One of the most potent signs of India’s greater participation in the globalised world is the growing hostility between civil society and corporate India. Protests outside Davos or World Trade Organisation gatherings overseas are now increasingly matched in India by a prominent civil society presence — and, in the case of Bt Brinjal hearings around the country, a noisy voice as well.
That’s a significant change after nearly a decade and a half of celebrating India’s economic progress in which India Inc has been the hero. It’s not an unvarnished villain now by any means, but questions are beginning to be raised about its contribution to society in environmental and social terms.
Contrast this with the pre-nineties situation when tea and coffee plantations and giant public and privately-promoted engineering and chemical plants could create, with impunity, luxurious internal worlds that contrasted starkly with the immediate external environments. In the case of the plantation business — legacies of Raj grandeur — the gap between management and labour lifestyles was hard to ignore. Yet I cannot recall any NGO ever coming forward to protest. Land acquisition for industrial projects and dams in the early years of Independence was couched in terms of “nation building”, so few were disposed to speak for the dispossessed in tribal and other backward areas in those days — and their predicament was no better then, than it is today.
Now, fuelled by special interest groups and corporate rivalries, NGOs have emerged as a powerful institutional voice shaping the public discourse. It’s fair to say that this development is not such a bad thing — if only because it has put the social agenda on the table in a more definitive manner, prompting corporations to look at CSR beyond philanthropy.
No one can quibble, for instance, when a bank, credit card company or telecom service provider offers the option of replacing a paper bill with an online one. Or when companies invest in energy — and water — saving options for their offices and factories.
The problem, however, is that the differences between civil society organisations and the corporate world have coagulated into hard-line stances that are playing out in the political sphere in ways that are unlikely to help anybody. It was evident a decade ago in the Narmada skirmishes over the height of the dam that would displace people; in the face-off between the government and the NGOs, the voice of civil engineers suggesting a via media was drowned out. Today, every time the business plans of a Vedanta, Lafarge or Monsanto or the building of an expressway are curtailed by environmental or health rules, civil society exults and India Inc and its votaries grumble. The truth, as tribals, land-losers and businessmen will tell you off the record, lies somewhere in between hard-to-trust corporations and government institutions and avaricious local interests.
Such polarisation is, ultimately, self-defeating for contenders on both sides of the debate. For one, it is generating all sorts of well-meaning but worthless suggestions. Allocating shares to land-losers is one of them. First announced some years ago for a project in West Bengal, the plan was sold as a way of giving land-losers “a stake” in the projects for which they’re losing assets. The company concerned was perplexed by the underwhelming response from potential land-losers. “What will I do with shares?” an elderly farmer asked. In a country in which only about a third of the rural population has bank accounts and less than 3 per cent of India’s total population invests in the stock market, this is a valid question.
Meanwhile, India Inc, stung by allegations of social and environmental irresponsibility, hard-sells and burnishes its CSR credentials in ways that convinces few and antagonises many. Too often, corporations cynically exploit the CSR agenda to hold strategy sessions on what programme will “fit” their image instead of undertaking a sincere assessment of what’s needed and what’s possible.
Worst of all, it’s the politician who cynically leverages the inability of civil society and corporate India to find a meeting ground. For every leader with a capitalist crony offering jobs is a Mamata Banerjee or Rahul Gandhi promising an Arcadian status quo. Both constituencies want the same thing: power. But development becomes a casualty.