When someone says he is writing a book with the express purpose of reducing poverty, you hesitate, thinking it’s another of those capitalism-sucks-let’s-go-back-to-nature kind of half-communist NGOs. But when you get to know that the person writing the book is someone who has increased his company’s turnover 25 times in the last seven years, and that he is an unabashed believer in the power of markets, you sit up and listen or, in this case, read.
Even those not familiar with the name William Nanda Bissell would be knowing of FabIndia and its 108 stores across the country (and there are some in Rome and Dubai!) doing, what Bissell calls, ‘ideology marketing’, or selling the organic life – from natural fibre clothing to no-fertiliser oatmeal. Bissell’s theme is one we live every day of our lives. We are a democracy with the power to elect a prime minister every 13 days if we like, but we don’t have the power to get the tree outside our houses cut; we have the power to file as many public interest litigations, but are powerless when it comes to removing even one of the scores of corrupt officials we come across everyday… the list goes on.
Bissell’s book is an attempt to fix all of this, a grand rearrangement of the manner in which India works, right down to a unicameral form of legislature, a completely cashless economy, a Nandan Nilekani kind of card that captures details of your income levels and gives the poor automatic ‘top-ups’, and even a new tax system (it’s way too detailed to explain here, so you do have to read the book… the maths is complicated, so just take it for granted that Bissell’s done his sums right — when’s the last time your FabIndia bill was wrong?). The only thing Bissell’s left untouched is the country’s people, the people for whom he’s written this book!
In all of this, there’s a market to ensure justice, a Justice Adam Smith if you will. The poorest of India’s poor, Bissell points out correctly, live in the richest ecosystems in the country. So why not, he posits, let the residents of Panchsheel Park, the tony south Delhi colony where he lives, buy environment credits (think of the concrete they use, the carbon their fancy cars and air conditioners emit and the plastic bottles they throw out of their cars) from Sewari village in western Rajasthan which is trying to harvest water and preserve mother nature. Once you price resources right, two things happen. First, Bissell’s neighbours stop indiscriminate emission of carbon and second, poor villagers in Sewari get paid for their efforts to preserve the Earth.
Bissell’s narrative, especially when it comes to what the villagers in Sewari are attempting, is evocative, but after this the book gets quite heavy. And with good reason, since the challenge is a complex one. Carbon trading of the type just discussed is an old idea, the trick is to make sure that if the residents of Panchsheel Park pay the tax, it actually reaches Sewari’s denizens. This is where Bissell’s grand plan of completely rearranging the country comes in, his proposals on legislative structures that actually give power to the people — Bissell sets great store by writings of political philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hobbes, and the Federalist Papers which explain why small communities in the US are so powerful — and a lot more. Once again, you have to read the book for the detailed mechanics, but the broad idea is to make the tax base a lot larger (more on this later) and a lot of transfers more automatic, less discretionary — if you’re wondering about Bissell’s faith in techo-fixes, keep in mind that his ‘ideological marketing’ works on an Oracle backend server that allows him to track buying/selling patterns in each of his shops and ensure he is able to order enough of each of the 150,000 items he stocks well in time before the customer demands it!
Many parts of Bissell’s book appear outlandish. A tax on wealth, for instance, is proposed since four persons have a net worth equal to 16 per cent of India’s GDP. That’s true, but given that all this wealth is held through a web of investment firms that are not even owned by these four people, does Bissell really hope to make even a dent in this? Ditto for his plans to get huge monies from property taxes or even on getting cash banned (once everything’s transacted on a card, there will be a record and so, the argument goes, there will be no black money). Bissell just has to see what’s happened to Panchayati Raj institutions or to the Women’s Reservation Bill to know how politicians will kill his plan to reconstitute the power structure in the country.
The list goes on. But when you engage in an exercise in nation-rebuilding, the choices are very tough ones, and Bissell’s is one way of doing it. A series of national debates, the type that took place when India was framing its Constitution, around the ideas he’s outlined are what is called for — the book is not a quickie, or even a complete solution, its job is to stimulate debate along a guided path. And while it’s tempting to say Bissell’s ideas should be implemented in parts — carbon taxes for Sewari — this will never work. Each experiment Bissell outlines has been tried out, in India and elsewhere, and none of them have worked in isolation.
MAKING INDIA WORK
William Nanda Bissell
Penguin/Viking
248 pages; Rs 499
