Let me begin with a story about my favourite Sufi wit, Mullah Nasruddin.

Apparently one day the Mullah lost his ring down in the basement of his house. He couldn’t find it because it was very dark in there. So he climbed out onto the street and started looking for it there instead. Somebody passing by stopped to enquire:

“What are you looking for, Mullah Nasruddin? Have you lost something?”

“Yes, I’ve lost my ring down in the basement.

“But why aren’t you looking for it down there?” asked the man in surprise.

“Because,” said the Mulla in reply, “there’s more light here!”

I am in the midst of doing what I call an inspirational book on CVS at the invitation and behest of MCRC. The questions that I keep asking others who knew him concern largely the impact of CVS’s work on the livelihoods of village folk. I am not focussing here on his development of spirulina production, for example, even though that has become a basis for successful commercial exploitation today, albeit for a class of people CVS never perhaps originally intended. I am interested solely in the spread of those ideas and technological innovations of his which involved non-laboratory and non-commercial instruments like the kitchen gardens, the vermiculture beds, the windmills and the low-cost catamarans.

Despite considerable probing, I am surprised to discover that fairly little learning has emerged among the post-CVS generation about this impact of his work. This is something to be seriously deplored since the efforts of great minds have lessons not just when they are successful but especially when they fail or when they are unworkable or generate an impact far less than was originally expected.

Did then any of Seshadri’s technological interventions – in the villages MCRC worked in – survive after the grants were over, after he died, after the institution withdrew from the area, whichever. Were any of these innovations eventually appropriated by the common people as their own and have they flourished even if no longer in their original form?

My own personal exploration of the true embeddedness of Seshadri’s social engineering in the livelihoods of his clients is still underway and at this stage it would be presumptuous of me to jump to any easy conclusions. I recently visited the Nilgiris and met one of his associates with whom he had worked rather closely. I found to my dismay that nothing had survived of Seshadri’s work with the tribal community there.

In contrast to other social engineers or scientists, CVS had no pretensions whatsoever when he worked with either staff or villagers. So one could say that compared to others, there was far greater chance of things working out or of his ideas getting accepted simply because he treated the people he worked with not as objects but as equals. (Some of you may remember he gave lifts to his staff if he passed them while they were walking to the MCRC, for example.) He was not foreign to village folk because he was able to function at their level, in their language. He eschewed formality and unnecessary social distancing – common enough diseases among the people we find in our stratified, class-conscious scientific and technical institutions today.

I have been an obsessive observer for several decades of the efforts of good-hearted modern educated (read professionally qualified) Indians seeking to change the ways and livelihoods of their less endowed fellow beings. For a time I was also a part of the same grand (what appears to me now to be) wholly misguided effort. Like the Mullah’s tale relates, I do not know whether we are looking for solutions in places where we get all the light we want but then these are not the places where the problem is to be located. We prefer the light perhaps because we are associated with the light, born and schooled in the same light and therefore we feel that any illumination this light promises to provide is going to be axiomatically good for the human race.

For the same reason we also assume that we are focussing our valiant efforts on admitted areas of darkness, technologically barren human deserts, archaic technologies now bypassed or rejected by history and people devoid of any worthy expertise, skill or knowledge. This set of presumptions has continued to justify the interventions proposed by anyone even remotely connected with the establishment in this country and its ruling class.

In 1980, a small Gandhian organization called CORT (Consortium on Rural Technology) asked me to travel across the country and carry out an evaluation of the efforts of various scientists and technologists to ameliorate the condition of people in the rural areas, what we would call efforts at social engineering today. They never expected the report to be critical so when it was submitted to them, they were very upset. It’s not nice to say “not nice” things about the efforts of committed – almost saintly people sometimes – to improve human welfare through appropriate science and technology.

One memorable encounter provided in that report was about my visit to Bardoli, where there was a Gandhian running an institute called Yantra Vidyalaya to supply “improved” agricultural tools to farmers and artisans. This was not a government setup, so I could not understand why a few hundred metres away from the institute I could find entire streets of artisans manufacturing all kinds of routine agricultural tools and they had neither heard of the institute nor had the institute thought they should be consulted by it in any way. It was simply assumed that tools made by village (in this case, town) artisans were a priori inferior and in need of improvement (as was similarly the case with the artisans themselves who were obviously – to this way of thinking – bereft of scientific and technical education and competence). Improvements or new tools could only be done by people trained in modern engineering institutions because they had the benefits of science.

