There Is More To Recession Than Meets The Eye _ Chandrashekhar Hariharan

It is only recently that this column featured a set of reflections on how Thoreau is not perhaps relevant to this day and age with the dramatic change in our perception of needs and the big realization of what it means to the world in terms of the loss of ecology and threat to the planet.

A recent edition of a newspaper had the historian scholar Ramachandra Guha quoting Gandhiji, writing as far back as in 1928: “God forbid that India should take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny kingdom [Great Britain] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million Indians took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts”. Guha has written for many years now of the anguish of consumerism and of the need for moving away to lifestyles that would leave a softer footprint on the planet.

The traditional values and emotional anchors that our houses provided or the city landscape offered is now quickly a thing of the past.

Globalization of some kind or the other is being experienced by each of us in our own little ways. It sometimes means you’re given the pink slip, the American euphemism for being unceremoniously dumped out of your job with no notice. It sometimes means you get very rich. Sometimes it means both. More often it means that you’ve got a job but you’re very, very poor. All this stems from a certain kind of globalization that has fed oru greed with complete disregard of social obligations or of environmental realities. There is only one narrow pursuit of the single bottom line for a human being or for an organization. [This writer heard recently of the sad plight of many pedigree dogs that have been packed off to CUPA by the rich young types from the IT industry who have been hit by the recession. Those poor dogs…]

These are very powerful forces that can’t but have the Armageddon of growth hurtling on with little that you can do but being a helpless bystander.

The sort of growth that we had in the last ten years was based on the promise of limitless economic growth. A feature carried in these same columns by this writer a few weeks ago reminded us, of how way back in the 1960s we carried the sanguine notion that the planet can continue to offer all that we need if only we know and are convinced of the ingenuity of man. To fulfill the promise of US lifestyles for all would need may be two planets’ worth of natural resources—some thing we can never have. We have already exceeded many limits. We have become too big for our ecological boots, is the start fact, and continue not to recognize it.

Of Carbon Debts

To support the profligate lifestyles enjoyed by the rich, the Earth’s biosphere needs at least one year and three months to simply regenerate the amount lost to human consumption in a year. So what can be the result but environmental decline of a kind that the planet has never seen before? Disproportionate use by the rich of the atmosphere’s limited ability to absorb pollution also means that countries and individuals are running up massive carbon debts. Unlike any debt that a country or an individual has to service, there is no mechanism to call in the ecological debts that the rich create. The other worrisome dimension is that with the sharp urbanizing that we have seen in the last 20 years, culture has suffered as diversity has been lost. Cultural diversity is important for personal identity and well-being; it also matters because local cultural production is an important part of any economy.

The trouble with big brands and the corporate biggies is that they suck out wealth from local economies, and repatriate their profits to shareholders across the world in most cases these days—take the example of any IT major today who has global shares participation and you know the story. Local producers usually encourage the creation of wealth where it matters, in the community. For example, a rupee spent in a supermarket on globally branded goods is worth only about half the same spent in a local shop selling local produce. But the catch is that packaging and branding usually claims the customer’s attention and desire. Look at what is happening to you and me, when it comes to buying: we prefer the food mall to the friendly kirana store!


More to the Recession

What we are seeing today as a recession is far beyond its current dimensions. The slew of horrendous news we are receiving on the business and economic fronts from nearly every country in a business world that is coming crashing down on all of us, is that this is not merely an economic downturn but will signify a complete redefinition of the future of consumption itself in the world—no more the insensitive adoption of pedigree dogs or building of megapools and houses that bespeak of obscene avarice.

A whole new sobered generation of youngsters will now want to see how they recalibrate their economic and career ambitions to get to the good old fashioned way of working hard to earn the day’s wage. What this recession is showing is that there will be a dramatic across-the-board drop in consumption over the next ten years. What this new sober economy of the future is saying is this: dependence on external markets beyond our own country, or our district, or our community, will reduce to the levels that prevailed in the middle of the last century. India still qualifies as the fastest growing economy in the world at over 7 per cent GDP growth. We only have Nehru and the legacy of self-sufficiency his 17-year regime created, and the hard-working, enterprising commonplace Indian of today for this growth and the assurance it offers in this world of turmoil. You only have to walk on busy street and watch Life as it passes you by, and you know that here is a country of people who have the ambition to succeed, the hunger to achieve, and the pride in succeeding.

The Kirana shop is dying

Globalization has devastated cultures and environments over the last 20 years. Capital has never shown as much or more appetite than it has done in the last few years. But it does not have enough stomach to digest all the people it pretends to control. While putting people on corporate payrolls, it closes the doors of the globalized market to millions of small producers and enterprises. All you have to do is to step out some morning and chat up the pushcart vendor who sells vegetables every day on your street to know how he is now reduced to making visits only twice a week, because no one buys.

The kirana shop, or the friendly neighborhood provision store that has been part of India’s invisible infrastructure for a 100 years, is slowly crumbling with the advent of the retail market. People simply don’t have the time to pause by, have a chat with the shop owner and give him the list of things that you will need for the month. We find it easier to walk the aisle of an anonymous shopping mall and pick up what we need without loss of time.

What this kind of globalization has meant is fundamentally that human beings are disposable. We have become prisoners of addiction or prisoners of envy that is stoked by the onslaught of advertising on television or the newspaper.

Inherent in all this is a tyranny of subdued violence that has inevitably led to what we are seeing around us today. The recession, and what will come as its aftermath, is going to rejuvenate the world even if it’s going to leave us a little staggered and chastened on our urban lifestyles. The nicer fallout of the recession over the next decade, with hope, would be that life will move at a gentler pace and people will enjoy a degree of leisure unknown to many of the younger generation in the urban India.

Chandrashekar Hariharan

The writer is from Biodiversity Conservation [India] Limited, a pioneering green homes organization based in Bangalore.