The Need for State Funded Proportional Representation Based Elections

 

Introduction

Ideally the Indian electoral system should be based on proportional representation to accommodate the vast diversity in the socio-economic characteristics of the population. In this system political parties are allotted seats in the legislature and parliament in proportion to the votes that they get and so even small local parties who can get votes higher than a specified threshold can find representation in the legislature and parliament. A threshold voting percentage, as low as 3 per cent of the total valid votes polled is required to prevent frivolous legislative participation and too much fragmentation. Those parties getting this threshold vote will also be recompensed in proportion of the votes gained for the election campaign expenses on the production of proper bills.  There is thus scope for a thousand schools of thought to contend and bring to fruition a much more vibrant and diverse democratic culture in India than has obtained so far.

Instead the first past the post (FPTP) system was adopted in which the candidate getting the most number of the valid votes cast in a constituency is declared elected. This latter system was to the advantage of the Indian National Congress party at the time of independence as it got to rule unhampered on its own without the pulls and pressures of coalition governance that a system of proportional representation usually gives rise to and would certainly have in the diverse Indian context. So the first past the post electoral system of the British and American democracies, which the British had introduced to suit their own agenda of keeping the unruly masses at bay, was retained after independence giving the Congress an undue monopoly of power in the crucial first decade and a half of governance under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

History of FPTP in India

The first elections to the Lok Sabha held in 1951 saw the Congress winning just forty five percent of the total valid votes but as much as seventy five percent of the seats. Similarly in the second elections in 1957 the Congress won forty eight percent of the total valid votes and seventy five percent of the seats. In the third general elections of 1962 the Congress won forty five percent of the total valid votes and got seventy three percent of the seats (ECI, 2005). The second largest party by way of votes won in all these three elections was the Socialist Party but due to the fact that their support base was spread much thinner than the Congress' they could not win seats in proportion to their votes. In 1951 the Socialists got ten and a half percent of the total valid votes but only two and a half percent of the seats. This is to be contrasted with the Communist Party of India, which won only three and a half percent of the votes and a similar percentage of the seats because their mass base was of a concentrated nature. Interestingly Ambedkar's political party, The All India Scheduled Castes Federation, also failed to do well at the hustings in the first elections in 1951 with the great man himself losing from the Bombay City North constituency despite having done so much for the Dalits. Similarly in 1957 the Socialists once again got ten and a half percent of the votes but only three and a half percent of the seats while the Communists got nearly nine percent of the votes and five and a half percent of the seats. In the 1962 elections the two separate Socialist Parties together got nine and a half percent of the votes and only three and a half percent of the seats while the Communists got almost ten percent of the votes and five and a half percent of the seats.

Thus, a clever and unnatural choice of electoral system gave the Congress party thumping majorities to do as it pleased with little effective parliamentary opposition to its policies. The significance of this disproportion between votes and seats becomes crystal clear if we compare it with the relation between the percentage of votes and seats won for the same three groups above in the general elections of 2004 by which time fractured mandates and coalition politics had become the order of the day. The Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Trinamool Congress Party, which have their roots in the old Congress, together won thirty percent of the votes and twenty nine percent of the seats. The various splinter groups of the Socialists together won eleven and a half percent of the votes and sixteen percent of the seats. The Communists and their allies won eight percent of the votes and eleven percent of the seats (ECI, op cit). The tables had been turned. The Congress is continually being spread thin while the smaller parties, concentrated as they are in localised niches are garnering more seats in proportion to the votes won. The BJP, which too, harbours similar grandiose political visions as the Congress in its heydays, now benefits from this FPTP system. While it got only 38 percent of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections it yet secured as much as 66 percent of the seats.

FPTP and Corrupt Electoral Practices

The adoption of the first past the post election system is only a short step from letting the influence of money power and unethical political practice dominate the electoral strategies of parties. The conservative elements who formed the majority within the Congress in the pre-independence days had a free hand in the preparations for the elections to the provincial assemblies in 1936 and they generally selected candidates from local businessmen, contractors and landlords who were able to donate funds to the party and also spend lavishly on their own campaigns. Defections were also engineered from non-Congress parties in areas where the party was not strong with the dangling of the usual sops (Das, 2001). This strategy was immensely successful and helped the Congress to come to power everywhere it contested. Nehru made a few deprecating noises within the party forums regarding the infiltration of unscrupulous elements but went along with this wholesale subversion of democratic and ethical norms by the conservative leadership of the party so as to gain support from them for his overall leadership.

