A Recipe for India’s Renaissance

M. A. Siraj | NT

India has 740 districts. Around 58 per cent of the nation’s population lives in 240 districts which lie at the core of the diamond-shaped India.

These lives matter if India has to leap out of the category of developing countries and to be counted among the developed nations.

The 75th anniversary of India that we left a little behind us, can trigger a movement if this middle is coaxed, persuaded and goaded into purposeful action.

This middle of India that lives in tier-2 and tier-3 towns does not bask in reflected glory of the large metropolises that carry the colonial hangover. They nurse a culture that is circular, complex and vernacular, yet is exciting, emotive and full of possibilities.

The life here revolves around Dhabas, Dharamshalas, Patwaris, Tehsildars, and cherishes the spirit of swadeshi and satyagraha. It is these people who are the subject matter of Shahank Mani’s book Middle of Diamond India recently published by Penguin Random House.

Shashank, an alumni of IITDelhi envisions an India that heretofore reimagines itself as a Diamond, a transition from a Pyramid, and seeks a horizontal association that befits a republic of its size.

Shashank, who worked with several MNCs in India as well as overseas, jettisoned the jet-set life around 2008. He pegged himself in the small village of Barpar in Deoria district, in Purvanchal region of Uttar Pradesh to take up grassroots development work to realise his dream of unearthing the strengths of what he calls ‘Middle India’.

He says, these people are no longer poor but not particularly rich either. The strategy he talks about involves shunning the zero-sum economic thinking of colonial or mercantile systems, essentially designed to divide resources and funnel wealth to metro destinations.

“The Middle represents ‘and’ thinking, balancing science and spirituality, economics and culture”.

According to him, it will counter the top-down approach, both of western industrial thinking and that of communist China.

The author set up an NGO Jagriti in Deoria and began training volunteers through a novel experiment of taking 500 of them on a train journey around the middle and peninsular India, spending the days in towns and cities enroute, interacting with heads of institutions engaged in path-breaking grassroots development work in cities and towns and travelling during nights.

The Jagriti Yatra has so far taken 7,500 volunteers on the journey covering nearly 130,000 kilometres. The book is a compendium of Shahank’s experiences at Deoria, insights from annual Jagriti Yatra and as one who worked in private sector as a business strategist for several years.

He says the ideological divide in the emerging world may not be between the traditional Left and the Right, but between the dominant forces of the Top and the rising energies of the Middle.

Curiously, part of the author’s philosophy draws inspiration from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on August 15, 2022 unveiling panch pran (five vows) pursuing the goal of a developed nation; to take pride in our roots; decolonize our institutions; need for national unity; and, creating a sense of duty in our citizens.

The author agrees that a networkof 7,500 yatris is not enough to bring about a change in a country as large as India. But he was propelled by Margaret Mead’s words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world”.

The yatra made the volunteers realise that the Indians who lived in the Metros were one, or two generations removed from a place that is in the Middle India. Shashank’s Middle India has roughly 800 million people, 11 per cent of the global population.

The top economic class of India resides in 30 metros and tier-1 districts which have a population of 160 million Indians who are prosperous. On the other extreme are 470 tier-4 districts where 460 million Indians live, largely coinciding with the bottom income segment.

Districts of Dhemaji in Assam or Gadhchiroli in Maharashtra come under this category. The United States too shared a similar distribution of population at the end of the Second World War with the extremely rich and extremely poor concentrated on the either end of a diamond while the big fat middle class making up the centre.

Growth priorities were directed at the centre resulting in the powerful growth. The author argues that recognition of the vast Middle would free the nation from three biases that damage the democracy.

The first bias is that the top elite consider those in the Middle as poor and treat them as a liability rather than as an asset. This leads to the creation of dependence and promotes the culture of grants, sub