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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Pioneering thoughts -Ramachandra Guha

Pioneering thoughts -Ramachandra Guha

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published Published on Oct 22, 2022   modified Modified on Oct 22, 2022

-The Telegraph

Radhakamal Mukerjee: an ecological pioneer

In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukerjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukerjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar to recognise the vital importance of common property resources to the sustenance of peasant agriculture.  While cultivated land was owned by individuals or families, canals were traditionally held and managed by the village, as were woods and grasslands. Thus, as Mukerjee wrote, “where private ownership might confer a privilege against the rest of the community, their use has never been allowed to be exclusive.”

In the precolonial Indian village, it was the collective ownership and use of irrigation channels that was most significant. The management of irrigation, observed Mukerjee, “compels men to give up an anti-social individualism, or suffer in consequence... it forces men to enter into closer economic relations with other men…”. Thus, “in the Indian village communities there are minute communal relations of the supply of water to prevent the mutual rights of the cultivators. To prevent a tyrannical use of property, India has sought to establish a kind of communal ownership of tanks and the distributory channels of irrigation — the most important instruments of agricultural production.”

Mukerjee argued that these indigenous systems of common property management had been undermined by British colonial rule. A State forest department had taken over the wooded areas, working them for commercial purposes and criminalising villagers who sought to use them for subsistence. The tanks and canals had also been placed under a government department, with officials appointed by the State put in charge of their upkeep.  This change, wrote Mukerjee, “has brought about a complete loss of initiative of the people as regards… public works, which were formerly maintained by the indigenous machinery, but which have fallen into desuetude and disrepair in the absence of all responsibility and all authority, customary or positive”. 

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The Telegraph, 22 October, 2022, https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/pioneering-thoughts-radhakamal-mukerjee-an-ecological-pioneer/cid/1893543


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