Nehru in fact was busy cleverly "burning the candle at both ends" to the appreciative delight of the Conservatives in the Congress led by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel after whom the Sardar Sarovar dam is named (Patel, 1936). He played the mentor to the then young Marxist firebrands led by Jayaprakash Narayan and gave them much greater importance than the mass following they commanded. Presiding over the crucial Lucknow Annual Convention of the Congress party in 1936, held against the backdrop of the British beginning to devolve power to the Indians and the emerging possibility of independence, he not only espoused socialism as the solution to India's and the world's problems but also nominated three members of the Congress Socialist Party which had been formed earlier with his blessings in 1934 to the Congress Working Committee (Sinha, 1984). In this way he both countered the Conservatives and also co-opted these firebrands into the leadership and deflected them from pursuing subversive mass mobilisational work. However, once their purpose of buttressing Nehru's position vis-a-vis the Conservatives within the Congress was served the Socialists found themselves rejected in the same way as the Gandhians after independence. They severed their connections with the Congress and formed the independent Socialist Party in 1948. Following exemplary democratic principles they also resigned their seats in the legislative assembly of the United Provinces and sought re-election. The Congress then used its art of winning by hook or by crook developed earlier during the 1936 elections to defeat the Socialists and push them into the political wilderness (Brass & Robinson eds, 1989).

Given this corrupt pre-independence history of the Congress right from the first general elections in 1951, money power, muscle power and the state machinery were used to vitiate the sanctity of the electoral process in such a way that there was little chance of an ethical person being able to win elections. Both the Socialists and the Communists lost out because of this in most areas except in a few niches where they were in such great mass strength that they could effectively counter the electoral mal practices of the Congress. Losing out on state power in a poor post-colonial country like India with an underdeveloped economy and civil society and an over-developed state apparatus (Bardhan, 1999) meant losing out on everything as the state was the main collector and commander of resources and distributor of largesse. Control of state power also provided the Congress with the opportunity to get massive financial contributions from the industrialists - the nascent Indian capitalist class in exchange for policies and programmes favourable to them. This further reduced the chances of the Socialists or the Communists of winning elections. Even when the Communists despite mountainous hurdles did manage to cobble together a government in Kerala, the first democratically elected Communist government in the world, Nehru threw all political scruples to the wind and dismissed the government in 1959 to impose Central rule in the state. Defections were engineered with the dangling of sops to win away elected representatives and their supporters. Thus there was a continuous exodus of workers and leaders from among the Socialists and Communists to the Congress (Sinha, op cit).

The net result was that both the Socialists and Communists got effectively sidelined in the Nehru era and parliament lost its capacity to act as a check on governance, which increasingly became of a strong centrist nature shedding even the little formal federalism that had been provided for in the Constitution. The extent of the Congress hegemony can be gauged from the fact that the first no-confidence motion against Nehru's government was moved only in the year 1963, all of sixteen years after independence. Nehru became the supreme leader as head of both the government and the Congress party ruthlessly removing those who tried to stand up to him in opposition by overt and covert means and consciously promoting weak politicians without much mass following as the chief ministers in the states (Das, op cit).  A patron-client relationship was set up beginning with Nehru at the top and a whole sycophantic pyramid going down to the lowest workers at the grassroots level all trying to dispense state favours. Indira Gandhi, who followed Nehru as Prime Minister after a brief interlude after his death, pursued these corrupt practices and perfected them into an art. Finally, the mass movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, which reached the verge of forcing a general election, challenged this covert subversion of democracy by the Congress party. Indira Gandhi then went to the extent of declaring an internal emergency and overtly curtailing democratic freedoms in 1975.

Betrayal of the Sampoorna Kranti Movement Ideals

The long incarceration in jail during the emergency must have given the opposition leaders of all hues an opportunity to review the reasons for their electoral marginalisation and they probably realised that winning elections and being able to cut and distribute the developmental cake were crucial to effective operation in the Indian democratic system as it had evolved under the Congress. So when the parliamentary Socialists and Communists finally made their way to power at the centre and in the states following the historic elections of 1977 after the internal emergency was lifted they too began treading the corrupt trail blazed by the Congress. Winning elections and staying in power became the driving goal and ideology began taking a back seat as Jayaprakash Narayan's ideas of total revolution too were floated down the Ganges with his funeral ashes (Sinha, op cit). Nowadays most political parties, and there are many to accord with the varied diversity of the people across the spectrum from the left to the right and from the bottom of the social order to the top, that take part in elections, have recourse to unfair electoral practices prior to winning and dubious parliamentary practices after that. Indeed the Bahujan Samaj Party of the dalits, which had given a clarion call for cleansing the dirty politics of the "Manuvadi" upper castes when it first began participating in elections, too has gone the corrupt way of the other parties. Most parties have also duplicated the patron-client relationship on which the Congress is based and are top down parties centred around single leaders or a small group of leaders. No wonder then that hardened criminals who have both power and pelf in the local settings have begun winning elections in embarrassingly large numbers and dictating what little is left of party policy. Since winning elections and staying in power have become ends in themselves rather than being the means for social transformation and people oriented governance, both electoral and legislative practice have been reduced to being a theatre of the absurd with bizarre goings on these days. The BJP, backed by the organisational muscle of the RSS and the backing of the capitalists has now excelled in manipulating the FPTP to gain an upper hand.

