Inclusive Value Chains in India

08 Mar 2010

A review by Sudhirendar Sharma

Mainstreaming small producers
Market influence notwithstanding, current development processes attach great importance to market-led economic growth for poverty alleviation. With 'pro-poor growth' being the leitmotif running through much of the recent development debate, poverty alleviation is increasingly associated with small scale commercial farm and non-farm activities. A key concept is the development of value chains integrating farmers into local as well as high value markets.

The idea of 'value chain' assumes that market-led development generates the income sustaining itself. It is, however, different matter that more efficient markets drive out less competitive producers. So it is by no means clear to which proportion the rural poor will eventually benefit from value chain interventions. Value chain development is a necessary condition, but by itself not sufficient to respond to the problem of economic exclusion.

Amul is one the earliest example of effective value chain, much before 'value chain' as a concept came into vogue. Though it reaches out to over two million people and is profitable, it has not made its producers rich although it provides them with a reliable supplementary source of income. Using 14 different case studies, the author concludes that the value chains which are promoted by private for-profit businesses grew much faster than those which were promoted by nonprofit organizations.

Without doubt, value chain perspective helps to explore the growth potential of specific rural products and allows targeted interventions activating them. But the question is to what extent 'value chain development' can in fact serve as a core concept of rural development. Since some of value chain interventions are specific to particular products, markets provide the basis of a value chain strategy as it impacts short-term employment through raise in wages.

In reality, value chains may have manifold and highly differentiated effects on wages, job quality, competitiveness, distributional, and social & environmental issues. What's more, these effects are closely interlinked; improvements in one field may alter complex power relations at the local level, often deleterious in the long run. Given the long-term impacts of value chain interventions, immediate economic gains may remain ephemeral!

The book provides pragmatic insights on what works and what doesn't on a subject that is becoming increasingly important in fighting poverty in rural areas.

Inclusive Value Chains in India by Malcolm Harper, World Scientific, Exclusive Distribution in India by Books for Development, Bangalore, 289 pages, Rs 695

Art, science and commerce of Brinjal

By Sudhirendar Sharma
08 Mar 2010

If a large section of mainstream media is to be believed India may soon witness mass hunger, demoralised scientists and economic recession if Bt brinjal is not allowed to be commercially cultivated.

Childhood memories of brinjal, popularly called baingun, are curiously uniform across the country. As kids, no one seemingly had any fascination for the violet vegetable. From elongated to round and from small to big, brinjal diversity has always been on offer without many takers to savour its predictable recipes. At school, brinjal helped children remember 'violet' being a conspicuous colour of the rainbow. Rarely would the relationship with brinjal extend any further.

That the lowly vegetable would gain national significance and the hyperactive environment minister adding a 'brinjal' on his cap could be the gravest surprise ever. That some of the 2,400 varieties of brinjal that middle class mothers selected from the vegetable vendors would be under pest threat unless impregnated with an alien gene could be no less amusing.

This would have made my grandmother happy who, as a staunch vegetarian, had an eerie feeling about some legless worm roaming freely within the encased flesh of brinjal. Pest control in brinjal had meant liberal sprinkling of woodstove ash to ward off the devouring pest from its broad leaves. Since no one ever heard of a pest epidemic on brinjal, the indigenous method had seemingly worked to keep the market price of brinjal under check.

But this has seemingly not gone well with those who consider that Olericulture, the science of growing vegetables, be given a lesson. After all, science has to progress even if the poor brinjal has to be its unsuspecting guinea pig. And, why should it matter that an annual 8 million tonnes of brinjal production in the country is not under any crisis? The bedtime story of a tiger devouring a lamb for the crime that it never committed seems real for once!

Could the lowly brinjal cloud the scientific vision of the country? It seems it already has if the thwarted exasperation of the science & technology minister is anything to go by. The minister argued that the scientists would be demoralised should the progress on Bt brinjal is put on hold for long. One would expect the scientific community to contest such irresponsible utterance because brinjal isn't the only topic of research they have been engaged in!

The minister, Prithvi Raj Chavan, reminds me of my history lessons. While his namesake stood for bravery, courage, principles and patriotism, the modern-day Prithvi Raj is behaving more like Jaichand. History has been known to repeat itself and it seems to be doing so again after 820 years. But that it will repeat with characters switching sides has been beyond imagination. Brinjal is sure to rewrite history!

A bit of history has already been written. Unassuming brinjal has triggered a new wave of nationalism, with people rallying around the most unlikely of symbol to assert patriotism. For once, brinjal is at the centre stage of discourse to challenge colonialism of the kind that takes genetic route to control peoples' lives. If nothing else, it has helped identify the enemy within.

