South Asia: India, Giant of the Subcontinent - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 234

Figure 8-13
This poor village in Madya Pradesh has just
received a well for potable water . Getting water is
a twice-daily chore for women and children. Going
to the well gives women opportunity to catch up
on the latest gossip. Photograph courtesy of
B. A. Weightman.

community is of course infinite, if not pathetic . . . What
is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance,
narrow mindedness and communalism.” In India,
“communalism”r efers to allegiance to one' s own culture
group. He also described caste hierarchy as “an ascend-
ing scale of hatred and a descending scale of contempt.”
While Ambedkar denigrates villages in the context of
his boyhood experiences, the vast majority of Indians are
very attached to them, even after they migrate elsewhere.
The village is a life-context that shapes life-ways such as
reciprocal social relations among kin and neighbors
(Figure 8-13). However, exclusion and deprivation,
embedded within unequal power structures, reduce
social cohesion thereby disrupting the connectivity among
individuals and groups that is essential to equitablre-
source distribution at the household, community , and
state level.
When social solidarity crumbles, collective action
is difficult, and social norms and sanctions no longer
regulate behavior. Societal breakdown produces strife
and even greater inequalities.

unsuitable for small, nonirrigated plots. Nevertheless, India
remains the world' s second largest cotton producer after
China and is the United States' fiercest rival for exports.

The Digital Village

In 1999, the Karnataka state government launched
a program to computerize the land records of
6.7 million farmers in 30,000 villages. The program
is called Bhoomi, which means “land” in both Hindi
and Kannada. Farmers can now go to government-
owned, computer kiosks and retrieve information
in Kannnada (the local language) about their land
and its potential productivity . They can find out
about input costs, market prices, and even get
weather forecasts.
With equal access to information, upper castes
have lost their advantage over lower castes. Many
land deeds used to be fraudulent and cost poor
farmers US$20 million a year. Now , the problem has
essentially disappeared.
One program in Madhya Pradesh has practi-
cally eliminated corruption in the sale of soybeans.
T Traditionally, , farmers sold their beans to inter-
mediary traders at open auctions called mandis . The
traders then sold the produce to food-processing
companies. As the traders knew what these compa-
nies would pay and the farmers did not, they could
hold farmers to unfair prices for their soybeans.

THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION
In light of globalization, import duties on crops such as
cotton have been reduced, leaving Indian growers at a
disadvantage against cheaper American cotton, which,
as critics point out, is heavily subsidized by the U.S.
government. Further, Indian farmers have been encouraged
to use costlier, genetically modified seeds. Although
these are pest-resistant, they have turned out to be