View: To manage growth-induced friction, we need cooperation, threatened by anger

To make good on the growth budget, the government and its leaders must learn to appreciate the value of one behavioural imperative: smile! No, this is not an attempt to be facetious. I am dead serious. To smile at someone is, one, to notice that person, two, to accept him or her as someone you are willing to engage with, rather than bypass or stomp underfoot. The budget proposals will bring up lots of opportunities for engagement with those who object — or to grind them into the dust. To engage with dissenters is the defining rubric of democracy. To snuff out all dissent with force is to run the risk of hunger pangs for a chunk of your peaceful southern neighbour’s territory and deploy your armed forces in offensive formations across the border.


The joke is on us

With comedians thrown into jail and being denied bail on the basis of evidence that the judge says might be forthcoming, with journalists and activists being charged with sedition and such other unlawful activities for mere utterances, with a chunk of the nation’s peasantry, who produce a sizeable share of the nation’s marketable surplus of grain, besides the young men who guard our borders, being dubbed religious-nationalist secessionists, Sri Lanka had better watch out.

Why should the budget unleash a wave of opposition? It envisages dramatic policy changes. Privatisation of State-owned enterprises, privatisation of nationalised banks, privatisation of airports. Expect employee unions to be up in arms and on the streets.

This is straightforward and obvious. There are less obvious reasons to exercise those facial muscles to produce a smile, rather than a snarl.

As India prepares to launch an infrastructure-building spree, that is precisely the response of a great many countries desperately trying to beat recession in their own domestic economies. The anticipated demand surge in metals has already sent commodity prices soaring — the Economic Survey looks backward to infer quiescent inflation. The Economist’s index for all commodities registers a rise of 39.6% over the last 12 months, in dollar terms. Since most global trade is invoiced in dollars, dollar prices matter.

The infrastructure that India will build, to both provide the growth stimulus the economy needs and to support efficient economic activity in the future, runs the risk of being expensive, because of a commodity price boom, and because of a surge in labour costs. If this is not to crimp India’s competitiveness in the global market, there has to be offsetting action. Such as by a technological step change in construction.

It is not feasible for India to build with the kind of labour-intensity that went into the pyramids of Egypt. China managed to build full-fledged hospitals in a matter of days, in the face of the Covid emergency. India has to acquire that kind of generalised sophistication in construction, and not just because of any post-pandemic emergency.

If half of India is to become urban over the next couple of decades, that means adding 20-25 crore people to India’s towns. They cannot crowd into existing towns, new towns have to be built. They must be smart, as official slogans tout, but the towns and connectivity to them must also be low-cost, for the industry and services they house to be globally competitive. That means modern construction techniques.


A greeting to a war cry

That, in turn, calls for trained manpower. Companies have to invest in training. Can they afford to train the undifferentiated, barely literate embodiments of manual labour supplied, paid and controlled by a contractor, who might be redeployed to another construction site, if not another state, in a week’s time?

Efficient construction is not just about machinery, it is about the kind of employer-employee relations that would allow workers to be treated not as a mass of brawn but as human beings who have intellects and aspirations, people who can learn the value of loyalty as well as how to precision-weld stainless steel.

Employers, in other words, would need to be persuaded to hire workers on their own rolls, and learn to not just countenance unions but also to use unions to improve productivity. Workers would need to be convinced to accept that flexible employment terms are not only not inimical to their interests but necessary to improve their lot. Regulation would have to ensure distress-free transition from one job to another. Can you imagine all this persuasion taking place at gunpoint? Learn to smile.

The anger that transforms Jai Sri Ram from pious invocation of unity under God into a war cry will drain the nation’s energies into internecine sectarian strife, instead of channelling them into the building of modernity and prosperity. Learn to smile.

Democracy is not about people outsourcing all decisions that shape their lives to a philosopher king. It is about a raucous discourse that draws in every section of the people, every interest group pushing its own interests and produces a messy compromise that might not entirely please anyone but would not leave anyone in total despair, either. To function as a democracy, neither a menacing frown nor a contemptuous smirk would help. Learn to smile.