The Marginalisation of People’s Movements by FPTP

It does not require much perspicacity to see that given this corrupt milieu it is next to impossible to win elections at levels higher than that of the panchayats, and there too with much difficulty, while remaining true to ethical canons and priniciples of equity and sustainability. This is why the environmentalist mass movements have been unable to make any electoral headway at the legislative and parliamentary levels apart from some stray MLAs here or there  and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi and to some extent in Punjab. They have been able to win some seats in panchayats but since these have little financial or political powers, this does not help in influencing policy at the state or national level. A vicious circle of marginalisation results from this. There is a tendency among the masses to vote for those parties who they feel will be able to win and make an impact on governance. That is why the marginal "bin pende ka lota" image of the environmentalists has resulted in electoral formations set up by them falling flat and becoming even more marginalised. A major problem always is the mobilisation of resources to do political work in general and election campaigning in particular.

Therefore, there is a dire need to launch a campaign for a switch from the FPTP electoral system to the proportional representation system supported by state funding of elections which will considerably increase the chances of people’s movements being able to enter the legislatures and parliament. Even if these movements have small bases in diverse disjointed locations, cumulatively a federation like the National Alliance of People’s Movements can garner enough votes across the country to cross the minimum threshold of votes. Since the members of these movements and other voters will also know that their votes will not go waste they will also vote in larger numbers for these movements.

References

Bardhan, P (1999): The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Brass, P & Robinson, F eds (1989): The Indian National Congress and Indian Society 1885-1985: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Dominance, South Asia Books, Delhi.

Das, S (2001): The Nehru Years in Indian Politics: From a Historical Hindsight, Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies Number 16, Centre for South Asian Studies, School of Social & Political Studies, University of Edinburgh.

ECI (2005): Performance of National Parties Vis-a-Vis Others in General Elections, Election Commission of India website accessed on 12^th September 2005 at url http://www.eci.gov.in/Election Results_fs.htm

Nehru, J L (1975): Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series Vol VII, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, Delhi.

---------- (1983): Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series Vol I, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Patel, V (1936): All India Congress Committee Papers, Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, New Delhi, File-G-85(1).

Sinha, S (1984): Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement: An Overview, in Reddy, G K C ed Fifty Years of Socialist Movement in India: Retrospect and Prospect, Samata Era Publication, New Delhi.

------ (2005): Chunav Niti, Ranniti Va Anubhav (Election Ethics, Strategy and Experience), (in Hindi) Samayik Varta, Vol. 28 No. 11

Universal Basic Income as a means to a Revolutionary Transformation

 Current late capitalist domination has so atomised the working class that we now no longer have a proletariat, a class for itself but only a precariat with little or no class consciousness as a prelude to organising for a revolutionary transformation to a more socio-economically just dispensation. Under the circumstances just fighting for better working conditions and wages will not only be difficult but will not achieve a progress towards revolutionary transformation. Consequently, there is a need to fight for a universal basic income as well as will be argued in this note.

1.       Primitive Accumulation

Karl Marx had in Das Kapital defined primitive accumulation as a pre-capitalist phenomenon that led to the initial accumulation of capital on the one hand and the creation of wage labour on the other hand, resulting in the establishment of capitalism in England in the eighteenth century (Marx, 2016). Marx, critiquing Adam Smith’s earlier assertion that the process was a peaceful one in which some labourers through their hard work had accumulated capital (Smith, 2018), contended with evidence that peasants were driven off the land, on which they were serfs or petty producers and even the commons were enclosed, through extra-economic means such as arbitrary violence and laws enacted by the state. However, Marx himself said that while this was at that time a one-off process in England, it was not so in the colonies where petty agricultural producers continued to be there in large numbers providing rent to the colonisers, who sent the surplus so extracted back to the imperialist countries for expansion of capitalist production there. Rosa Luxemburg, too, argued that the existence of a non-capitalist space was necessary for the realization of the surplus component of the value of a capitalist commodity as well as for primitive accumulation from exploitation of labour and natural resources from the colonial periphery for the continuance of capitalist development as capitalism internally would not be stable (Luxemburg, 2003).

Later, Louis Althusser argued that primitive accumulation has been an integral part of capitalism because even after capitalism was well established in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it continued to extract surpluses by extra-economic means from the colonies and later the nominally independent nations of the post World War II era (Althusser, 2006). The onset of the neo-liberal era from the 1990s onwards, led on the one hand to a withdrawal of welfare benefits and union rights which had been gained by the working class through hard fought battles in the industrialised capitalist countries of the West and a dismantling of the socialist apparatuses of the USSR, China and Eastern Europe on the other. Many Marxian theorists argued that this was a revival of primitive accumulation within the capitalist system since it involved the exclusion of a vast number of people from the social commons which provided free education, health and unemployment benefits combined with the squeezing of wages through outsourcing of jobs and the handing over of public enterprises to private capital (Harvey, 2003, De Angelis, 2004). Moreover, tax breaks and subsidies were given to corporations which led to their increasing profits further reducing the funds available for maintaining the socio-economic commons. The huge dominance of finance capital globally and the use of international financial organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to impose cuts in public welfare spending in the developing countries and the transfer of the surpluses from them to the banks of the developed countries through debt and interest repayment were also considered to be extra-economic dispossession of the people of those countries and so a form of primitive accumulation.

