A Crisis of Livelihood in the COVID-Era: A comparative analysis of two approaches

March 25, 2021
• Development Studies

Introduction: 

In the wake of a global pandemic, communities worldwide faced sudden and unforeseen socio-economic challenges. Food crises, mass unemployment, and economic recession became the norm in what future historians will likely refer to as the “COVID” era1. When studying such a multidimensional crisis, the proposed solutions too are many-fold and are highly influenced by the value systems that underlie the decision-making process in developing countries. Further, we must take into account the relative vulnerabilities of different communities in our studies. In the current economic crisis, low-income households with less access to social securities are among the most vulnerable.

In this analysis, I attempt to compare and contrast two proposed approaches to development during and after the COVID crisis, particularly in India’s low-income population. I further try to justify why building locally sustainable economic systems with the help of participatory development principles can build disaster resilience and provide a feasible and inclusive alternative to dependence on urban industrialization and global capitalist frameworks.

Discussion:  

In the aftermath of the sudden national lockdowns and the resulting job loss, the low-income households faced a more significant crisis due to lack of savings, unavailability of credit, and financial illiteracy as established by surveys such as the “PayNearby India Savings Behaviour Survey”2. But the “poor” can further be divided into two different horizontal divisions, the “urban poor” consisting primarily of the migrant workers in cities living in the slums and the “rural poor” residing in villages and specializing in agriculture and handicraft industries3.

While one would naively expect that since both are “poor and underprivileged”, they would be equally vulnerable to the economic crisis, the reality is very different. The urban poor experienced higher levels of unemployment and found themselves with barely enough social security from the state, thus triggering social distress and mass migration back to villages4. On the other hand, many of the rural poor, who have a higher social cohesion, could establish local self-sufficiency with the help of civil society organizations. The distinction between the two gives us an exciting opportunity to compare their relative disaster resilience and the principles behind their organization and use this to guide our developmental progress.

In Ashish Kothari’s article in ‘The Hindu’5, the author adopts a participatory development framework and provides evidence for how small villages have resisted the large-scale macroeconomic phenomenon of economic recession by focusing on highly localized and decentralized systems of production and distribution. Supported mainly through the activity of civil society organizations such as the Deccan Development Society, Navadarshanam, and local panchayats, these villages were able to achieve not only food security (“anna swaraj”) but also promote ecological sustainability. Contrary to the capitalists’ expectations of inefficiency from a small-scale system, these groups were able to produce a surplus used to support other communities while empowering socially oppressed groups such as women.

The author further argued that small-scale industries have a significant role in preventing financial instability and uncertain migration behavior by creating not “jobs” but “livelihoods”. This idea echoes the political philosophy of Karl Marx (‘alienation’)6 and John Locke (‘workmanship ideal’)7. Industrialized assembly-line production has uncoupled the product and their creators, thus alienating the labor from what they produce. Establishing local industries reestablishes the connection and promotes greater involvement and economic investment creating stable risk-resilient ways of sustained living rather than just a risk-vulnerable income source. In essence, the author argues for village-level sustainable development focused on subsistence driven by small industries and self-sufficient local cooperatives and civil society institutions that prioritizes the people’s livelihoods over seeking economic expansion.

On the other hand, the article in “The Print’ by Manish Sabharwal and Sabina Dewan focuses on the urban poor and takes a neoclassical economics approach to development8. They see the economic instability in the lives of the urban poor as a temporary change, a business cycle recession, driven by the stress on the macroeconomy due to the pandemic and tries to argue that the way forward is to wait for the “migrant workers [to] come back.” While they see this as a reforms opportunity to improve the urban poor’s economic disaster resilience through policy changes in education, social security, and labor laws, they still argue for a highly industrialized society focusing on urbanization. Since large industries benefit from economies of scale, this translates into national if not global value chains that prioritize the interest of the wealthy capitalists (the top 1%).

In the modern world, the nature of the crises itself has changed. In the past, disasters were highly localized and infrequent. Nowadays, due to climate change, improved communication and transport, minor and frequent random crises can influence the global economy, as apparent from the current pandemic9. This suggests that large-scale value chains that are the foundation of capitalistic economies are much more vulnerable to disruption. Also, urban communities with higher densities are more susceptible to the adverse effects of disasters such as mass distress, lower response times, and overload of public services and social security systems making urban disaster risk reduction a major logistical challenge. A local community-driven economy, on the other hand, to a certain extent, dissociates itself from the global value chains and large-scale macroeconomic cycles at the cost of productivity that an economy of scale brings.

The nationalized state-capitalistic system adopted by the current right-wing Indian government tends to prioritize “national interest” over the people itself, as apparent from their response to the farmer protests in recent days. In contrast to such a state-driven development framework, a local civil society organization is mainly driven by the local interest in the area it operates and promotes participation from the community in decision making. Furthermore, a people-led local group is a lot more likely to be well-versed with the local community’s social and cultural lives. It is equipped to provide a culturally-sensitive response, especially in crises where a fast and directed response is required. These pieces of evidence suggest that a developmental framework that prioritizes a highly industrialized and urbanized community is inherently at greater risk from disasters than a localized, decentralized system that is inherently more resilient to disasters.

Conclusion : 

The articles discussed the contrast between two different fundamental participatory forces in development. Kothari emphasizes the role of civil society organizations in inclusive growth, while Sabharwal and Dewan try to support the role of market forces in industrial economies. While it is impossible to prescribe a “one size fits all” solution to the organization of development, rural empowerment, localization and decentralization provide an exciting and disaster-resilient alternative to modern-day urban capitalistic economies.

References:

1.    Post-lockdown misery of India’s migrant workers. The Indian Express https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coornavirus-national-lockdown-impact-migrant-workers-exodus-women-7241944/ (2021).

2.    Chakraborty, N. Covid-19 has hit finances of low-income the most; affluent still better off. mint https://www.livemint.com/money/personal-finance/covid-19-has-hit-finances-of-low-income-the-most-affluent-still-better-off-11593677472785.html (2020).

3.    Jha, R. How is urban poverty different from rural? ORF https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/how-urban-poverty-different-rural/.

4.    Biswas, N. S. and M. Covid19 and the Urban Poor: India’s nowhere people. ORF https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/covid19-and-the-urban-poor/.

5.    Kothari, A. What does self-reliance really mean? Amazing stories emerge from India’s villages. The Hindu (2020).

6.    Leopold, D. Alienation. in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Zalta, E. N.) (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018).

7.    Tuckness, A. Locke’s Political Philosophy. in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Zalta, E. N.) (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020).

8.    Sabharwal, M. Dear intellectuals, migrant workers will come back. Here are the five reasons. ThePrint https://theprint.in/opinion/dear-intellectuals-migrant-workers-will-come-back-here-are-the-five-reasons/426077/ (2020).

9.    Dominey-Howes, D. Explainer: are natural disasters on the rise? The Conversation http://theconversation.com/explainer-are-natural-disasters-on-the-rise-39232.