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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

‘Mere Paas Sarkaar Hai’ -Mihir Shah

-TheIndiaForum.in

The uniqueness of agriculture calls for continued & not less government intervention. Reform of Indian agriculture is needed, but this must be to enhance state capacities and strengthen regulatory oversight. What would be a “better government that is better”?

Over the past 30-40 years, all over the world, the word “reform” has come to acquire a very specific meaning. Summed up as the Washington Consensus, it proposes reducing the role of government and moving towards greater privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation of economic activities. This “consensus” has now almost acquired the status of what Pierre Bourdieu, in his classic Outline of a Theory of Practice, called “doxa”—beliefs that are “taken for granted, self-evident and undisputed”, producing for the established social order “the naturalization of its own arbitrariness” (Bourdieu 1972, 164).

Since reform, by definition, is taken to mean only one thing, sector after sector is compulsively sought to be moved in this direction, even if overwhelming evidence over many years from all over the world indicates that it is the state that has played the leading role in provisioning the most critical aspects of life: water, sanitation, education, health, food and nutrition. Totally ignoring lessons from this experience, over the past two decades Indian policy-makers have repeatedly suggested that agriculture must also be freed from what neoconservatives call “the dead hand of regulation” (Wilson 1971). As rural India has seen quite unprecedented distress for some time now, the solution proposed is simple: get the state out of the way, give farmers their freedom and everyone will live happily ever after!

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