Brinjal has clearly become a big hurdle on way to a $1 billion a year seed industry, with any number of paid employees of the biotech industry and those willing to accept any kind of 'sponsorship' vouching for its safety. The same biotech industry that had thumped safety related aspects of Bt cotton now secretly accepts that not only have cattle died after consuming Bt cotton residues but skin allergies to farmers have been on the rise too. By its own admission, the pest resistant vigour of Bt cotton has been on the decline.

Without doubt, the claims on Bt brinjal are not above suspicion. Science ought to be held accountable, as no one can afford slow genetic transformation on account of consuming genetically modified vegetables. A recent report indicating conversion of male rats into females through exposure to widely used weed killer atrazine has sent alarm bells ringing. A genetically modified food product could indeed be doubly potent. One would only argue that the proponents of Bt brinjal are well within their means to push science and to make profit but not at the cost of making bhartha of our lives.

Calendars speak for the commons

By Sudhirendar Sharma
20 Jan 2010

The 2010 calendar by ICR highlights public movements

The role of calendars has widened beyond commercials and now they convey crucial statements about social and cultural movements.

In the world of calendars where hardly anything sticks to the wall or stays on the desk for long, two new calendars have made a mark by going beyond mere date and design. Distinct in form and style, both pursue the common thread of ‘defending the commons’. While one follows a lesser-known mountain river from its source to confluence, the other calendar chronicles peoples’ resistance to protect the commons. Into their second editions, both the calendars have been backed by clear vision and research.

While Dehradun-based People Science Institute’s (PSI) calendar on Gori Ganga is studded with stunning pictures, Delhi-based Intercultural Resources’ (ICR) calendar on Social Movements documents range of civil resistance across time and space. Implicit within both is the central argument that the commons are at the heart of a conflict of interest as they are being appropriated by direct actions of a complicit state and large corporations.

Gone are the days when calendars provided the basis for planning agricultural, hunting and migration cycles, for divination and prognostication, and for maintaining cycles of religious and cultural events. The concept of calendar has gone through significant transmutation; it uses date as an excuse and glamour as a quotient to amplify desire and to legitimise obsequiousness.

While starlet Neha Dhupia's topless calendar hogged the limelight for obvious reasons, calendar on Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had the unstated ingredients of political opportunism. Go Green, publisher of the topless calendar, argues that the calendar successfully integrates nature with glamour to create images that bring about eco-consciousness amongst the onlookers. What it actually does need no guesses!

These and much more, calendars have implicit messages that go beyond dates and images. From worldly to divine and from sublime to ridiculous, today's calendars have everything on offer. As consumer preference for calendars shifts from divine portraits sketched by Yogendra Rastogi to glamorous images clicked by Atul Kasbekar, calendars seem to be giving a different measure of time to its onlookers.

It is here that both the PSI and ICR calendars stand out. These reflect a clear direction and a sense of purpose, a link between mankind and the cosmos. PSI’s head Ravi Chopra says: ‘living far from remote rivers like the Gori Ganga, many of us are simply unaware of the total ruin of the essential global life-supporting role of such pristine rivers and the Himalaya, which characterise our monsoon climate and agrarian economy’. Using the medium of calendar, the subtle message of protection-of-the-commons has creatively been conveyed through pictures.

Reflected through amazing pictures, the upper catchment of Gori Ganga belongs to a class that ecologists define as wild rivers. Scientists value their biodiversity, land forming processes, energy flows and nutrient and water cycling as vital, global life-supporting systems. The calendar, says Ravi Chopra, is aimed at spreading awareness to save our rivers, as also to build support for the spring rejuvenation and river restoration work being undertaken by the organisation in Sikkim, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

Five proposed hydropower projects on its 107 km stretch are sure to ruin the pristine flow of Gori Ganga, with a potential to trigger yet another social movement to protect the commons. ICR calendar argues in favour of social movements as these provide a crucial window into the range of aspirations that communities at the base of our society feel and act on. Every date and month in the calendar is a grim reminder of the struggles that have been waged in some corner of the country, along rivers, in forests and on the streets.

Social movements challenge not only the intentions and projects of the aggressor, but also the implicit attitude that the resisting cultures and peoples are dispensable. The calendar aims to connect various struggles and build solidarity for ‘defending the commons’. Bindia Thapar, who designed the ICR calendar, says, ‘the calendar reflects hope for millions who have been at the receiving end of current paradigm of development, globalization and capitalism’. For late Smitu Kothari, who had conceived the idea, the calendar on social movements has been a tribute to the indomitable spirit of the communities and a document that celebrates their movements.