This analysis has been cogently extended by Prabhat Patnaik to the case of India since the 1990s when neo-liberal policies were introduced in this country (Patnaik, 2017). Patnaik writes –

“The neo-liberal regime, has increased the tendency to inflict primitive accumulation upon third world petty producers. In the name of free trade, this sector, and above all peasant agriculture, is now exposed to world market fluctuations, which bring ruin to large sections of the peasantry. In the name of bringing about fiscal rectification, input subsidies to this sector, including cheap credit, are withdrawn. International agri-business and domestic big capitalists are able to squeeze the peasantry.

The second way in which primitive accumulation is carried out is in the name of ‘development’ itself, peasant lands are taken over for a ‘song’ for industrial and infrastructural projects. Not only is the peasantry, that legally owned this land, squeezed in the process, but also the entire group of tenants and agricultural labourers whose rights on the land are not even recognized when such take-over of land occurs.

The third way of primitive accumulation is increasing the tax-burden on petty production. Take the case of the uniform Goods and Services Tax, under which, all products are taxed, including the products of the petty producers that had not been taxed earlier, on a par with the products of big capitalists. This has, needless to say, the effect of squeezing this sector.

The fourth mechanism of primitive accumulation is through the privatization of essential services like education and health that the neo-liberal regime effects, which raises the prices of these services. Since the new service providers belong to the capitalist sector, such a rise in price is analytically analogous to a rise in the ‘degree of monopoly’ (Kalecki, 1971), which clearly has the effect of compressing the real income of the petty production sector and of the workers of the capitalist sector itself.”

Patnaik, however, does not mention above the most important means of primitive accumulation, that of non-payment of statutory minimum wages due to extra economic pressure exerted on the workers, leading to huge extraction of surplus value. This is even more of a problem in India than in the developed countries because the statutory minimum wages are themselves very low in most states in this country (The statutory minimum wage is 15 Purchasing Power Parity dollars a day on an average in India as opposed to 120 dollars per day in the USA). Marx showed that the exchange value of goods and services produced, depended on the socially necessary labour time required to produce them (Marx op cit). This social determination of labour time is not simply a function of supply and demand but is also dependent on negotiation between the working class and the capitalists. Thus, over time the proportion of the value created that would be given to the workers in the form of better wages and working conditions, was decided by contestation through trade unions between the workers and capitalists and increasing workers’ power resulted in the State also legislating to provide for regulation of the capitalists. Consequently, the absence of unionisation in the large informal sector or the roll-back of unionisation from the formal sector as has happened since the 1990s all over the world and in India, mean that there is extra-economic extraction of surplus value from workers within the capitalist system and this is a basic feature of primitive accumulation.

2.       Labour Situation in India

The fact is that industrialisation in India has from the beginning been fuelled by primitive accumulation based on cheap labour resulting from state policies to prevent unionisation and keep down wages and through dispossession by displacement (Basu, 2008). Education, health and employment for the masses have never been provided adequately by the State unlike in the developed countries and so the vast majority have had to remain unskilled, unhealthy and underemployed providing a large industrial reserve army who can be cheaply employed by the capitalists. Attempts by labour to organise and get better wages and working conditions are met with state repression. The most infamous example of this in recent times is the state repression of the workers of the Maruti Suzuki Car factory in Haryana (Deshpande & Haksar, 2023). The State has enabled this exploitation as labour laws have been implemented only for a miniscule proportion of the total workforce that is formally unionised. Whereas, there were 11124 registered trade unions in India, only 2311 of them filed returns and the total membership of the latter was only 6,181,731 (GoI, 2022).  We can safely assume that those trade unions that are not filing returns are defunct and so given the industrial workforce in India to be about 130 million or about 25 percent of the total work force (CEIC, 2023), the effectively organised industrial workforce is just 4.6 percent of the total.  Thus, the overwhelming majority of the workforce, being not only unorganised but also prevented from organising, are being paid much less than the statutory minimum wages which are themselves very low.

Moreover, from the time of independence the draconian but now repealed colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894, the Indian Forest Act 1927 and later the post-independence Wildlife Protection Act 1972 have been used to dispossess millions of peasants, especially tribespeople, from their land for development projects like dams, steel plants, mines and industrial areas without adequate compensation or rehabilitation (Basu, op cit).

A major labour phenomenon in India has been circular migration, which by definition, is a transitory phenomenon but it has been a long-standing feature of industrialisation right from its inception. Incipient industrialisation in the nineteenth century attracted migrants from rural areas. In the case of the jute mills of Bengal these were workers mostly from the rural areas in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and also from Odisha and Andhra Pradesh (De Haan, 2022). The cotton mills of Mumbai also had migrant workers from Ratnagiri to the south of the city and from Uttar Pradesh (Chandavarkar, 1994). These workers were men who lived alone and maintained close relations with their families back in the villages. Industrial or other urban jobs gave these migrants an opportunity to supplement meagre family incomes and farm livelihoods but did not result in a permanent transition from rural to urban life. It was only later in the twentieth century and especially after independence that the migrant workers settled down in cities as industrial growth spurted with greater public investment under the Five Year Plans and the need for permanent skilled labour increased (Joshi, 2008).