Since the contempt for artisan-made tools was total, this often led the social engineer to generate his own set of newly designed tools without ever considering at the stage of design the probable user’s requirements and needs. The designer himself never used the tools for his own livelihood. Farmers however continued to purchase their tools from the town artisans, never from the institute. The latter put up its new tools at exhibitions and these were mostly purchased by those who never used them. The tools looked attractive and ably designed, but the farmers found them unsuitable for work in their fields.

It is this total lack of synergy between target victims and technological missionaries that has bothered me no end ever since I left university, deprofessionalized myself and decided to live in villages, where I have doggedly persisted now for several decades. I left Mumbai city in 1977, never to return. Even now, I continue to live in a village and find that it is the wisest decision my wife and I ever made though for most people at large life in a village even now is life at the other end of the spectrum of a desirable Indian existence.

One of my most favourite local friends in the village where I now live is the blacksmith, Mohan Chari. His family is associated with the metal plough that is used practically all over the State of Goa. He has created thousands of ploughs of his heirloom design, like his father, and grandfather before him. He repairs them as well. Agriculture in Goa without this family’s contributions would be extremely difficult to understand.

However, till today, no person from the Agriculture Department has ever visited this family or its backyard smithy. Recently Chari told me students had come from a polytechnic in Kolhapur to get him to design (successfully) an automated paddy transplanter. He produced one from scrap iron bought from a scrapyard. He powered the contraption with batteries from a kinetic scooter. Its motor was originally used in a truck for powering its windshield wipers. For transmission, he used the chains and sprockets of a discarded pulsar motorcycle and timing chains from a Tata Sumo. The students were delirious. Nothing like this could ever have been done by their mechanical engineering department or by any of their professors. One day I am sure Anil Gupta is going to land up there as well on one of his numerous “shodh yatras.”

In 1980 I also visited the set up called Science for the Villages at Wardha. They had created a massive plough fully from virgin iron obviously because funds were available. I looked at it very carefully and compared it with the ordinary wooden, metal-tipped plough we see farmers carrying on their shoulders to the fields. It was quite apparent that the plough the SFV had developed was just too huge and heavy: it could not be carried even by half a dozen people together. Secondly, it was too heavy to be pulled by ordinary village oxen with their malnourished diets. The Centre simply felt the villagers were too ignorant to appreciate its invention. I doubt it was ever used in any field.

That is why CVS attracted me like no other scientist or social engineer I have ever known who came from the same professional class. I recently had a conversation with Prof. Vikram Soni, a physicist who works at the National Physical Lab in Delhi. He recounted to me his first chance encounter with Seshadri. The week after I discussed CVS with him, I got a written note from him on the encounter which is somewhat priceless. I would like to share it with you.

“1978. I have been in Madras for a month.  It is a new experience, the blue sea, the strong sun that makes you run for cover, the fecundity accompanied by all the smells organic of decomposition – different in texture from the North.  I learn of an artists’ village, Cholamandala, along the southern coast on the route to Mahabalipuram, about 12 kilometers down. I am eager for new sights and experiences.  So off we go on the trip.  We alight on the narrow coastal road after a half hour. Cholamandala is on our left.  I stretch a little and notice a funny crude bamboo wheel, that is turning, on the right in a fenced compound which seems to have scraps of synthetic cloth on it. Curiosity; I excuse myself and go across the road to investigate, telling the others to carry on and that I will join them in five minutes. I go in the compound and ask what this structure is.  I am led to a rather cultured, well-speaking man who tells me it’s a wind sail.  I linger – and he suggests having a closer look.