In addition to serving practical purposes, both the calendars provide a sense of understanding in controlling future. Visionary as these are, the calendars act as a source of inspiration in guiding the onlooker to adopt a socially relevant resolution for the next twelve months.

(Published out of sheer commitment, the calendars are priced to recover costs. Bulk enquiries may be directed to neemresistance@gmail.com (for Social Movements calendar) and psiddoon@gmail.com (for Gori Ganga calendar).

Consume, throw and then blame

By Sudhirendar Sharma
09 Dec 2009

As rapidly growing mountains of trash raise a stink across the globe, it's time to discard the 'use and throw' culture which has no concern for environment and humanity.

Adam's wasting the mythical apple unleashed a culture of consumption and waste for the human civilizations. This culture has relentlessly amplified and waste has grown in quantities and categories ever since. Mountains of rubbish have come to symbolize a democratic expression of growth, embedded within them a consumptive pattern that reflects class, power and dignity. An average American's 700 kg waste a year and a European's 500 kg is no coincidence, providing substrate for millions of poor to make a living from the waste heaps of the 'effluent' class.

Our neighborhood waste dumps may impinge our senses and may take away our natural paradises but a look at the mass of trash spread before us makes it clear that money has been made. The huge tertiary sector devoted to getting rid of things is central to the maintenance of capitalism. At its core lies the linear model of resource use, of manufactured and packaged products, that has left society rushing headlong into the destructive frenzy of consumption. With 80 million new citizens joining the planet each year, search for a new Earth with a new Adam may seem orderly!

With waste bins overflowing, the terrible pressure of accumulation means that waste itself has become a historical force that calls for strengthening the system (of disposal) without addressing the symptom (of consumption). This notion is somewhat problematic as the policy and economic instruments keep 'the reduction of waste' central to crafting strategies without asking the more difficult questions about whether or not recycling makes much sense in either economic or thermodynamic terms. Plastic recycling with its dreadful emissions is a case-in-point.


Recycling does have a place under the sun but the problems waste poses may be more than economic or environmental. Else, the huge tertiary sector that converts garbage into money would not be counter-positioned to ecological movements that stress on human values and 'the natural'. Jonathan Chapman of the University of Brighton laments 'adulterous consumption' and the associated inevitability of recycling, because there is simply no relationship at all between the product and the purchaser. This disconnect nurtures a culture that is conducive to capitalism.

Waste is a key category for understanding cultural value. In more conservative societies, the idea of waste rarely exists because the metabolism of the human species aligns with the metabolism of natural world. Consider the cotton dhoti that rural Indian women drape around themselves: its multi-stage metabolism would pass through distinct household usages, from being man's shirt to a window curtain, before being stretched to the last thread for mopping the floor. The emotional relationship with the product ensured that its re-use and re-cycling remained largely private.

Contrast it with the modern culture that first disposes of the 'bad stuff' and then engages in a constant struggle to redeem it. Paradoxically, what gets disposed is essentially through 'private' action but what accumulates as a result warrants 'public' attention. Seeing half the contents of your garbage bin spread over the street can be irritating and may trigger strong feelings of disgust and exposure. Our intimate life is often on public display, yet any attempt at relating to it makes one shudder with the horror of contamination.


Similarly, the clogging of storm water system, designed to manage runoff from streets, with raw sewage from overflowing drains during rains blur the distinction between private and public. When the rain clears and everything is meant to smell fresh, but a strong stench emanates from the gutters, almost as if human excrement is in the air. Obviously, this is grossly unpleasant. But individuals who contribute to it neither feel personally exposed nor implicated. On the contrary, it is called a failure of public infrastructure.

It is clear from these two urban encounters that waste that is most threatening to the self has to be rendered out of sight and mind as quickly as possible. Waste is a function of our pre-public individuality that loses its identity once it enters the public arena, triggering public concern towards its bureaucratic (mis)management. Though the status of waste in public and private spheres seems incommensurable; the human relationship to waste is markedly distinct. A blocked toilet becomes the ultimate domestic nightmare but the overflowing drain remains nobody's concern.

In making human waste management a state matter through the formation of regulations and institutions to administer it, says Gay Hawkins author of 'Culture of Waste', the realm of privacy and personal habit gets substantially reordered. And only by understanding how waste has been deployed to produce a modern public-private distinction is it possible to assess the fundamental paradox of waste in public. A paradox that goes something like this: horror at the very idea of open defecation and resigned acceptance of overflowing sewage drains.

