Seven years ago, I witnessed a crime at the altar of ‘development’—one that continues unchecked today: the deliberate refusal to see that what most of us call “rural development” is, in fact, just urban arrogance dressed as policy.
Back then, I was summoned as the token “insider” to a high-powered government meeting —tasked, along with sophisticated sounding consultants from a global funder, to redesign the future a rural development programme. The experts from the multilateral spoke with polished confidence, their PowerPoints shining; the government team, by contrast, shrank into hesitancy, unprepared, with poverty of language, conceptual clarity —or maybe just unwilling—to define a purpose.
I argued that true progress requires a wrenching shift: Development’s future must pivot away from poverty obsessed charity and toward planet centred justice. I called out the real scandal: Poverty is less about scarcity and more about hoarding—resources pile up in privileged hands, as inequality poisons our society. What we need is not paternalistic handouts to the “poor,” but a relentless ecological and equity-first approach. As ensuring earning with dignity and relevance I had proposed a green entrepreneurship focus.
My insights are inseparable from the hard realities of our environmental crisis. Take Jevons’ Paradox—a lesson we still seem determined to ignore - since the 1992 Rio Summit, global fossil fuel consumption hasn’t dropped. On the contrary, it’s exploded, multiplying 2.5 times in absolute terms. This happened while the fossil fuel share in global energy ticked down by a laughable 4–6% (from 86% to 80%). We tout “innovation,” but only become more resource-hungry under a new gloss. During this period the rich countries reduced their fossil fuel consumption by a ridiculous 2% while the poorer countries imitated the rich by guzzling more fossil fuel.
Meanwhile, the poverty discourse made a cosmetic shift in the early 2010s— from dole outs to “livelihoods.” What did that really change? In India’s vast, complicated reality, even the definition of livelihoods—let alone how to prioritize or deliver them—remains a battlefield with no consensus, no clarity, and precious little urgency.
India loses as much topsoil every five seconds as would cover a cricket field. Soil which will take centuries to naturally replace. If we don’t put soil health first, the very future of our food, farmers, and climate security is at risk. We have lost 2.3 million hectares of tree cover and 90% of its biodiversity hotspots since the Rio. Did our livelihood decade of “rural development” effectively arrest, reverse or address this trend? Nope, sir.
We spent the decade of “livelihood” focus, busily integrating the rural producers to global markets, at their cost most often. Our pathways were craftily designed to hurt the freedom and culture of the rural citizens – institution promotion with their own investments, marketing promotion without working capital support, supply – chain financing at usurial interests, aggregation as a solution without streamlining warehousing or processing, unnecessary high end machinery yoked to loans, expensive branding binge without adequate market and on and on. High risk and no return pathways whose results we have not bothered to study or learn from. Nearly 85% of the celebrated Farmer Producer Organization(FPO)s end-up promoting monoculture, 98% practice chemical agriculture (the more successful ones, the more intensely so), farmers haven’t benefitted as much as the retailer with less than 25% of the supply-chain premium if at all reaching them and meanwhile the supply-chain added 12% to the carbon footprint to the consumer food miles today. Meanwhile the starched consultants have repeatedly declared FPOs successful, brandishing numbers like “14,000+ FPOs registered” and “₹100,000 crore in aggregated turnover,” yet these figures mask the ecological and livelihoods damages. By reducing the livelihoods impact to selective commercial abstraction, both land and rural citizens have been reduced to a soulless spectacle, stripped of dignity and meaning.
Seven years ago, along with the Planet, I suffered a placatory response. “Everyone will be sent to you for orientation to the planetary focus. You can convince them to go green!”, said the co-creators of the programme. Thereby turning the entire planetary burden of the programme into my individual responsibility. This is the strategy from the global commerce playbook - turn structural failure into personal duty. Of course, once the programme started to get implemented, the bureaucratic sloth and nepotism took over and even this placatory response was insincerely pursued and eventually discarded. Programmatic efficiency is a conscious justification tactic to wilful gloss over the destructive acts of a corrupt system.
Fast-forward to the present. Now, I am invited to yet another “rural development” programme design brainstorming with the field is already set to usher in the “enterprise” as “rural development” golden age. Now we self-declare without either decency or data to support (oh yeah, the biggest decisions of “development” often suffer from data asphyxia), that we have dawned on the new era of enterprises as the pathway of rural development!!!
To me, “Rural development” reeks of colonial contempt that ought to have been discarded by any self-respecting Nation State. For us today, it is a slur that echoes through the minds of our urban elite and privileged migrants, who have inherited this disdain for everything rural, branding it as “backward” and unworthy. What truly demands development is not the rural landscape, but our mindset—our ability to observe and listen to the planet’s urgent call. What we are instead discussing are cosmetics of digital technology, AI bhakthi, market communication and financial tool innovations – basically opportunity for manifesting and billing our “expertise” shrouded in the plan of yet another programme that we inflict on the rural citizen. It’s not just an insult. It’s active erasure of dignity, freedom and wisdom of the rural community.
Recently I heard someone comment, “don’t romanticize the present” as against the past, as the present times where we make do with poor quality of essential life-giving forces - air, water, soil, food, art and meaning of life – while we celebrate “successes” of commercialized technology, markets, finance and entertainment. Planetary imperatives urgently demands a pathway of every “development” to be rooted in the reality of life-force quality enhancement, not irrelevant pathway that furthers scarcity and scarcity mindset.
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