However, even after independence matters did not improve much because the nascent capitalist class drew up a plan for economic development of India based on primitive accumulation that is known as the “Bombay Plan” after the industrialists from Bombay who conceived of it (Thakurdas et al, 1944). This plan envisaged the rapid development of basic infrastructure through heavy state spending garnered from exploitation of the labour of the masses and the vast natural resources. It specifically mentioned that the state must intervene to maintain law and order and restrict individual freedoms given the possibility of dissent from the masses against such a policy and the new independent Government in India followed this path of development.

Consequently, the new Indian Constitution adopted in 1949 did not give fundamental rights status to the rights of education, health and employment and instead put them into the section on Directive Principles of State Policy which are non-justiciable. In fact, the Constitution was largely a copy of the colonial Government of India Act of 1935 and mirrored its anti-people provisions. So much so that G.D. Birla the doyen of the Indian capitalists gloated at the time, "We have embodied large portions of the 1935 Act, as finally passed, in the Constitution which we have framed ourselves and which shows that in the 1935 Act was cast the pattern of our future plans" (Birla, 1968). The Five Year Plans that were implemented from the 1950s, followed the anti-people guidance of the Bombay Plan. So, right from the time of independence people have been displaced from their land and have been forced into increasing the industrial reserve army, mainly as migrant labour. The state has actively promoted this policy. As a result, the unionisation of labour has always been weak in India and been restricted to a few big private firms, government departments and the public sector enterprises leaving the vast majority of workers at the mercy of primitive accumulation. Unfortunately, the Governments in the states and the centre which are mandated to enumerate the number and type of migrant workers as a part of the regulatory provisions of the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act 1979, do not do so. Therefore, there are no reliable estimates of migration in India apart from the Census data, which are both suspect and outdated. The Labour Bureau under the Ministry of Labour and Employment is conducting a large sample survey covering 1.2 Lakh households but the results have not been published as yet. According to one estimate there are 140 million migrant workers which amounts to about 27 percent of the total workforce (Ajeevika Bureau, 2023). Assuming that 25 percent of these migrant workers are working in industries, this comes to a fairly large number of 35 million and they are overwhelmingly unorganised.

Thus, migratory labour, continues to be of relevance and constitutes a large part of India’s urban workforce as was vividly shown by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when hundreds of thousands of workers returned to their villages from the cities (Khan and Arokkiaraj, 2021). Migratory labour is preferred by employers because of their lesser ability to unionise and demand better wages and working conditions as compared to local labour and so they are the mainstay of primitive accumulation in India. This process has been further enhanced with the spread of outsourcing and the gig economy in the neo-liberal era (Madan, 2023).

3.       Characteristics of Late Capitalism

The working class globally and in India received a major blow from the 1990s onwards as computerisation and the internet made it possible to outsource manufacturing to anywhere in the world where labour supply was high and state regulation was low and consequently wages too were low, so as to facilitate primitive accumulation. Not only did manufacturing shift out of the western capitalist countries but even in countries like India it shifted out of traditional manufacturing centres and even in those, contractual labour was used in large numbers. Moreover, in India, to further avoid the possibilities of the unionisation of workers, local recruitment of workers was reduced and migrant workers were brought in. This huge migrant work force is invisible simply because there are no records of their migration with the government or the employer industries as they are employed informally by contractors. They did become visible for some time during the initial Covid Pandemic in 2020 but they have once again become invisible.

This is a global phenomenon and so it is not possible for workers to fight for their rights locally beyond a point. Simply because a company that does not adopt these practices of primitive accumulation will go out of business as it will not be able to compete with others which are practising primitive accumulation elsewhere. States too are wary of regulating the capitalists because they will just pack up and leave as it is very easy to relocate manufacturing with the new technologies that are available. India, in fact, has seen a progressive whittling down of workers’ rights so as to increase the ease of doing business for capitalists (Jenkins, 2004).

Thus, the situation has changed drastically as there is no more a proletariat – a working class that is assured of its jobs and only has to fight for better working conditions and wages. Instead, what exists now is a precariat – a working class that is not assured of employment in addition to suffering from bad working conditions and wages due to extra-economic pressures. Organisation work requires money which traditionally used to come from the contributions of the workers who were assured of their jobs. However, now with workers not being assured of their jobs and mostly working on contract as migrants, not only are they unable to make contributions to their unions but they are also fearful of losing whatever low paying jobs they have by unionising. The new Labour Codes that have been legislated by the Union Government and whose implementation is presently stalled, not only do away with many protections that were there in the earlier laws but in the case of the unorganised sector and migrant workers, leave them high and dry without any social protection (WPC, 2020).

Expectedly Industry associations like Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Conference of Indian Industries (CII) and Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) have welcomed the reforms resulting from the new Labour Codes, since they facilitate industrialists to further casualise the workforce in their factories and reduce the workers’ collective bargaining powers and dilute the state’s regulatory institutions. The removal of the protective framework of labour rights and entitlements will result in further informalisation of the already small organised workforce in the country and reduce the possibilities of formalisation of the informal workers and especially migrants (Shyam Sundar & Sapkal, 2020). Thus, the whole project of organising workers in trade unions has been rendered very difficult. It has become even more utopian than it used to be earlier to propose the formation of a class for itself organised into a party of the working class seeking to overthrow the capitalist order beginning with the formation of trade unions.

