Category: Lokavidya and Informal Knowledge

The Singur Judgment: Is there another way to understand the politics of industrialisation?

First published on The Dialog.

On August 31st the Supreme Court of India struck down as illegal the acquisition of 1000 acres of prime agricultural land by the West Bengal government on behalf of Tata Motors for their Nano factory in Singur village of Hoogly district. The judgment, coming ten years after the land was initially acquired in 2006, was widely covered in the media. One of the Justices handing down the judgment disagreed with the state government that the land had been acquired for “public purpose” and took the side of farmers whose livelihoods had been taken away from them. The other Justice argued from the perspective of the need for West Bengal to industrialize but nevertheless agreed that the state government had failed to follow the 1894 land acquisition law to the letter.

Disputes such as Singur have generally been framed in terms of “need for industrialization” versus “need to protect livelihoods.” This pits “traditional communities” such as farmers, adivasis, and petty producers of all kinds against “modern industry” such as malls, dams, mines, and factories. On the one side are those who wish to see the country industrialise and modernise, and displacement of these communities is seen as inevitable in this process, the only debate being whether the displaced are compensated and rehabilitated adequately. On the other side are those who argue that industrialization and development will displace these communities from their existing livelihoods but offer them no better alternatives in return, thus making them worse off in absolute terms in order to benefit others who will get jobs in the new industries and consume their products. Unfortunately we have been stuck in this “traditional versus modern” debate for many years with the pro-development camp unable to see anything beyond “adequate compensation” and the pro-people camp unable to offer an attractive and compelling vision of the future.

It is clear to all who are paying attention that the vast majority of the country still earns a livelihood in the petty production sector as farmers, artisans, and petty producers as well as retailers. This is also known as the “informal sector.” The standard of living in these occupations is five to ten times lower than that in the formal sector. For example a typical monthly income in informal jobs is around Rs. 7000 per month compared to Rs. 35000 per month or more for formal jobs. Even where land is not a constraint, modern industry and services have not been absorbing labour at the pace necessary to reduce the size of the informal sector (see my pervious post here on “Jobless Growth”). As long as this remains the case incomes will not rise very much in real terms for this majority. Thus protection of their meagre livelihoods is only a short-term strategy. There must policies and a politics that envisions a rapid improvement in their standard of living without the chimera of hope that they will somehow be magically absorbed into the formal sector.

Luckily this county also has a long tradition of thought and experimentation with industrialisation of various kinds, not only the capital- and resource-intensive, labour-saving kind that has developed in the advanced industrialized countries and that is ill-suited to the conditions here. The Gandhian experiment during the late colonial period was one such. Subsequently, the idea of labour-intensive, small-scale industrialisation caught the imagination of many others including Rammanohar Lohia. Thinkers such as K.R. Datye, author of Banking on Biomass: A New Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity based on Renewable Energy and Dispersed Industralisation, have written provocatively on this. In their book Churning the Earth, Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari recount more examples.

A Gandhian or dispersed pattern of industrialisation does not mean “handicrafts.” It only means an approach that draws upon peoples’ own existing knowledge-base and techniques (“lokavidya”), carries them forward, and puts livelihoods before productivity and local before long-distance wherever a trade-off becomes unavoidable. Such lokavidya-based, community-controlled development is the need of the hour. We must stop fetishizing “glass and aluminum development” as the only kind of development and recognise that such a process as we have launched upon in India destroys much more than it creates in terms of livelihoods, culture, and ecology. In other words, everything that matters. The losers of this process have, for decades, tried to highlight this and have fought against it, but only with very limited successes. This is because the juggernaut of development places in the hands of the winners hitherto unseen material and soft power to be able to effect the outcomes that they desire. In fact, the entire debate on development (both sides of it) is shaped by those who have benefitted from it. The integration into the global economy only rewarded the beneficiaries even more and conferred even greater power and public visibility on them.

