Paternalism?

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

-- Attributed to anonymous Vietnam War Major

It occurred to me, during my last week of fieldwork in Bhorugram (while I was daydreaming about the return to "civilization") that people like me are effectively plotting to destroy India[1]. That is to say, we are actively hammering away at the basic assumptions on which the entire Indian economic, political, and social system currently rests.

As mentioned in prior posts, the classic picture is that "India lives in her villages." It's not an exaggeration -- despite the hugeness of major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, or Bangalore, about 70% of the population still exists in the rural setting. That is to say, there are a hell of a lot of people still living with dirt roads, irregular electricity, erratic (if any) running water, questionable sewage, and poor infrastructure. More importantly, it means a lot of people still engaged in subsistence farming or activities that directly support subsistence farmers, and as noted before, it means an economy specifically geared around abundance (thus cheapness) of human labor.

Meanwhile, people like me are out there actively doing everything we can to build a health care system. Our stated goal is simple -- save lives, improve standard of living. BUT, one of the main metrics we use is the birth rate, and various numbers derived therefrom, and we cheer every time we get it nearer to the goal -- replacement level or below. And therein lies the problem. You can't run a subsistence agriculture economy with a developed-world birth rate. There's not enough people to do the work, because farm work depends on having a large number of young people around to gather the harvest by hand. Thus, we are effectively setting up the dominoes for forced mechanization of Indian agriculture over the next few decades.

But that's good, you say? Mechanization = more food to go around, and better standard of living (minus the air pollution from a few million tractors)? Sure. Except that we can see what the same thing has done to small-town America. We hear every day about the death of the family farm. The same thing is going to happen in India, except it'll be the death of the village. The path we're putting them on leads, as far as I can tell, to the rise of the same kind of large-scale "factory farming" we do (minus, hopefully, the meat factories).

Now, maybe that is good. I can't imagine myself wanting to be ruled in a political system where corruption is the order of the day and where most voters are barely educated[2]. But, being a good little geek (and given that there's a new Star Trek movie out this week) I can't help but think back to the Prime Directive, and how it's pretty much being shredded and used for toilet paper here[3]. We mean well, but we really are bringing along a whole pile of assumptions about what a society should look like. After you get past the surface, the whole thing starts to look a lot like Kipling's "White Man's Burden". As I said, I wouldn't want to live Indian village life. I just am not entirely sure that the villagers feel the same way.

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[1] Now there's a quote that'll come back to haunt me outside of its context someday.

[2] You think we have that in the USA too. Brother, you ain't seen nothing. They do vote buying the old school way here, and they play ethnic politics in ways that can be downright frightening. At least in the US, you aren't allowed to get re-elected from jail after getting thrown in there for murdering or otherwise harming political opponents.

[3] Probably softer than the regular stuff.