How humans relate to waste is critical because the magnitude of the problem is extraordinary. If Americans had recycled the 32 billion cans of fizzy drinks they threw away in 2002, they would have saved 435,000 tonnes of aluminium - enough to rebuild the world's entire commercial fleet more than 1.5 times. But that was not to be, as capitalist market does not encourage an iota of concern in individuals towards use-and-throw culture. Young consumers might relate to their favourite pair of jeans but the aluminium cans don't generate any emotional connect.

Aluminium cans and human excreta represent two significant but somewhat unrelated aspects of the growing waste debate which reflect that our subjectivity and self is at stake when we deal with waste at home. However, when the inefficient waste management system is criticized, the same consumers take on activist citizen role to hold the state accountable for its inactions. In the long journey from the bathroom to the sewer or from the kitchen to the garbage dump, not only does waste get transformed but so does our relationship with it.

That there's public waste which is the responsibility of government was established during the year of 'the Great Stink' in London in 1858. The restoration of the Thames from the scourge of public waste was necessitated because peoples' representatives were finding it hard to stand the stench from untreated sewage in the river flowing next door to the Parliament. The subsequent creation of 1,240 miles of sewage tunnels laid the foundation of the state's defining role in managing and disposing public waste.

In the long journey from the bathroom to the sewer or from the kitchen to the garbage dump, not only does waste get transformed but so does our relationship with it.
The role of state hasn't changed ever since, though its inability to handle waste has been glaring. Some 2.5 billion people across the world not only lack access to basic sanitation but remain vulnerable to its consequences too. Every conceivable water body, be it a lake or a river, has been converted into a public laundry, bathroom and toilet. Each open space has inadvertently been littered with plastic bags, bottles and the like. With the state being presumed to be the savior, little thought is given to the ethical and environmental implications of our waste habits.

The legitimate dependence on state as a service provider leads to a set of intriguing questions. Is it not a reality of our times that when waste happens the demand for it to be rendered invisible generally means its disposal outside both public and private spheres, distant landfills and rivers, for example? Does it not restrict our sense of obligation to the rivers where our waste ends up? Does efficient techniques of waste elimination not a measure of cleanliness at the cost of nature and environmental stability?

Curiously, there hasn't been any imagination in the way waste has been handled since late 19th century. In a broader sense, waste management has remained a function of sound infrastructure investment based on effective public policy. However, saddled with inefficiency and corruption the municipalities have run out of resources to manage the growing rubbish mountains. Any number of innovative solutions on waste reduction, including the boards made of human excreta, have yet to prove their aesthetic appeal and economic viability despite the promise they hold.

Waste corrupts the system

Waste generation has clearly outpaced its management, compounded by the incredible challenge of mobilizing resources for this resource-crunched sector. Successful civil society initiatives like the Sulabh's pay-and-use toilets showcase that community can indeed pay, providing clues on innovative financing to the beleaguered municipalities. Such self-help models do chide the state for its failure to meet peoples' expectation but absolve the state of its primary role of a service provider as well. The net result is the convenience of creating business opportunities for waste management by partnering with the commercial sector. It is somewhat ironic that the capitalist culture of consumption returns to the capitalist route for managing waste.

No wonder, big companies and large multi-national corporations jump into the fray to partner the state in helping reduce the public waste. For the urban consumer it offers a win-win situation as the public-private partnership route to corporate investment promises an early disposal of the overflowing neighborhood garbage bin. But as the state rechristens its role as a regulatory authority, the ethical and environmental consideration of waste disposal gets undermined as profit-making moves centre-stage in the new relationship.


What seems genuinely encouraging may not promote environmental values on account of the new institutional arrangement of waste management being pivoted around profit. The breadth of the reform relies on financial orthodoxy, discounting the fact that such a system remains easily corruptible. Simply put, the modus operandi of efficient waste disposal hinges on the choice of technology that need not necessarily adhere to the ethics of safe disposal. Most people don't get a sense of the ferment of ideas going on out there till they actually feel the 'heat'.

And, heat is indeed generated as solid waste is burnt under controlled conditions in the incinerators, a technology that has been favoured despite its poor environmental records. It replaces the more cumbersome composting technique. Without doubt, incinerator render the waste invisible as also reduce its volume faster than the labor-intensive method of composting that is visibly offensive and malodorous. That it generates toxic organic fumes and dreadful heavy metals like mercury remains conspicuously absent from any public discourse.


Sukhdev Vihar residents in South Delhi recently demonstrated their ire against the controversial citing of an incinerator in proximity to their habitation for reasons enumerated above. This hasn't been the first such instance of public outrage against a technology that is designed for effective and speedy waste elimination but one that underscores the need to understand how addressing waste disposal in public re-emerges as a problem that leads to implication of the 'solution' itself. The regulatory body often feigns ignorance to such intricacies.