“A bunch of bamboo staves lashed together by local coconut hemp rope sitting on a sterile palm tree.  Local catamaran sails made of polysack cloth attach to the staves to fill with the sea breeze that sets in steady after noon.  This whole structure attaches to a balsam wood like axle that can rotate, mounted on the tree. Also on the axle is a wooden eccentric.  It is just the reverse of the old locomotive that converts the up and down piston motion to rotate the wheel on the rails via an eccentric. So this is the reverse eccentric. The eccentric attaches to a log which is capped with a large iron thimble made by the local iron monger and this in turn is linked to a traditional water pump. From the afternoon, when a steady sea breeze sets in, well into the night the wind sail runs the pump and pumps water. Simple and ingenious, I say. Seshadri answers ‘Yes, simple.’ Cost? I ask. ‘About a thousand rupees ($25).’

“If something goes wrong no outside intervention is required.  It is local. No huge transport of material from Japan, no technician from Madras coming out on a hydrocarbon burning machine. Contributed entropy – minimum. I am impressed. I thank him and tell him I had ditched my friends with whom I had come to see Cholamandala – must go, but will meet later. I run down to see the others returning, do a dance about a few paintings and get back to Madras.  A few days thence I find I am more and more taken up by the wind sail. It is quintessentially local – like nature – almost no toxic waste to repair and replace. It is crude, simple, ingenious and natural.”

Seshadri’s windmill, Soni concluded, was a perfect example of building into the natural cycle. It was also, I might add, a stunning instance of synergy: CVS thought it foolish to substitute for natural energy when one could profitably use it for free by simply understanding its quality.

If CVS had been alive today, he would have been the godfather of the climate change debate presently raging across the world because one can see how he looked at energy and especially natural energy. But that matter is for another seminar. CVS taught us that work done at ambient temperature was not just awesome, but that it generated no pollution (or greenhouse gases) as well. His classic illustration was the manner in which nature ensured the transfer of huge quantities of water across the Indian subcontinent in the form of the monsoon at ambient temperature. Ever since Francis Bacon, scientists have looked down upon the quality of nature’s efficiencies. We can therefore predict that social engineers who do not respect the value of work done at ambient temperatures will never have sympathy for most of the work done by village artisans or innovators in any case.

It is only a person who understood the value of work at ambient temperatures who would also see with a clear head that the kitchen gardens of village women could also find a place on the radar of a premier science research institute like MCRC. Kitchen gardens are not run on power. They are too small for tractors and they rarely use motors for pumping. Almost every piece of work is “work done at ambient temperature,” the manual work of digging, excavating, creating raised beds, manual drawal and sprinkling of water. But by this process, one unit of energy will generate 30 units, compared to high-energy development where 50 units could only generate another 50 units or worse, 20.

But before we run astray here, I should reiterate that we are not interested in these experiments per se. My intention here is to focus solely on the aspect of synergy. Was there synergy, a platform for a creative dialogue, in CVS’s work? Was there bonding of energies and interests, mutual benefit, mutual learning? Was there net gain due to the reliance on “science”? Did the village women Seshadri and his teams worked with see themselves as people capable of creating science or was their role (because they were poor, illiterate, village folk) limited to being the receptacles of the new wisdom brought from outside their experience and their lives? Was there equity in the roles of both, the role played by the social engineer, and the one played by the recipient of science?

The road to human welfare is strewn with a million useless inventions and ideas because the scientist or the social engineer simply forgot about synergy. So much time and energy has been expended in the onerous task of taking the lab to land yet no one asks why it has produced no significant results, as least not as dramatic, for example, as the almost instant spread and use of mobile phones.

Only the language of the interventionist has kept on changing, or the nature of the projects, but the learning graph dismally is non-existent. The most recent news I read about when I was in Chennai last week was about the “7^th convention of the Grameen Gyan Abhiyan – Rural Knowledge Movement on Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Food, Health and Livelihood Security in an Era of Climate Change.” At the convention, according to press reports, Mr R Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the GOI, released a report on “Designing Rural Technology Delivery Systems for Mitigating Agricultural Distress.” Wow! Now we even have a weapons systems delivery expert recruited to “deliver” life positive “rural technology” to those contemplating suicide.

I will also make fun of myself here.