Matters have been compounded by the fact that consumerism is being aggressively promoted among the workers also and so they are more interested in working long hours to earn more money to satisfy their consumerist desires rather than organise to improve their wages and limit primitive accumulation. Moreover, whatever little organisation there is, is being diabolically deflected into sectarian conflicts between different castes and religious communities further dividing the working class and preventing mobilisation for workers’ rights.

4.       Universal Basic Income

This increasing tendency of primitive accumulation is difficult to roll back in the present milieu of late capitalist dominance in which neither are states prepared to uphold workers’ rights and nor are the workers in a position to agitate for them on a sustained basis.  This precarity of the working class can be countered only by ensuring that they have a universal basic income (UBI) from the state given that welfare measures like free education and health that form part of the social commons have been cut back in recent decades (Gentilini et al, 2020). The state has to step in and provide a life long universal basic income to all adults so as to both provide a dignified life to workers and shore up the demand in the economy. The eternal problem for capitalism is that even after primitive accumulation and even more so because of it, crises of over production will beset it from time to time as there is not enough demand for the goods and services that are produced due to the poverty of the vast majority (Marx, op cit). For instance, in India the per capita annual income is dismally low at $ 2400 and 70 percent of the population earn less than this and so there is always a recessionary trend despite high overall growth in GDP which gets aggravated from time to time, as is currently the case, with high inflation. From the 1930s onwards, capitalist states have adopted welfare measures, the social commons, to counter this. However, these have been progressively dismantled over the last three decades of neo-liberal economic policies. Consequently, the social commons have to be restored through a new welfare measure like UBI. This will also enable the working class to organise for their rights as they will have some funds instead of being on the economic edge as they are now. As opposed to the utopian programmes of organising the fragmented working class to become a class for itself, the fight for an UBI holds more promise though it too is utopian given the present capitalist control of the world.

The resources for the UBI will come from a tax on all financial instruments and transactions that there are, most importantly the huge international trade in currencies which is not being taxed at all at present. The trade in currencies is more than twenty times the value of the trade in goods and services and is totally speculative in nature. It goes on 24 x 7 across the world and its profits come from exploitation of labour through primitive accumulation. So on the one hand labour is not being paid a living wage and on the other currency trading which is profiting from this is not being taxed at all in a blatant show of power by late capitalism.

Therefore, the working class movements the world over and in India will have to bolster their local battles for better wages and working conditions with a wider battle to put pressure on the state to provide a universal basic income so as to restore the social commons that has been whittled away. This will considerably reduce the precarity of the working class and allow it to once again organise not only for better working conditions and wages but also for a revolutionary transformation to a more just and inclusive socio-economy.

References

Ajeevika Bureau (2020): Labour and Migration in India, accessed on 30.08.2023 at url https://www.aajeevika.org/labour-and-migration.php.

Althusser, L (2006): Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, London and New York. Verso.

Basu, P. K. (2008): Globalisation: An Anti Text; A Local View. Delhi: Aakar Publications.

Birla, G. D. (1968): In The Shadow of The Mahatma, Mumbai, p. 131 quoted in S. K. Ghosh, 2001, The Indian Constitution and Its Review, Research Unit for Political Economy, Mumbai.

CEIC (2023): Labour Force Participation in India, accessed on 30.08.2023 at url https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/india/labour-force-participation-rate

Chandavarkar, R (1994): The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

De Angelis, M (2004): Separating the doing and the deed: Capital and the continuous character of enclosures, Historical Materialism, Vol. 12: 57-87

De Haan, A (2022): Labour in South Asia from mid Nineteenth to mid Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Deshpande, A. & Haksar, N. (2023): Japanese Management, Indian Resistance:  The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workers, Harper Collins, New Delhi.

Gentilini, U., Grosh, M., Rigolini, J. & Yemtsov, R. (2020): Exploring Universal Basic Income: A Guide to Navigating Concepts, Evidence, and Practices, World Bank, Washington, DC.

GoI (2022): Report on Trade Unions in India 2019, Labour Bureau, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, Chandigarh.

Harvey, D (2003): The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, New York.

Jenkins (2004): Labor Policy and the Second Generation of Economic Reform in India, India Review 3(4): 333–363.

Joshi, C (2008): Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities, History Compass, pp. 439-454.

Kalecki, M (1971): Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy 1933-1971, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Khan, A & Arokkiaraj, H (2021): Challenges of reverse migration in India: a comparative study of internal and international migrant workers in the post-COVID economy, Comparative Migration Studies, Vol 9.

Kumar S, Heath AF, Heath O. (2002): Changing patterns of social mobility, Econ. Polit. Wkly, Vol. 37 No. 40 pp 4091–96.

Luxemburg, R. (2003): The Accumulation of Capital, tr. Agnes Schwarzschild, London and New York, Routledge.

Marx, K (2016): Capital Vol 1,2,3. Fingerprint Publishing, Delhi.

Madan, A (2023): Dark Side of the Gig Economy, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 58 Issue 19.