Only a politics of knowledge can change this. By this I mean a politics that organises farmers, adivasis, petty producers of all kinds to raise their voice not in defense of their livelihoods, as they have done so far in Singur and other places, but in order to assert the claim that their knowledge is not inferior to any other kind of knowledge; that their practices can constitute the basis for a way forward that genuinely delivers the good life to all instead of delivering it today to the select few and promising it at some endlessly deferred time to the rest. If pro-people struggles against land acquisition and industrialization, such as Singur, Narmada, Niyamgiri and many others assert themselves not as defense of meagre livelihoods but as harbingers of a future India based on industry suited to our conditions they can become future-oriented. They cannot then be seen as anti-development or backward-looking. Needless to say this is not easy and it means taking on not only the domestic beneficiaries of the development process but also global economic forces. But the strength of such movements lies in their size and the knowledge they possess. The Singur judgment, though it does not go this far, combined with the Niyamgiri judgment that ruled Vedanta’s claim on the Dongria Kondh land illegal along with hopefully more such to come, create space for such a politics and also are an opportunity to raise the above issues among the classes who have benefitted from development and globalisation.

India’s New Intellectual Property Policy: A Critique

First published on The Dialog.

Last month the Modi government introduced a new policy on intellectual property rights (IPRs). It lays out the government’s approach to strengthen IPRs with a view to foster innovation and protect India’s traditional knowledge, and envisions “an India where knowledge is the main driver of development, and knowledge owned is transformed into knowledge shared.” (p.1)

Several commentaries on the policy have appeared over the past month. Some have been critical of its “maximalist” orientation arguing that India is at a stage of development where its domestic economic interests are not served by excessively strong IPR laws. Others have argued that the new policy has been drafted with the interest of multinational corporations in mind, rather than ordinary Indians. MNCs are generally in favor of stringent IPR laws because they stand to gain monopoly rents via patents, trademarks, and copyrights and stand to lose the more these are infringed by local businesses. Still others have noted that Indian IPR laws were changed recently under the UPA government and that there was no need for another comprehensive policy change so soon.

In this piece I want to use the policy document to raise some fundamental questions about intellectual property and its relevance for India. In the current climate, IPRs are often seen as the only way to ensure that creators of knowledge and culture receive returns for their creative efforts. Given the structure of India’s economy and the nature of knowledge production in it, what should be our approach to property rights in knowledge and culture? Can we lead the way in offering an alternative to privatisation? These issues remain un-debated even as policies continue to be drafted and implemented.

Knowledge and culture are what economists call “non-rival” and “non-excludable” goods. Om purnamadah purnamidam…as the Sanskrit shloka goes. Sharing does not reduce knowledge but adds to it. A common property or commons approach to knowledge has been the defining feature of our society, as the policy document acknowledges, noting that “monetisation of knowledge has never been the norm in India.” (p.8)

But private property rights in knowledge and culture are rapidly replacing open-access and common property regimes all over the world. International agreements such as TRIPS go a long way in ensuring this. Within such agreements, access to developed country markets for developing countries is often predicated on stringent domestic IPR laws. The policy document notes that the traditional Indian approach mentioned above, “while laudable and altruistic”,

…does not fit with the global regime of zealously protected IPRs. Hence, there is a need to propagate the value of transforming knowledge into IP assets. This requires a major paradigm shift of how knowledge is viewed and valued – not for what it is, but for what it can become. (p. 8)

The “major paradigm shift” referred to is the shift from treating knowledge and culture as common heritage and property to treating it as private property. Globalisation has brought with it an unprecedented level of experimentation with common property approaches to knowledge and culture. The FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) movement, peer-to-peer (P2P) movement, wikimedia commons and many similar movements across the world are changing our idea of knowledge and cultural production.

India’s knowledge and culture landscape is well-suited to a commons regime. Unlike countries like the US or EU members, a very large proportion of knowledge production and culture creation in India occurs outside the corporate sector. The so-called “informal sector” which employs 90% of our workforce is the site of this production. Whether it is farmers innovating new techniques, weavers and other artisans figuring out new ways of working with new designs and fabrics, food workers innovating new products, folk singers with new songs, or countless others, these knowledge and culture producers are untouched by an IPR regime.