When someone asked me once to describe my own attempts lasting over five years at changing things in a village environment, I could only point to those small twisting columns of wind that appear of an evening from nowhere when one is sitting under a peepul tree, cause a significant disturbance, raise fallen leaves and dust into the air, and then disappear without a trace. But I found later I was in exceeding good company! I was surprised to discover that even Gandhiji’s efforts at “improving” Segaon failed. He succeeded only in changing its name to Sewagram. Today, Sewagram is no longer Segaon which has once again retreated after retrieving its separate identify. It is still there, as squalid a village as any other. I was shocked when I visited it a few years ago. Sewagram ashram, which is at a distance from it, is a nicely kept museum. It has no direct relevance to life in Segaon today. The village is completely immune to development.

Part of the reason for this rejection of “improvements” is that social engineering itself is often founded on feelings of contempt, disgust, revulsion, derision and pity for the people who are located in “rural areas”.

This is part of a pattern, established within the consciousness of the privileged classes by “education”. At our schools, for instance, we discount the enormous evolutionary wisdom with which the child is endowed and erect over it a new, artificial “learning” that actually enfeebles and diminishes the personality instead of enhancing it or giving it confidence. We do something similar when we destruct a biodiverse natural forest because we claim we can speed up the natural production of biomass by planting “quick-growing” clones or monocultures. For the past five decades we have with great determination replaced the efforts of dhangars and ghoulis, masters of raising dairy animals and the Maldaris, who preserve the genetic purity of the indigenous breeds, with imported milk plants, imported bulls and half-baked genetics.

No one really asks why we persevere with this continuous effort at substitution, of replacement of one set of competences by another under the claim of betterment when this is almost always never true and when we invariably land up with substandard substitutes or often, more likely, with the transfer of assets from the failed entrepreneur to someone higher in the chain of being.

This is nothing but a power game of the powerful versus the weak, since it is not a question of replacing an invalid science with valid (modern) science which might be justified. Both are valid in their own spheres. The present model – which has a history of some 200 years – is little more than a “displacement model” through which one form of useful knowledge or skill is forced to make way for another; in fact, several forms of useful knowledge are replaced by one form alone. The development is wholly macabre because the model we all are so keen to apply over people’s dead bodies even, is a model that is driving the planet, like it has already done some of our farmers, to suicide.

Thus, besides the social or habitat displacement exercised through the Land Acquisition Act, we also have technology displacement, tradition displacement, memory displacement, skills displacement, and a million other classes and categories of displacement. We displace open pollinated varieties of indigenous seeds with HYVs, or the plough with the tractor, the Persian wheel with the electric or diesel-operated pump, animal driven oil ghanis with electricity operated expellers, animal feed based on agricultural wastes with compound feed made from grain that could be consumed by human beings.

Just as Christian missionariess seek to displace so-called heathen or demonic religions with their superior truth and divine insight, social engineers look to displacement theory for the entire range of their actions. Proselytizing by missionaries is unacceptable, but social engineering is wholly desirable, legitimate and politically correct because it comes with the varnish – or whitewash – of development, sanctioned by the Constitution.

Once the foot is in the door, we can nudge ever further to replace the tribal community habitats themselves with tiger reserves, farmers by corporations, evolutionary design by Monsanto’s products, villages by gated communities which boast to be self-sufficient in all things – just like the erstwhile village! Comprehensive replacement is the therapy of the modern world in which destruction of earlier assets is mandatory. The State backs this form of development to the hilt, unless when it faces a rebellion as in Nandigram or Singur.

The entire effort of the development project is to re-write nature, recode people, rewire culture, not build on it, nor link with it, nor feed and nurture it in any appreciable or serious manner. Thank God we had no social engineers poking around with our music, our languages, our dances, our asanas, our food recipes.

In my own experience, I have found several examples in which efforts have been made to build either from nature or from tradition through synergy. The technicians of Auroville are a good example of the former. But if you look at the experiences of PRATEC in Peru or the University of the Earth in Oaxaca in Mexico, you will see successful examples of the latter. The University of the Earth, for instance, takes mechanics from the street, interacts with their knowledge and expertise, helps them understand their work better and then awards them formal recognition through its degrees.