MoSPI (2010): Migration in India 2007-08, National Sample Survey Organisation, New Delhi.

Patnaik, P (2017): The Concept of Primitive Accumulation of Capital, Marxist, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, October-December.

Saxena (1993): The Hindu Trade Union Movement in India: The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Asian Survey, Vol 33, No 7.

Shyam Sundar, K. R. & Rahul Sapkal (2020): Changes to Labour Laws by State Governments Will Lead to Anarchy in the Labour Market. Economic and Political Weekly 55(23)

Smith, A (2018): The Wealth of Nations, Fingerprint Publishing, Delhi.

Thakurdas, P., Tata, J.R.D., Birla, G.D., Lalbhai, K., Dalal, S.R.A., Shroff, A.D. & Mathai, J. (1944): A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India, Mumbai

Vaid, D. (2014): Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence, Annu. Rev. Sociol. No. 40 pp 391–410.

WPC (2020): Why the New Labour Codes leave the Workers even more precariously poised than before, September 23^rd, Scroll, accessed on 31.08.2023 at url https://scroll.in/article/973877/why-the-new-labour-codes-leave-workers-even-more-precariously-poised-than-before

 

 

 

Propagating Heirloom Seeds

 Kansari nu Vadavno, the Bhil Adivasi women's organisation led by Subhadra Khaperde has been reviving the cultivation of the traditional indigenous seeds of Western Madhya Pradesh over the past eight years. These women farmers have not only succeeded in cultivating over thirty varieties of traditional seeds ranging from millets, rice, wheat, pulses, oilseeds and fibre to vegetables, but have also spread them across the country by participating in organic seed festivals. Bicchibai and Gendabai two stalwart farmers of the organisation are participating in the latest Organic Seed Festival in Indore with their cornucopia of seeds and are holding forth before farmers, consumers and the media about the importance of this campaign to save the agro-biodiversity and so the food security of Western Madhya Pradesh.

The Used Water Debacle

 A few years ago I did a study for the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) on the status of Water management in the city of Jaipur (https://lnkd.in/dqwkV4yM

). On the basis of data collected I had shown that centralised water management in the city was both economically unviable and ecologically unsustainable. I had also said that the beautification project on the Dravyavati River passing through the city was ill conceived and would fail in the long run because the plan for intercepting drains emptying into the river and treating the used water in them through STPs would not work. The main problem was that the Jaipur Municipal Corporation did not have the funds to operate the STPs and the centralised water supply. While water supply being crucial is somehow fulfilled to some extent, used water treatment is given a go by.
I had also said that the only solution was to implement building level rainwater harvesting/recharge and used water treatment and reuse.
I find now on a visit to Jaipur that all my dark predictions have unfortunately come true.
The biggest STP at Delawas of 215 MLD capacity is dysfunctional and is releasing the sewage water untreated into the Dravyavati River. The smaller STPs along the river built to treat the used water from the intercepted drains are also dysfunctional. Consequently, the Dravyavati River is not only stinking to high heaven but is also emitting the green house gas methane in large quantities.

What I found most disconcerting was that a totally irrational method of disposal of used water is being implemented in individual buildings. Small wells called kuis of 1m diamter are dug to about 10m depth and concrete rings with a few small holes are put in them. The untreated used water is emptied into them.

 These wells fill up very soon and then they are emptied by desludging tankers which then empty their tanks in the Dravyavati River or some drain that empties into it.

To add insult to injury, farmers downstream are using this highly polluted water of the Dravyavati River to produce food crops.

There is something seriously wrong with water management in this country, especially in our cities and towns and despite clear guidelines in the rules and laws for implementation of building level water management, the folly of centralised water management is persisted with.

The Crisis of Smallholder Agriculture

 The biggest concern at present should be about the severe constraints that the small and marginal farmers, who constitute 85% of all farming households and 50% of the total population of India, face. These farmers put in a huge amount of back breaking family labour into their farming. This labour is grossly underpaid at about Rs 100 per day as revealed from surveys that we have conducted in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh. Whereas the latest statutory minimum daily wage in the state is Rs 335 for unskilled, Rs368 for semiskilled, Rs 421 for skilled and Rs 471 for highly skilled. Farming is a highly skilled operation and so the farmers should be paid Rs 471 in the interests of equity. Especially because the analysis of the consumption expenditure surveys that we simultaneously carry out show that the respondents are suffering from chronic hunger. One can easily imagine what raising the household labour wage to Rs 471 per day will do to the farmgate price of agricultural produce. When we paid a wage of Rs 220 per day (the statutory minimum wage for unskilled labour in MP last year) and also a fifty percent profit over and above their operating costs to the farmers with whom we work in our organic farming project (https://kansariorganics.in/) the farmgate price of our organic wheat shot up to Rs 27 per kg as opposed to the Rs 17 prevailing in the market for chemical wheat and the Rs 20 offered under the MP government's MSP scheme (which is anyway available to a limited number of farmers). After adding on the costs of the subsidy we provided to the farmers for organic composting and bio-enzyme rich liquid making and cleaning and grading the price of our wheat in Indore is Rs 35 per kg whereas the chemical wheat of similar quality sells at Rs 25 per kg. Few people are prepared to buy our wheat at this premium despite its being the cheapest authentic organic wheat available in this country because we are not charging any profits or management costs which are met by grant funding. This in turn means that there is a need for direct transfers to farmers by the government to compensate them properly as the market will not do so. Since the chemical agriculture being practised now is both economically and ecologically unsustainable this cash transfer should be given to farmers to switch the country from chemical monoculture to organic biodiverse agriculture combined with huge investments in communitarian ecosystem conservation and restoration, compost and bio-enzyme rich liquid making on a very large scale to replace chemical fertilisers and decentralized renewable energy production from gasification of agricultural and forest biomass.

