Impressions on 4th Gyan Shodh

Place:  Village Kappaladoddi, Mandal  Pedana, Dist Krishna, AP
Dates: 20-21 September 2013
Local Contact: Mr Loganatham, a weaver and social worker
Participants: Apoorva Reddy, Saket, Vivek, Shyam Sunder, Brigadier

Genesis

Kappaladoddi is weavers’ village predominantly in the rich district of Krishna in Andhra Pradesh. It has over 1000 weaver families living in an abject poverty with meager incomes and disturbing health for the last so many decades. Seeing such a poor village in the heart of most rich district of AP is surprising.

Palle Srujana visited the village on an invitation from Sri Loganatham, a weaver from Kappaldoddi village. He asked Palle Srujana to see how his people are living and resorting to suicides due to hardships faced by them. Palle Srujana decided to conduct  a Gyan Shodh  in that village to understand the issues , unmet needs, and the system indifference on the village. No promises or commitments were made prior to the visit to Sh Loganatham.

Impressions of Vivek Nomani, one of the participant from USA  based on few questions are as follows

1) How did you like the event and how could it be better? 

I really liked the group approach to understanding a village's problems and trying to come up with possible solutions. I am not sure how this would work, but I think if we had brought along some people who have worked extensively on the issues at hand (like the folks at dastkar andhra) and created a three-way dialogue between us, these 'experts' and the villagers, we might have been able to come up with more productive ideas. 

2) What could be the possible solutions to implement in the village? 

A water filtration system to reduce their drinking water costs; affordable, solar powered looms to increase their productivity; a villager-run training program to train single mothers and other women who don't even have the knowledge to run the looms; some sort of childhood nutrition program to curb malnutrition; improved access to markets. 

3) What was your biggest takeaway? 

I was stunned at how many families were struggling to get their children out of the industry, as well as by the suicides, which I am curious to learn more about. (Are they a rising trend?) 

4) What can Palle Srujana do as a voluntary organization? 

And here I believe that what may soon be necessary for Palle Srujana is the development of a kind of intellectual framework that links the themes of the various Gyan Shodhs and places them within the context of national and international changes. I would argue that the framework need not (and probably shouldn't) be ideological, but it should be personal, philosophical, and most of all grounded in reality. 

What is really putting the weavers into so much debt and duress? A few bad moneylenders? A flawed village-level system? As the weavers said themselves, something else is afoot. Prices are rising beyond their control but their incomes are not keeping up. In other words, the value society/the economy places on their labor is much less than its own growth. To give another example, my father, fresh out of IIT, earned 6,000 rupees a month as a software professional in the late 1980s. These days my cousins, with similar qualifications, are getting hired for 90k. So in just twenty-five years, the nominal value of that labor has risen about fifteenfold. For weavers, farmers, many other rural people, it has maybe doubled, or tripled, but hardly more than that. And in the same period, we've have an average interest rate of 7.9%, meaning the price level has gone up 6.7 times. Meaning, if we assume that the income from weaving a single sari has tripled, a weaver will have to work at least twice as hard to maintain the same standard of living as he or she did twenty five years ago. 

The problem is national. Kappaladoddi is one examples of thousands of rural communities across India that are seeing their traditional livelihoods endangered, and no longer sustainable. This must be obvious to you already: with liberalization comes standardization, and the privileging of so-called highly skilled labor. In America they have already made this trade-off, with single farmers now managing hundreds of acres of land, and most of the workforce engaged in some incarnation of the service sector, usually made possible by the leverage of American corporations around the world. Is the same really possible in India, with its centuries of diverse rural traditions? Can the children of hundreds of millions of rural people really become engineers and technologists, even in the best case scenario? 

This is my bigger question: When globalization has introduced American snacks and Japanese televisions to the remotest corners of India, why hasn't it managed to introduce Indian handlooms to the rest of the world? Surely the markets for these products exist out there. 

I think a framework is necessary to connect the dots and address these questions. And it shouldn't be ideological because ideologies tend to be reactionary, dealing in useless extremes; there are already hundreds of 'anti-globalization' groups in the country, most of which I'm afraid have accomplished very little. For better or worse we live in a liberalized, interconnected world; you can't just un-globalize an economy. But I don't see many people working towards the social and technological innovations that might make traditional, seemingly outdated livelihoods more sustainable. 

5) How can you contribute? 

I am going to do some more work on the weavers story and try to pitch it somewhere. I am happy to do some writing for Palle Srujana and, of course, attend more Gyan Shodhs.  

That's it for now. Let me know if I missed anything! 

All the best,
Vivek

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Vivek Nemana
vnemana@gmail.com
+91 9573653011 
viveknemana.com