This is the only way. It is the surest way. It cannot be substituted with a theory of “replacement” formulated by those who claim to be in a hurry.

The whole of our civilizational traditions, their richness, have been constructed slowly, patiently, on natural energies. Their organic growth, their evolution, stopped or was put aside when our gaze was attracted by another form of knowledge which naturally, being proprietary, was not enthusiastic about keeping a place or role for other ways that might raise competition. It is about time we break with this perception and start from what there is rather than what ought to be. Can we see some directions in the way organic farming has evolved in this country?

The example of panchagavya and its dissemination holds striking lessons. A medical doctor (K Natarajan) fresh from his worship at Tirupati and struck with some observations in some article he had read, tried out a fermentation recipe that would restore microorganisms in soils killed by chemical fertilizers. At first, sticking by tradition, he used only five elements all sourced from the cow. Then, he expanded this, with inputs from several other experimenting farmers, to nine elements, which is the standard recipe today. Now farmers make panchagavya from goat and buffalo dung as well. At the last conference on panchagavya, more than 700 farmers gathered at Erode to exchange their findings on its use on their farms.

Panchagavya took the world of organic agriculture by storm. It led to various other variants, including jeevamrut and amrutpani and amirthakaraisal. All over south India, the women have understood the technique faster than the men as they are already unerringly expert at the biotechnology of the idli and dosa, also the products of fermentation. As a fermented product, panchagavya can be manufacturered again only at ambient temperature. The competition – chemical fertilizers – which it is now displacing much to the relief of the soil and the earth and all other forms of life connected with the soil and waters, is manufactured in giant industrial units that are unable to operate without handsome and continuous feeds of energy at high temperatures and subsidies, with all their gory consequences for soil, water and air. What a classic example of how we should have gone and where we have gone wrong!

Subhash Sharma, another one of India’s most perceptive organic farmers, solved the problem of moisture on his farm with a self-assembled 400 rupee device by which he measured the differentials on his farm, neatly ensuring that not a single drop of water left his ten acres. Through an adroit management system, which involved profit sharing with his workers, and timely vacations for them, he was able to enhance the productivity of his farmland several times over. He used bullock power because tractors besides increasing soil density, could never provide him with the precision he needed for his farming operations. He has no use for chemical fertilizers or the plants that manufacture them.

Farmers like these have thrown out the entire modern agricultural apparatus and its parapharnalia, with its universities, departments, fertilizer plants, pesticide factories, agricultural credit divisions in a few single steps out of the window, forever. (Left longer on this planet, CVS would probably have done likewise.) Professors, vice-chancellors, scientists visit these organic farms, grasp their significance, express amazement, but are unable to relate to them or adopt them in their labs. There is a total absence of synergy. These are two parallel innovation tracks. They do not look at each other or feed each other. One however is essentially related to an agriculture of permanence, while the other is patently unsustainable as it is dependent on scarce and expensive non-renewable supplies and its death-knell has already been sounded. Having a reached a plateau with its yields, it now desperately hopes to enhance yields by yielding to the temptation to tamper with the genetic code itself.

C.P. Snow introduced the debate on the breakdown of communications between the “two cultures”: the sciences and the humanities. Jairam Ramesh recently reintroduced a fresh schism between the “two cultures” of environment and development. In this sharing of my experiences, I have tried to highlight the gulf between these other two cultures that have co-existed uneasily in India since independence: the modern science tradition, most of it imported, and the indigenous experience of work, based on valid knowledge associated with tradition. Both can flourish only if they converse with each other. Both have deficiencies which the other can correct. In the absence of an authentic, mutually respecting dialogue, both are bound to flounder, as we have come to see so well. The perceptions ruling modern science have no roots in this country, and as CVS showed, they have tenuous roots in nature as well. The village artisan or craftsman has no political patron, except his constituency which needs him. Through his work at MCRC, CVS created the space for a creative dialogue between these two traditions. We do him eternal injustice by not supporting and extending that space for the betterment of both.

Thank you

(Chennai 4th December 2010 during the seminar to commemorate C V Seshadri organised by the MCRC)