This system, over centuries, has created a highly diverse and sophisticated ecology of knowledge and culture in food, music, textiles, and various household goods. In this sector, dissemination of knowledge and culture is rapid. A new product quickly spreads in the market by imitation. Thus, monopoly rents for innovation disappear quickly but competition serves as a motivator for innovation. The writers of the new policy certainly recognise this fact.

Eventual privatisation of the immense informal knowledge commons is the goal of the policy. The strongest defense offered for such an effort, in a poor country like India, is that it will enhance incomes in the informal sector (e.g. see this World Bank report). The argument goes that unlike the knowledge commons such as Wikipedia alluded to above that have been developed “on the side” by people who do not earn a living from this activity, informal knowledge commons are created and sustained by those whose livelihoods directly depend on them.

It is true that lack of formal property rights makes it easy for larger market actors, say in the corporate sector, to capitalise on knowledge produced in the informal sector. Generally we are used to thinking of piracy as the other way around; small, informal businesses producing knock-offs of large brands such as Nike shoes or Gucci bags. But piracy occurs the other way too; the most famous example being biopiracy. It is the appropriation of traditional knowledge particularly of medicinal plants, by large pharmaceutical companies.

Further, patent and trademark protected products are rapidly displacing informal products on which they are often based (for example countless varieties of bhujia, sweets etc). A small “innovation” on top of a local product by a large corporation with the resources to secure an IPR results in a trademarked product. The local product on which the trademarked product is based is forced out of the market by economics of aggressive pricing, and attractive packaging and marketing. The resulting destruction of local economies means the destruction of jobs (with women being hurt more than men) and communities. Thus on the face of it, the argument for strengthening IPRs for this knowledge is strong.

But millions of scattered innovators are not easily amenable to private IPRs. One way to get around this problem is to create community-based IPRs for the informal sector, e.g. Geographical Indications (GIs) which are IPRs that cover not an individual or a company but a community of producers, such as Banarasi Sari weavers or Moradabad metalworkers. Since 2005 India has created more than 400 GIs in diverse agricultural and artisanal products. A second way to safeguard informally produced knowledge from appropriation is the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). Here the strategy is to ensure that patent officials all over the world have access to “prior art” that they can use to evaluate if a particular product is new enough to deserve a patent or copyright. The new policy outlines the need for expanding the TKDL to include other fields besides Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani and Siddha, that it already covers.

Both these approaches are better suited to India’s knowledge ecology being community-oriented rather than private. But they are also severely limited when juxtaposed with the immense diversity of products and scale of innovation that occurs daily in the millions of micro, small, and medium enterprises in the unincorporated informal sector. It is not only a matter of “traditional knowledge” that matters to a few artisanal communities. Rather it is the livelihood basis of 90% of our workforce. Further, in a context where the informal sector is severely underserved in terms of infrastructure (such as electricity) and several reforms that aid production in this sector are overdue, banking on more stringent IPRs to enhance informal sector incomes is, to say the least, unrealistic and unwise.

Our challenge is to develop an intellectual property regime that can aid local economies in their fight for earning decent livelihoods based on their own knowledge and resisting corporate take-over, while developing a commons-based alternative to private property rights in knowledge and culture. This will not be easy since it means taking on powerful global vested interests in intellectual property. But the payoff will be very large both in terms of helping local economies and leading the way in treating knowledge and culture as a commons.

Geographical Indication: Will it Save Traditional Indian Art?

First published on Policy Wonks.

India has always been famous for her hand-crafted goods. Most readers will not need an introduction to the rich diversity of textiles, fabrics, jewelry, metalwork, woodwork, ornaments, perfumes, etc. that have been manufactured here for centuries. The millions of artisans, men and women, employed in these industries possess a great wealth of knowledge and skills relating to local ecology and materials, production techniques, art, design, and market trends. These are the original “knowledge workers.” However, they usually do not receive material returns commensurate with this knowledge. For example, in the textile industry of Banaras, handloom weavers, the makers of the world-famous Banarasi Sari, who are paid piece-wages per sari, end up earning as little as Rs. 10-15 an hour. This amounts to barely Rs. 150 for a day’s work on the loom, less even than manual laborers make in a day.

