The Hindu Business Line : Alternative view

The week brought news of two gentlemen of ripe years, both very original and divergent thinkers. They led amazingly parallel lives sponsoring the alternative, unpopular view in their fields. Both Prof N.S. Ramaswamy, founder director of IIM Bangalore, currently head of an NGO with the typical acronym of CARTMAN, and Dr Verghese Kurien of Amul fame were remembered for their extraordinary contributions towards very intelligent, insightful and relevant approaches to economic development.

Both concentrated (one as a Professor and publicist and the other as an outstanding manager) on ways to modernise rural India, remove poverty, and reduce the urban-rural divide. Growth without privation, with less inequality and higher productivity were common lenses through which they saw the world.

Coincidentally, cattle figured in both lives and dreams: Bullocks as draught animals whose lot is in need of improvement; and buffaloes whose milk output can be better processed and marketed for the benefit of all, but predominantly the rural poor. Prof Ramaswamy received the well-deserved Padma Bhushan for his varied work, of which putting rubber wheels on bullock carts and designing them better are best remembered, even if at times with a titter.

Dr Kurien even recently pilloried the short-sighted thinking that equates shopping malls and designer clothes with progress while millions in the rural economy have no champions for their cause. Common to both the achievers' solutions was the crucial need to decentralise development, liberating it from New Delhi's shackles. Farmers who own and manage their small-scale and disaggregated resources have demonstrated the wonders they can do, as Dr Kurien has unflaggingly reiterated, if organised through the co-operative route. When the corporate model takes over, they will lose control over their own plot — in both senses of the word! A producer co-operative thus is a necessary revolution in structure that must be encouraged by all right-thinking citizenry.

Prof N. S. Ramaswamy

Prof Ramaswamy points out, on the other hand, the stark contrast in the time and thought given to the real problems of Rural India. Five hundred million animals and 14 million bullock carts that save six million tonnes of petrol, get little attention to further their efficiency or welfare. Similarly, in the earliest battle Dr Kurien fought against conventional wisdom and entrenched interests he established, for the first time, that milk powder could be made from buffalo milk, thus ending the stranglehold of the import lobby.

Both visionaries tried the educational route and succeeded, at best, only partially. IIMB started as a different institute focused on the under-managed sectors in social and public organisations while the Institute of Rural Management Anand was entirely to be devoted to better managing the farming-related sectors. Pitted against the onrushing tide of market-capitalism and consumerism, their efforts faltered.

There may be two lessons in motivation and change here. First, radical solutions need non-traditional organisational structures too. Change is resisted in institutions structured in a traditional way.

Second, when the students' ambitions have been fed for years on tales of fabled opulence, perhaps it is too late. They would give anything to fight their way to dollar-denominated salaries. There are, of course, some wide-eyed enthusiasts, and it is on catching them young and supporting them that we must pin our hopes.

S. Ramachander

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