented rural system. Neither the political leadership nor professionals can envision villages with high urban quality – well drained tarred road, attractive modern homes each with a small car, healthy cows and modern farm machinery, and parks, and well equipped schools, library, health centres and an attractive market. Why is it that state policies do not plan for such villages?

The answer is that the state as structured cannot do so. Having established an anti-people political system —- centralised, non-transparent and bureaucratised, based on the faulty Westminster system and exploitative colonial institution, the common people (especially rural communities) stand condemned to exploitation and poverty. Deprived of control over local resources and with state bureaucracy ruling over them, they have been made totally dependent upon the state for all their needs, and have lost all entrepreneurial initiatives. The only antidote to such exploitation is true democracy. A second freedom struggle is the need of the hour. q

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