?Proletarians arrive at communism from below, but I from poetry?s sky plunge into communism, because without it, I feel no love?
?Valdimir Mayakovsky, Russian Poet
The City of Joy is in tears. One of the world?s first democratically elected communist governments is in shambles. Socialists of all hues all over India are upset at the turn of events in Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal. History was rewritten with the blood of the poor, ironically, as a result of violence let loose by the CPM. The savagery has been condemned by intellectuals, historians, artists, film stars and political pandits. The normally suave poet Chief Minister of West Bengal yelled, ?They have been paid back in their own coin.? Was he justifying the Marxist bestiality at Nandigram on Diwali night? His admirers cried in pain, ?Et tu, Buddhadeb!? It was left to the grandson of the Mahatma to provide the healing touch in the manner that the Mahatma himself did in 1947.
What went wrong? If at Singur, the West Bengal government promised to usher in Tata Motors? Rs 1 lakh car facility, at Nandigram it promised 22,000 acres of farmland to an Indonesian group which wanted to build petrochemical plants in two special economic zones (SEZs). How is this possible without the concurrence of existing landowners? This question is relevant to other states as well. At the core of the debate are SEZs, which The Economist rightly described as lightly taxed industrial havens, roughly based on a Chinese model intended to promote investment in infrastructure. But should farmland be converted for industrial use?
Resources shifting from primary production to industrial use in the early stages of economic development was the pattern in countries that are now advanced, and developing countries have sought to follow. Since the factors of production are limited in supply, productivity gains among various sectors of the economy (like agriculture, industry and services) have to be valued on the basis of labour employed per unit of land in agriculture, total factor productivity and returns to scale. The production possibility frontier indicates the maximum output of goods or services possible within the available resources, given the output of other goods. No wealth system exists in isolation. To quote Alvin and Heidi Toffler, ?A wealth system is only one component, although a very powerful one, of a still larger macro system whose other components?social, cultural, religious, and political?are in constant feedback with it and with one another. Together they form a civilization or a way of life roughly compatible with the wealth system.?
Balanced growth remains an imperative. Even if this means different things to different people. Environmental factors, infrastructure facilities and labour productivity gains are all part of the picture. Classical economists placed equal emphasis on agriculture and industry in developmental policy. This school of ?balanced growth? argued that the best way for an economy to develop was for all sectors to grow at the same rate. This is a call for perfectly synchronised development?a belief that the path to ever growing wealth is through ever-greater synchrony. As the Tofflers point out in Revolutionary Wealth, things are not that simple. Perfect synchronisation, holding key variables in fixed relationships, makes any system inflexible, inert and slow to innovate. By contrast, as Joseph Schumpeter showed, economic development also requires ?gales of creative destruction??winds of change that annihilate old technologies and industries to make way for new and disruptive ones. ?And the first thing creative destruction tears up, is yesterday?s time table. Every economy needs, therefore, both synchronization and some degree of desynchronization?.
Kalyana Raman theorises that maritime economic zones (MEZs) will help fishermen along India?s long coastlines prosper. While SEZs lead to displacement of people, MEZs are conceived as cooperatives of small fishermen and small-scale marine product processing units that help everyone thrive.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is not the first leader to try capitalism with socialism as a base. Like Brendan O? Neill, editor of Spiked, the CM is a Marxist who defends capitalism. Prof Abhirup Sarkar of ISI Kolkata points out that while industrialisation may be the only way out, this in itself will not guarantee democracy. Can we industrialise without violating democratic norms? John Keay, an English journalist who frequents India, points out that the Bengali is a Bengali first, before assuming any other identity, and it used to be said that what Bengal thinks today, the rest of India will tomorrow.
The balancing is far from done. The Centre belatedly introduced the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill and the Resettlement & Rehabilitation Bill 2007 in the Lok Sabha, seeking to ensure a fair deal for all those displaced by land acquisitions. But the Act needs finetuning.
Dominique Lapierre, in his latest book, Once Upon A Time in the Soviet Union, observes that ?Happiness is a relative term. There was no TV, no knowledge of the outside world. There was only Communist Party Propaganda.? Fortunately for Bengal and India, we are a democracy, and voices cannot go unheard for long.
The author is a writer on industrial development. These are his personal views