People’s protests, almost all peaceful, all across India, have been active for decades. Many of them morphed into people’s movements for advancing their demands, needs and aspirations to governments.

These protest movements demand the rights to which people are entitled by law, but are not given or snatched away, due to state or central governments’ development policies, proposals, plans and projects.

This article is an attempt to examine the links between people's protests and governments’ “development” plans, purportedly in the public interest. Over the years, top-down planning policies and processes have widened economic disparities in society.

This has increased social unrest, quite apart from orchestrated measures to stoke fear, hatred and violence among and between sections of people, for political advantage.

The recent unseemly display of wealth connected with political power, in the pre-nuptial celebrations of the scion of one of the world’s most wealthy families, was aided by a servile bureaucracy, and even one of India’s Armed Forces.

It indicates the nexus between politicians and extremely wealthy persons. The meteoric growth in the wealth of another family intimately connected with the political power centre, demonstrates the operational effectiveness of this nexus.

At the root of all this is the mindless pursuit of wealth, according to the ideology of development by economic growth, that has attained the ‘status’ of a religion. To develop the argument cogently, it is necessary to ‘begin at the beginning’, even at the cost of boring well-informed readers, whose indulgence is solicited.

Every 5-year plan (FYP) from 1951-1956 to the 12th FYP (2012-2017) mentions, among other objectives, a targeted economic growth rate. The post-2017 governments’ target is the same. That is, every government to-date, has aimed at increasing economic growth rates.

An important indicator of a finance minister’s performance is achieving a high growth rate, so as to increase the size of the economy, and achieve higher levels of wealth. Indeed, it was the Indian government’s aim in 2018 to make India a $5-trillion size economy by 2025, and become the world’s third largest economy.

The size of the economy is the monetary value of all goods and services produced within the country in a year. That is, the GDP in any given year is the size of the economy, an indicator of wealth created in that year.

Economic growth rate is the percentage change of GDP based upon the size of the economy in the previous financial year. Economic growth rate is {(GDP2 minus GDP1)/(GDP1)}. With a positive growth rate, GDP2 is greater than GDP1, and the size of the economy expands every year.

Regardless of the political ideology of the party occupying the treasury benches or in the opposition benches in successive Parliaments, economic growth has been accepted not merely as part of the process of economic development, but as development itself.

The GDP is the criterion for evaluating economic development. Economic growth is considered the means to make India a “developed country”, with capital, and technology, driven industrial production as the most important means for development by creating wealth.

The economy functions by exploiting natural resources of all kinds, including human resources. The natural resources available in, on and under the country’s land and ocean territories are the country’s natural capital.

Natural resources which are not available within the country are purchased from other countries using money, or by trade transactions with monetary exchange. Geological exploration continues, to discover industrially exploitable mineral (including fossil fuel) deposits.

Exploitation of natural resources is vital for industrial-scale manufacturing, to produce large quantities of a vast variety of goods and services. Economic growth is measured by the increase in the industrial-scale production, sales and consumption of goods and services.

Money supply enables all transactions involved in the diverse, multiple, complex, interactive processes of the industrial economy. The total face value of currency notes and coins in public circulation is a mere 8-14% of the GDP.

Thus, most money is virtual money, and money value is based on trust in the fiscal authority and in government’s fiscal and financial management and probity.

The inputs to the economy are natural resources, and the outputs of the economy are goods and services. Money is a concomitant output, without which trade and commerce for large-scale buying & selling, and consumption, is impossible.

Thus, the economy grows year-on-year by industrial-scale extraction and exploitation (consumption) of natural capital, and by increasing trade and commerce within and between societies, to consume its products. It is matched by growth of money supply.

Year-on-year economic growth results in year-on-year growth in consumption of natural resources. It causes year-on-year depletion of non-renewable natural capital, at a rate which depends upon the size of the economy and its rate of growth.

Energy is a vital economic resource, the veritable “oxygen” of every economy, and the energy industry is at its core. Energy is a natural resource, part of natural capital. Use (consumption) of energy is essential for every economic activity, from acquisition of natural resources, to transportation to and between stages of manufacture.

Consumption of energy is essential, for manufacture, transportation of goods to markets, making service products, transportation of people, and for the purchase and consumption of the goods and services by people.

Consumption at any scale, of any kind, of anything, requires consumption of energy. Consumption of energy to produce goods and services, and to market and consume the products, results in generation of unusable, unwanted solid, liquid and gaseous by-products of consumption, which are disposed of in the soil, water and air.

