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16-18, May 2008 http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2008-May/073789.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Herald, 16 May 2008 Chasing a False Dream: The 'Development' Trap by Vidyadhar Gadgil As Goa sets about correcting the course set for it by the epidemic of 'development', we see a furious debate over the very meaning of the term. The people of Goa are protesting against SEZs, mega-housing projects, the depredations of the mining and tourism industries, and grandiose government projects. Politicians, builders and industrialists, who have major stakes in things continuing just the way they are, have been accusing grassroots people's movements of being anti-development. The movements themselves, stung by this criticism, have responded saying that they are not against development; rather, they are against the current model of development and would like to replace it with a more people-friendly one. But this is a no-win situation. 'Development' is a term whose meaning has been distorted beyond recognition and that has acquired a malevolent life of its own. Trying to give it a 'pro-people' bias is a battle impossible to win. George Orwell once pointed out that certain words are misused so often that they lose any meaning and are best discarded in the interests of meaningful discourse. 'Development' is the word that comes at the top of any modern list of such words -- one indication of this is the fact that one now feels compelled to enclose it within quote marks whenever one uses it. As Gustavo Esteva has written, 'In saying "development"...most people are now saying the opposite of what they want to convey. Everyone gets confused...The time has come to unveil the secret of development and see it in all its conceptual starkness.' It would be instructive to examine the genesis of the term in modern social, political, and economic discourse. While it has been in use for over 200 years, it first came into common parlance when its opposite -- underdevelopment -- was popularised by the US president, Harry S. Truman, who used it in his inaugural address in 1949. Promising to bring the fruits of development to the 'underdeveloped' nations, at one stroke he divided the world into two halves -- one comprised of developed nations like the US, and the other of underdeveloped nations in the global South. And ever since then, we have been engaged in a hopeless game of catch-up. The ideal, of course, is to become like the US and other countries of the global North. It is implied that if you are not like them, then you are inherently inferior. Aided by its domination of the global media, the US has presented itself as the desirable goal of which we are all falling short. Mesmerised as we are by the magic eye of television, this lifestyle begins to appear very desirable, one that we all aspire to. We accept uncritically the glamour and the material comfort that is projected by the media as epitomising the American Dream, and we buy into it wholesale. The underside of this dream is ignored -- the crime, the violence, the alienation and the anomie. And, most important of all, we conveniently ignore the basic truth that if the whole world were to live this kind of consumption-oriented lifestyle then we would need several extra planets to mine for natural resources and to use as garbage dumps. In other words, we forget that this dream is completely unsustainable and by definition unachievable for a majority of the world's population, and continue our vain endeavour to reach this goal of being 'developed', in the process jettisoning much that is of value in our own traditions and cultures. To this already corrupted concept, our politicians have added their own pernicious twists. All the debates about socialism vs. capitalism, or mixed economy vs. command economy vs. market economy notwithstanding, one factor has remained constant -- our economy is a 'loot economy'. It is based upon what is popularly known as the 30-per-cent principle, whereby the political class receives a sizeable kickback on any project that is being implemented. As a result, development projects are created not so much to satisfy any real needs as to give opportunities for corruption. In such a concept, the larger, grander and more expensive a project is, the more it is worthy of being sanctified as 'development'. The results of this form of development are all around us. We have dams whose reservoirs get silted up within ten years of commissioning; bridges to nowhere, or bridges that are prioritised for film shootings rather than getting people get from one point to another; bus stands without buses (but which still receive awards for the quality of their architecture); six-lane highways, where four-lane or even two-lane would be adequate; IT parks without any IT but lots of real-estate deals; and so on and so forth. Almost all such development projects suffer enormous cost over-runs. Their benefits are dubious; some actually end up being a nuisance, but that does not matter. They are grand, which inflates the egos of the politicians; and they are very, very expensive, which helps them to line their pockets. Objective achieved. When the mega-developers get together with politicians on these matters, we get projects with some benefits, but only for the elite. You have five-star hotels and grandiose housing projects built in remote, scenic locations (at great environmental cost); and then a road and other facilities are built -- at public expense -- to make these accessible. The common people do not derive any benefit from such development; in fact, they usually end up losing out in terms of damage to the environment and dents to the public exchequer. This indictment may sound excessively harsh, but there is no escaping the fact that this is essentially what development has come to mean today. When people's movements talk of development, they mean things like better educational facilities, better public health facilities, provision of employment opportunities, etc. But this concept of development is used by the powers-that-be as a Trojan horse within which they ship their own understanding of the term. Small wonder then that development has now come to mean something which despoils the ecology, displaces and impoverishes people, and provides very dubious benefits. The term 'development' has now become a semantic trap that swallows all around it. As we fight in Goa to restore some sanity to governance and to roll back the irrational programmes which will destroy Goa as we know it, we would do well to abandon the term altogether rather than try to give it an alternative meaning. Social development, pro-people development, human development, sustainable development -- add whatever qualifying epithet you will, the concept will get appropriated and distorted. This is not to advocate a Luddite philosophy, which is anti-technology and anti-progress (another loaded word, but let us not get into that now). We need to return to philosophers like Mahatma Gandhi, who placed the common man and the village at the forefront of the process of regeneration and decolonisation. We need to junk the term 'development' and replace it with something that expresses the aspirations of the people rather than the fantasies of the elites and the politicians. What this new term will be and what values it will promote is best determined by the process of churning and questioning that is going on in Goa and giving us all new hope. -- Question everything -- Karl Marx