Search for benign technology catches attention but the emerging power dynamics of waste management legitimizes the use of technology by corrupting the system. Expectedly, the regulatory body plays to the divided house thereby creating perfect conditions for converting an environmental concern into a political controversy. Without doubt, the next logical step takes the matter to the court of law. As waste transits from a subtle 'cultural context' into complex 'legal arena', it gains an altogether distinct currency with changed relationship matrix.

As public waste is assigned a new currency, it attains the level of a tradeable commodity. Pierre Bélanger, a landscape architect, points to the North American Free Trade Agreement - that allows a plot of farmland in Michigan to become, literally, a mountain of Canadian trash. In another bizarre case, the Dutch had made an abortive attempt to offload their overflowing dung heaps on the Gujarat shore in the early 1990's. Be it obnoxious waste or obsolete technology, developing countries have been the favoured dumping ground for the developed West.

The ship breaking industry at Alang on the Gujarat coast has grievously violated environmental laws of the land, by manipulating the regulatory and legal systems, but has continued to grow even though the world has been witness to an unprecedented economic recession. Someone's waste generates employment for others across several seas, justifying its dumping. Waste - be it public or industrial - has attained the level of a global industry. The waste industry is deeply connected to the free market economy's ongoing need to intensify and expand consumption. Indeed, an economy that relies on constant growth requires consistent wasting.

Love it or hate it, waste is a testament of culture. Yet, it is tough to reconcile how waste has moved from being a private act to a more pronounced corporate product with limitless possibilities of creating an industrial enterprise around it. If market globalization is anything to go by, we are a society that has an insatiable desire to consume and give a damn to the waste we generate in the process. The capitalist economy is supportive: many companies in the US have withdrawn refillable from the market shelves. The trend has caught on!

Unless there is a cultural renaissance, the wasteful society will grow in numbers followed by a committed section outside of it playing the activist citizen role to protect the stability of the system. Prophetic though it may sound, technology of waste elimination and minimization will be pronounced in a capital-dominated world of waste management. However, it could easily be doubted if the sum of all waste management techniques will erase the garbage footprints of modern society - economic recession and climate change notwithstanding.

Aesthetics in garbage footprints

Future anthropologists, paleontologists, and archeologists would be jobless if the present human race were not to leave its garbage footprints. They have written history by scraping feces and bones from the garbage pits of primitive people and from the detritus have pieced together the diet, culture, commerce, and possibly the eventual downfall of a people. The United States excretes more garbage, in more durable forms, than any society before it. History may remember them as much as the earth remembers their garbage today.


In a 2006 Canadian compilation Trash, artists have helped ease the notion of waste as a problem. They have instead looked at the infinite beauty in castoff items, either as testaments of the ingenuity of human life or as remnants of our once-great civilization. If you're one who instinctively opposes the continued trashing of our world, this occasional ambivalence about garbage - is it ugly or is it strangely beautiful and human - can be unsettling. Yet, it offers us imaginative new insights on looking at the dispossessed, the lost and the left behind.

It should be difficult for the environmentalist, or the conscientious consumer, to see beauty in trash - and yet some of space-age packaging clearly reflects smart industrial design worthy of appreciation. Paradoxically, both the appealing futuristic packing along with the product contained therein will soon be garbage themselves. It may sound polemic but the sense of appreciation helps to emotionally reconnect with the product that has long been presumed to be part of the unending waste stream.

Within limits evoking sympathy for rubbish may be critical, argues Hawkins, because it may help draw distinction between useful and useless, humble object and the recalcitrant. Isn't vintage stuff, be it broken chairs or eviscerated recliners, aesthetically placed in public parks and historical monuments? Not all stuff can be treated at par though, yet there exists an opportunity to appreciate the uniqueness in a waste product and rebuild emotional connection with it. Traditional societies have amply demonstrated that such connection works in reducing waste.

Sociologists have consistently argued that a throwaway culture has a serious disregard for humanity. Adequately reflected in modern lifestyle, the power of consumption has reduced nature as a source of entertainment and willful manipulation. Waste generation and disposal is an indicator of gross neglect of environment and serious disregard for humanity.

Waste is more than the used up, the broken, the outgrown and the obsolete. Evoking relationship between the purchaser and the purchase can refurbish the emotional bonding and revive a culture that has a regard for humanity as well as nature. The corporate logic of manipulating public to profit from trash ought to be challenged to create a society that distances itself from the dominant use-and-throw culture.