We are finding much in the way of community power, self-reliance and self-determination coming from India at the moment (see our material on “neighborocracy”).

Look at this story in The Hindu paper, “What does self-reliance really mean? Amazing stories emerge from India’s villages”.

And indeed they are amazing stories:

True self-reliance won’t come from relentless industrialisation, but from localisation and decentralisation, as demonstrated by these remarkable stories of empowered rural communities.

Not so long ago, Dalit women farmers in Telangana used to face hunger and deprivation. Today, they have contributed foodgrains for pandemic relief.

Farmers on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border have been sending organic produce to Bengaluru even during the lockdown.

And Adivasi villages in central India are using community funds to take care of migrant workers who have returned home.

These inspiring stories show the potential of empowered rural communities to cope with a crisis. And they expose the tragedy of a path of ‘development’ and governance that has not recognised or, worse, taken away the extraordinary agency of ordinary villagers to manage their lives.

Take Chandramma, who grows 40 varieties of crops, chemical free, on her rainfed plot in Bidakanne village in the Medak district of Telangana.

“I have enough food to last through the lockdown and beyond,” she says during a Vikalp Varta webinar. Chandramma and thousands of Dalit farmers like her contributed 20,000 kg of foodgrains to Medak district’s COVID-19 relief measures.

And they provide 1,000 glasses of nutritious millet porridge daily to health, municipality and police workers in Zaheerabad town nearby.

They are part of the Deccan Development Society, whose women’s sanghas are active in 75 villages in Telengana, and have helped thousands of women from a casteist, patriarchal society to revive dry land, millet-centred farming and thus gain control over land, seeds, water and knowledge.

Having achieved anna swaraj (food sovereignty) and self-sufficiency, the women are now feeding others.

The article goes on to detail scores more initiatives like these. The context of “self-reliance” comes from the Indian government’s recently use of the term, as the strategic focus of their post-Covid recovery programme (see this report). As the author of this article points out, there’s “enormous livelihood potential of rural, small-scale industries—India’s crafts employ 150-200 million people, second only to agriculture”.

Residents of Kunariya village in Kutch taking part in a local governance exercise

But Premier Modi’s government ignores them and instead, says the author, “pursues Memorandums of Understanding with foreign companies, dilutes laws protecting labour and environmental rights, puts heavy tax burdens on handicrafts, and continues to forcibly acquire land, forest, and other resources so vital to the rural economy, only to hand them over to corporations.”

We really recommend you read through Ashish Kothari’s piece, and indeed his archive of articles for the Hindu, which reveals the full spread of his interests and activism in this area. But his conclusions from the many stories Ashish tells here are worth dwelling on, in our own context:

These stories demonstrate what self-reliance really means — the revitalising of rural livelihoods. Note that I am talking about livelihoods, not jobs — about occupations linked to everyday life, social relations, and culture, providing body and soul with satisfaction. Industrialising the economy, with its soul-deadening assembly-line jobs, is not the solution.

….These stories, of village-level self-sufficiency in food, livelihoods, water, energy, sanitation, housing, and other basic needs, tell us of the urgent need to move towards localisation as an alternative to economic globalisation, which, as the pandemic exposed, abandoned its workforce when production stopped.

A member of the Deccan Development Society in her millet field

The stories tell us that clusters of settlements can be self-reliant in basic needs, significantly reducing distress migration and urban crowding. They tell us that communities can govern themselves, while making the state accountable.

Achieving this requires, of course, the dismantling of patriarchy, casteism, and other forms of discrimination, but it can be done through mobilisation, critical external facilitation, and sensitive education.

More here. Kothari’s own organisation, KALPAVRIKSH, is also worth exploring.

"The extraordinary agency of ordinary villagers": India's rural areas show enduring self-reliance, under the toughest conditions