Recently, Government of India, in collaboration with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), began awarding Geographical Indication (GI) status to handicraft industries. Since their formalization as a part of the Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement in the early 1990s, GIs have become increasingly popular among international development agencies, non-governmental organizations, policy-makers, and academics as a means of protecting traditional knowledge and developing traditional brands for global markets. A GI is a “place-based” collective intellectual property right. All producers who operate in a designated geographical area and produce specified products using specified methods can avail of the GI-status and thereby claim to be “authentic producers.” GI and related “marks indicating conditions of origin” (MICOs) have been used extensively in Europe for wines and cheese (think Champagne or Camembert).

The attraction of such a policy approach is obvious in a country where place-based crafts abound; Banarasi saris, Pashmina shawls, Moradabad metal, Kanjeevaram silk, the list could go on. In India the first GI was awarded to Darjeeling Tea in 2003. As of today nearly 500 GIs have been awarded, of which over half are for artisanal products (and the rest for agricultural products). The idea behind this effort is to promote a national and international brand name for traditional handicrafts and prevent imitation of craft goods by machines, thereby securing and enhancing artisanal incomes. If they work, GIs have the potential of benefiting millions of working Indians.

But are GIs the answer to reviving our traditional industries and promoting artisanal livelihoods? In a recent study (Basole 2015) I investigate the conditions under which GIs can address problems of poor but skilled artisans and what are their limitations in doing so. Based on a case study of the famous Banarasi sari industry, that was granted a GI in 2009, I make three points.

GIs must be designed through a participatory process.

Ordinary artisans, who are the producers of the knowledge in question, must take an active part in deciding which products and which processes of production need to be protected. Nominally this participatory process is in place. For example, in Banaras the GI effort involved a local NGO, governmental agencies, trader organizations and producer cooperative societies. But while this list appears to be a broad cross-section of interest groups in the industry, I found on the ground that with the exception of a few weavers directly associated with the NGO, ordinary weavers, who have contributed most to the knowledge commons that the GI seeks to brand and protect, were left out of the process. This is because the more powerful actors such as master-weavers and traders control the collective local bodies that represent artisans. Unions are absent. The consultations took place in hotels located outside weaver localities with officials, traders and well-off master weavers taking the lead. The entire GI application was drawn up in English with no copies available in the local language. As a result, even five years after the GI was granted, there is widespread ignorance about its existence among weavers. And many are skeptical that it will do anything to improve their lot.

GIs must be sensitive to the dynamic nature of artisanal knowledge.

The Banaras GI also highlights another problem with the way GIs are being used. It is primarily motivated by a desire to protect handloom weaving against powerloom competition and lays out rigorous criteria for what makes an authentic Banarasi fabric. In the process it unwittingly freezes knowledge by declaring only certain methods and designs to be “authentic.” But like all industries, artisanal industries are dynamic and they change both their products and processes to keep up with changing raw material sources, technology, and policy and market conditions. For example, silk has been substituted by synthetic fibres in Banaras and powerlooms are an outgrowth of the handloom sector, largely having taken off due to falling demand for handloom products, competition from Surat and other advanced weaving centers, and flawed trade policy that kept tariffs on Chinese silk high while reducing tariffs on Chinese fabric.

It is true that the market is awash with locally and foreign-made powerloom saris being sold as “handmade.” No enforcement exists and a lot of money is being made, as well as employment generated in the powerloom sector. But there already exists legislation that protects the handloom market, such as the Handloom Reservation Act, 1985 and certification schemes such as the Handloom Mark, whose intent was to prevent passing-off of machine-made cloth as hand-made. These have largely failed due to corruption and complicity of government officials with powerloom producers. In these circumstances, it is unclear how much impact a GI would have in protecting handlooms.

More generally, should it? It is clear that if fabric is made in China or Surat and sold as “Banarasi,” this is a case of free-riding on the city’s reputation and should be stopped. The GI is an effective mechanism to check this. But is a powerloom sari made in Banaras not a “Banarasi Sari?” Do weavers believe they are now producing a qualitatively different product undeserving of the name Banarasi? Does it not make sense to recognize and reward all the efforts of Banarasi weavers, whether in hand or mechanized weaving? These questions should have been debated widely, but were not. I believe one reason is that ordinary weavers were not part of the deliberations (the first point).