But why have we come to this sorry pass? There were four major constraints to agriculture in the British colonial times as follows - high land rents under the zamindari and ryotwari systems, usury, these two in turn prevented investments in soil and water conservation and in situ irrigation development and the low availability of fertilisers. We had innumerable varieties of crops including rice and wheat varieties that were of a high yielding type and therefore there was no constraint as regards to crop varieties. There was no storage problem either as there were traditional methods of decentralised storage of crops that were very effective. With independence the first obstacle was removed to a great extent even though land reforms did not take place as much as they should have and this released the energies of the peasantry in farming leading to a considerable boost in agricultural production. However, usury continued and constrained investments in soil and water conservation and in situ irrigation. Therefore, what was required was greater land reform, control of usury and extension of cheap credit, heavy investments in forest, soil and water conservation and in situ irrigation development and last but not the least heavy investments in composting to increase organic manure availability which is a highly labour intensive process. Animal manure on its own is not enough for the huge agricultural land in this country and so agricultural residue has to be mixed with a little organic manure and composted to greatly multiply the availability of manure. Beginning with Albert Howard there have been many experts in composting in India and so the needs of fertiliser can be easily met through widespread composting and bioenzyme rich organic liquid making. Unfortunately, none of these were done and so agriculture continued to be constrained and combined with the other folly at the time of independence of not implementing compulsory and free school education which would have put boys and girls in school instead of them getting married and producing children which led to a population explosion, we faced a food crisis in the 1960s. There was no nationalism involved in going for the green revolution. It was a neo-colonial collaboration between the American MNCs and the Savarna elite who were ruling this country and still do ( the British too were able to rule over India for such a long time because of the collaboration they received from the Savarna elites. they would have been kicked out in 1857 itself if they had not received extensive support from the Savarnas who had benefited from their rule), to ignore the possibilities of a policy of land reform, control of usury, investment in forest, soil and water conservation and in situ irrigation and widespread composting and instead foist hybrid seeds, big dams, deep tubewells, chemical fertilisers and pesticides and cheap coal fired electricity all heavily subsidised by the Government. This chemical monoculture has devastated both agriculture and food availability, especially in the rural areas where there is chronic hunger.

There is only one solution to the crisis of agriculture, water scarcity. rural unemployment and chronic hunger - gradually switching the whole country to organic biodiverse agriculture over a period of five years by providing heavy subsidies to farmers to make the switch by investing in forest, soil and water conservation, in situ irrigation and composting and generation of decentralised renewable energy from gasification of agricultural and forest biomass. Especially composting because it is a labour intensive process and absolutely essential to replace chemical fertilisers. This is difficult though because after 50 years of chemical agriculture most farmers have lost the belief that it is possible to do agriculture in any other way and it is extremely hard to convince them to make this switch as we have found out when we have tried to fund farmers to make this switch.

A Fair Income

 The FAO has estimated that a healthy diet costs about US$4 per person per day, which applying the purchasing power parity conversion rate of ₹23 to the dollar works out to ₹92. So given an average household size of 4.4 currently this works out to a food expenditure of roughly ₹400 per household per day. The latest consumption expenditure survey conducted in 2022-23 by the National Statistical Organisation says that food expenditure constitutes about 43% of the total household consumption expenditure. So for a healthy diet combined with other associated requirements for a good life the annual household consumption expenditure should be at least (400/0.43)*365= ₹340000.

Ideally a household should have a savings of 20% and so a decent annual household income is ₹425000.
Therefore, when we as development workers talk of improving the incomes of the people at the bottom of the pyramid and say we have impacted their lives positively we have to benchmark our impact against this desired basic income. To what extent have we been able to ensure this level of income for the beneficiaries on a sustainable basis. So far I have not seen such an analysis anywhere. Instead organisations proudly say that they have increased the incomes by a few thousand rupees or so.
In fact given the kind of low prices that farmers and craftspersons get for their produce and the low wages workers get for their labour, it is doubtful that such a high income as estimated here can be ensured by NGOs through development interventions. Therefore, there is a strong case for the provision by the government of a lifelong universal basic income equal to the statutory minimum wage to all adults funded by a tax on bank deposits and other financial assets. This can be tied to various projects of ecosystem restoration, sustainable farming and craft and renewable energy generation to ensure sustainability in the long run. This will not only solve the problem of low incomes resulting from low productivity and lack of well paying employment opportunities but will also push up both demand and supply in the economy.