Mad hatter's tea party
WHAT do depleting resource-bases have to do with riots,insurgency and revolution? The promise of a meaty answer, inthe lavish surroundings of the stately Neemrana Fort PalaceHotel in Rajasthan, drew a group of academicians and activiststo a two-day workshop last December. The projectoriginated with the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesandthe Peace and Conflict Studies Program, University ofToronto.
- The p roject's three case studies (including one on waterscarcity in China and the other onpressure on forest lands inIndonesia) considered demand-induced, supply-induced andstructural environmental scarcities. The Neemrana workshopdiscussed the third draft of the India paper by Shaukat Hassan,director, Global Affairs Research Partners, Ottawa.
The participants had been chosen as advisors to the projectwhen.it started two years ago, but this was the first time thatthey were brought together to give their views. Hassan had aninteresting task: to see whether the Malthusian prediction wascoming true in Bihar and gauge the state machinery's ability todeal with the situation. But the workshop's raison d'Otrecollapsed when the project's principal investigator, ThomasHomer-Dixon (University of Toronto), announced that theagenda had been altered to exclude civil violence, and insteadfocussed on the effects of environmental scarcity and thestate's management capacity.
Homer-Dixon started out by saying that Bihar has goodcroplands and rich mineral resources, and there are no severesupply-induced shortages. This had some of the participantsprotesting again. If the conflicts in Bihar were socioeconomicand cultural, not environmental scarcity (for the state seemedto be having plenty), why was the state chosen as a representative case to study the effects of cropland shortages?
"The agrarian unrest in Bihar is not due to extremeconflicts'for scarce resources like water and land, but alsodue to political mobilisation and competition forstate resources as a whole, including jobs,' saidAjit. Mazoomdar of the Delhi-based Centre for PolicyResearch. He emphasised the need to define civil violencewithin the context of the debate.
Hassan's draft, meanwhile, was found to be lacking notonly in establishing demand or structurally induced scarcitiesin Bihar, but also in drawing the necessary links between thescarcities and their effect on state capacity. It was found to bestatistically poor, making difficult to arrive at sufficiently convincing conclusions.
For example, Hassan tried to relate decreasing state capacity to falling land revenues as a percentage of the state's totaltax revenue. But the participants pointed out that in Bihar it isnot the yield but the amount of land cultivated that decidesland revenue.
Kailash C Malhotra from the Indian StatisticalInstitute pointed out that scarcity cannot be measured bytaking only one parameter, like cropland or water intoaccount. An overall picture of important resources has tobe considered. Smitu Kothari from Lokayan pointed out thatthe Bihar government had extracted revenue from both,mineral and forest wealth, but spent very little resourceson the community. So-the presumption that increasedrevenue meant increased state capacity was demolishedaltogether.
Leela Gulati from the Centre for Development Studies,Thiruvananthapuram, pointed out that with the projectalready two-thirds under way, it was a little late in the day tolook for advice. "What is our role... are we simply to react towhat has already been done?" she asked.
Kothari finally hammered in the last nail, quoting a 1993 - report, which, he said, had actually shown a decline in violence in the state, scarcity or no scarcity!
Thereafter, discussions on the paper were abandoned andthe participants went back to square one. It was apparent thatmuch was wrong even with the conceptualisation of theproject. Homer-Dixon tried to explain away the lacunae bysaying that a paucity of funds had not permitted a meetingwith the Indian advisors prior to the start of the project. Butthe us $400,000 budget and the plush locale of the workshopmade that a little hard to swallow.