Wider consultations are needed and if necessary the GI must be broadened to include powerloom-made products from Banaras. A dual system that consists of a GI incorporating both hand and power produced saris (as long as they are made in Banaras), combined with a certification mark that protects the handloom market, is a better solution. A handloom mark can prevent encroachment of powerloom products on handlooms, while an inclusive GI will allow powerloom producers in Banaras to avail of the industry’s reputation thereby increasing the demand for powerlooms and creating jobs in that sector. Such a scheme would be analogous to multiple certification systems such as “fair-trade,” “organic,” and region of origin used, among other products, for coffee.

A GI cannot address problems that arise out of the political economy of artisanal industries.

Even a well-designed and implemented GI cannot make up for structural problems facing the artisanal sector today. At best, GIs can ensure higher premiums to those merchants or master-manufacturers who are able to navigate the GI bureaucracy and secure formal registration. Whether these will be passed on to the artisan-workers who work for piece-wages depends on the power relations between merchants/masters and artisans. For example, it is not difficult to imagine that in Banaras, eventually powerlooms will indeed be included in the GI, but nothing will change as far as the lot of ordinary wage-working weavers is concerned because, like most informal workers, they are unorganized.

Indeed today, it is harder than ever before to draw a line between artisanal production and the rest of the informal manufacturing sector. The same problems that plague the rest of the sector are also found in most artisanal industries. Long subcontracting chains, asymmetric relations between powerful merchants and subordinate artisan-workers, lack of marketing knowledge, credit constraints, precarious employment, lack of infrastructure etc.

Under these circumstances, GIs could be one component of a comprehensive industrial policy, but are not a magic bullet. They especially cannot substitute for the hard work of supplying adequate credit and infrastructure, formalizing informal contracts, and building unions and other collective bodies that represent the interests of ordinary artisans as well as those that speak on behalf of master-weavers who organize production. Without strong collective institutions at the local level, neither will acceptable and appropriate standards be developed nor will a more equitable sharing of value occur nor will favorable industrial policy result. If bad industrial and trade policy, and prevalence of exploitative conditions continue to undermine the livelihood of the ordinary artisan, the GIs will not have any crafts to protect.

Further, instead of viewing “traditional crafts” are somehow frozen in time, consumers as well as policy makers should appreciate that “tradition” changes continually. It is this dynamism that brings crafts into existence in the first place! Artisans know this well. Communities of artisans, if they receive returns commensurate with their skills and knowledge, will continue to produce ever more beautiful things. If they do not receive these returns, no amount of pious wishes to preserve India’s traditions will work.

Further Reading:

Banaras Bunkar Samiti. (2009) Human Welfare Association, Joint Director of Industries, Uttar Pradesh Handloom Fabrics Marketing Co-op Federation Ltd., Eastern U.P. Exporters Association, Banarasi Vastra Udyog Sangh, Director of Handlooms and Textiles U.P, Banaras Hathkargha Vikas Samiti, and Adarsh Silk Bunkar Sahkari Samiti Ltd. ‘GI Application No. 99- Banaras Sarees and Brocades’, Geographical Indications Journal, 29, 30–65.

Basole A (2015) Authenticity, Innovation and the Geographical Indication in an Artisanal Industry: The Case of the Banarasi Sari, The Journal of World Intellectual Property, 18(3/4), 127-149.

Das, K. (2007) ‘Protection of Geographical Indications: An overview of select issues with particular reference to India’, Center for Trade and Development, Working Paper 8.

Liebl, M. and Roy, T. (2004) Handmade in India: Traditional Craft Skills in a Changing World, in J. M. Finger and P.E. Schuler (eds.), Poor Peoples’ Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries, World Bank and Oxford University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 53–73.

Rangnekar, D. (2010) ‘The Law and Economics of Geographical Indications: Introduction’, The Journal of World Intellectual Property 13(2), 77–80.