Intensive Vs Extensive
The erstwhile industrial model of India was akin to the natural feeding pattern of a free roaming elephant.
Elephants roam in herds. They have a voracious appetite but they hardly destroy the forests they live in.
How is that so and how does it relate to India’s industrial model?
FOOTPRINT AND FOODPRINT OF ELEPHANTS
Elephant herds keep moving around in their habitat which is a wide area within the forest. They do not confine themselves to any one spot for long. Such strolling paths of the elephants are called Elephant Corridors.
Elephants eat extensively, tearing down a few branches from each tree as they move along through the wide span of their habitat. They do not eat intensively in one area alone.
Also, as they pass by, they fertilize the forest ground with their large quantities of dung.
Hence, by the time the elephants return to the same spot in their corridor, the vegetation gets enough time and nourishment to sprout back. The fodder is once again ready for the elephants.
This is Nature’s way of ensuring that the green cover of the forests is not destroyed due to the voracious appetite of the large herds of these huge creatures.
THE VORACIOUS GREED OF HUMANS
Whereas humans in the modern era, for their factories, manufacturing plants with large investments, exploit resources intensively in just one area, sucking dry its natural resources, in every sense of the word, irreversibly and irrecoverably!
Even Nature, who managed to safeguard herself from the voracious appetite of the huge elephantine creatures, stands vulnerable in front of the rapacious greed of the small built humans.
EXTENSIVE INSTEAD OF INTENSIVE
The ancient Indian model of widespread industry was an ECO-ECO model, Ecologically Viable and Economically Friendly.
The balance between Economy and Ecology was maintained and sustained well through many footprints, which were but, small and spread out wide.
SMALL YET ELEPHANTINE
These small industries akin to industrious ants, collectively were elephantine in strength.
That was the production footprint of the past for many millennia and could probably be resorted to in the near future as well.
This is a model which is easily implementable, with the present day advances in communication and transportation.
It will be a better use of these advancements, than for maintaining large footprint, centralized production setups.
A SMALL BUT WIDESPREAD SECRET
The extensiveness of small scale industries, whose non-intensive style of production conserved ecology and the wide spread network of tradesmen and merchants, whose concerted aggregation of the produce consolidated economy, were the source and secret of India’s sustained prosperity.
Together, they produced and supplied enough for themselves and the world.
A CUE FROM THE INDIAN Q & Q BRAND
There is an erroneous understanding that cottage industries mean low production and low quality. There can be nothing farther from the truth.
The Indian production model and the range of productions that India was famous for, shows to us that even as a small footprint model they had not only satisfied the needs of the local community but had the demands of the whole world, in quality and quantity.
These, were products of world class which had built India as a both, for supplying the quantum that the world had demanded and in quality that was the best in the world.
Many of the top automobile & other manufacturing industries of the world depend on India for its iron ore and other sources of raw materials. They have honed their capabilities over years of undisturbed supply of raw materials from India.
Many of the “proficient” experts engaged in manufacturing elsewhere in the world, are from India.
India is now having to woo these industries to come and manufacture in India. Very soon, it should lead to a Queue, to come to India, but “to buy, that which has been manufactured in India’s own land, in its own indigenous way, with its own resources”.
ACTUALLY SMALL BUT VIRTUALLY BIG
Vicious Cycle of Chasing Big or Small
It is a civilization of contrasts that we live in today.
*Huge industries
*Huge markets
*Huge infrastructure
*Huge economic models
* Huge academic models
*Huge cities
*And huge armies to protect all of these.
All these huge entities have come up, just so that we can start manufacturing smaller and smaller things, especially such as electronic gadgets, for our daily comfort.
BIGGER AND BIGGER FOR SMALLER AND SMALLER
In a way, we have gotten into a vicious cycle where:
*The need for making smaller and smaller gadgets is driving us to create larger and larger structures to develop and maintain them.
*And, to keep these larger and larger structures in good health, we need the smaller and smaller gadgets again.
In the end, we are losing our own health and also making many of the species of the world extinct as well.
We have evolved into working in a way that
*more and more know less and less of the whole
*less and less gain more and more from that whole.
It is a process driven, assembly line style of knowing and working in smaller scopes so that the entire picture and knowledge rests with a vested few.
The end product coming out, is often, also a finer and finer, niche creation that fewer and fewer can afford or really need.
In the end, it is all about working with minute scopes and knowledge that the big picture is lost from the horizon.
BLENDING BIG AND SMALL
One probable way to blend the big and small, can be the indigenous Indian model that had survived well till the 1700s, for well over 2000 years and more, probably even 5000 years and more.
It is an “extensive” model of
*Planning as one big unit but
*Producing extensively as many smaller units.
REBRANDING SMALL SCALE AS EXTENSIVE
Perhaps the nomenclature of this model as a small scaled, industrial model is what has prevented its recognition and acceptance, due to the negative connotation that goes with small.
It is the tag “small’ which has prevented them from making the “Big difference.
lt is time now to change the name of the debate from “BIG vs small to “Intensive vs Extensive”. The word “Extensive” gives a bigger connotation of economy and wealth as well as trade and spread.
The Extensive Scale manufacturing carried out in India, with its million small scale units, has the clephantine size and strength to match or even better today’s BIG scale model and could be positionea in world economy as an alternate model, a more sustainable way to produce which blends
*Big and Small scales
*Intensive and Extensive patterns
*Modern and Traditional merits.
MOVING FROM CENTRALISM TO DECENTRALISM
After the world’s xperiments with Feudalism, Socialism and Capitalism and being conironted with the reality of having to accept a 2 degree rise in Global temperature, perhaps we are now ready to look for the next alternative to global practice of industry and economy.
In the process, if we care to look in the direction of India to seek tips from ancient India’s sustained prosperity, perphaps ,the next paradigm in industry and economy could evolve to be Decentralisns the ideology which lndia had practiced at its core.
LINGARAJ PANDA,BARIPADA