Industrially produced goods, from the smallest pin, to complex machinery, devices and appliances, to packaging and marketing materials, become unusable after their useful life, with or without maintenance and repair, reuse and recycling. Fundamentally and unavoidably, every industrial product is waste or garbage or junk, after periods which depend upon its utility and utilisation.

For example, a newspaper is garbage after a day or two, plastic packets are unwanted as soon as the contents are removed, while a consumer durable, like a refrigerator, may become unrepairable junk after a few years, and an obsolete fighter jet aircraft also becomes junk.

All waste, garbage and junk are disposed of into the natural environment, which is also the source of raw materials for industry, and natural capital gets degraded.

Thus year-on-year economic growth causes year-on-year depletion and degradation of natural capital, which is impossible to assess in monetary terms. Of course economic growth produces and delivers ever greater volumes and varieties of goods and services for people, who have the money to purchase, use, utilise, and consume them. But their consumption leads to inescapable cyclical, year-on-year depletion and degradation of natural capital.

Extraction (mining) of natural resources, the raw materials for inputs to the industrial-growth machine, places demands on land. Establishing and operation of industries places further demands upon land and water, for construction and for waste disposal.

In any country, but especially in a densely populated country like ours, large-scale industries always get large parcels of land outside urban areas.

Therefore, governments acquire farm land, grazing/pasture land, or forest land for “its own use, hold and control”, to provide for “infrastructure projects for industrial corridors or mining activities, national investment and manufacturing zones”, and for many other public purposes, including for projects to resettle “project affected families.”

Government can acquire land only with the prior consent of “at least 80-percent” of PAFs for projects of private companies, and “at least 70-percent” for public-private partnership projects.

It is no secret that this prior consent provision in the law is not informed to the PAFs, and never observed because of the nexus between politicians, planners, corporates, and government officials.

Indeed, in several instances, governments have declared people who have lived on land for generations, as encroachers, and forcibly evicted them, and even amended existing laws [Gujarat (2016), Maharashtra (2018), Karnataka (2019)] to fast-track starting industrial-scale mining, etc.

Consequently, people who live on these lands are required/obliged/forced to vacate their places of residence, occupation and livelihood. They may receive compensation according to the “rehabilitation and resettlement award”, if they can establish ownership of property or tenancy, or loss of primary source of livelihood for the last three years, and so on.

The problems that PAFs face begin with preliminary notification of the government's intention to acquire their land or property. The PAFs’ travails concerning post-displacement compensation, rehabilitation, and resettlement continue for years, even decades, including social disruption, migration, and search for habitation, work, and minimum living requirements for themselves and their children. Numbering in tens of millions, they are the victims and discontents of “development” and its injustices.

It does not take much imagination to connect “development” and economic growth, with land acquisition for mega-projects, population displacement, people’s demands and protests for their rights and lawful dues, depletion and degradation of the natural environment, and growing economic disparity and social unrest.

Governments over decades, are focussed on economic growth. The nexus of elected politicians with corporations, continues to violate the constitutional and legal rights of people who are the victims of development by economic growth.

It is a double whammy for PAFs, who pay for the nation’s economic growth with their property, livelihoods and social disruption, and thereafter are persecuted and prosecuted for demanding lawful dues, rights and justice.

Because of the mindless pursuit of wealth by economic growth, governments and other beneficiaries of economic growth are blind and deaf to people’s problems, especially people who are poor and uneducated. They choose to sit in their ivory towers, engaging themselves in trying to increase their wealth, while remaining in their comfort zones of news and views provided by corporate-owned media.

At another level, governments regard people’s protests as breaches of law and order, to be suppressed by police force. Further, governments brand those who support people’s causes for justice as “andolanjeevies” and “urban naxals”, and initiate criminal cases including sedition, against them.

Put bluntly, the model of development by economic growth impacts people’s rights, and causes economic disparity and social unrest. Additionally, at the global level, national governments’ pursuit of the year-on-year economic growth ideology for decades in the name of development, is depleting and degrading Earth’s natural capital.

This is inexorably driving humanity towards worsening global warming effects and climate catastrophe.

Is there a solution? Is there a viable alternative to the development model of economic growth? Perhaps. There are several writings in the alternate media in the public domain on this subject, but reading them will take the promoters and beneficiaries of economic growth out of their comfort zones.

Cover Photogrsph AFP

Major General Dr. S. G. Vombatkere (Retd), was Additional DG Discipline & Vigilance in Army HQ AG's Branch. He holds a PhD in Civil Engineering (Structural Dynamics) from I.I.T Madras. Views expressed are the writer's own.

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