Everyday there is so much waiting to be written and so much wanting to be written and at times documented but rarely is there time enough in modern life to write a good blog or to keep your thought trained on one thing to do justice to it.
Today morning over a cup of tea i got discussing about the culutre of doing sewing , embroidery , stitching at home. It is a dying culture or has already died in most parts of India. my counterpart was trying to tell me "why do you worry if we can help generate employment by getting someone to do it what's so bad in it?" ...it made me think why was it that i was disliking this change in culture.. i'd like all of us to think through this with our understanding of life, money, jobs, economics, or whatever.
To me the answer was not strange or unknown.. The answer to my predicament not that i have the best understanding on the same. I had to patiently tell my friend that everytime we outsource, we bring in an element of consumerism into services. While to our eye this consumerism has only one effect - generate employment for someone who provides services to us, to a seasoned rural manager and IRMA passout it is not too difficult to realise that consumerism has dual effects on the poor populace. The first is the effect of rising consumerism which raises the prices for services that were otherwise delivered within the household free of financial cost. They never the less had an economic cost. In being provided in-house they avoided the unnecesarry economic costs of packaging ( a shop or an office to provide services etc. ) and develoment (skill training etc.) . The second effect is that the poor
generally survive on open access and community or common resources and as such increasing consumerism draws on their meagre financial resources and increasingly renders their community and common resources non-tradable and as such they do not get monetary benefits of the same or the monetary benefit gets significantly reduced.
In summary by killing such cultures we are pushing the poor away from a sustained common resource livelihood to an unsustainable private rights resource livelihoods that simply do not give enough returns.
Now the question is why do they not give enough returns. Well to answer this question we have to look back at our own behaviour - how many times have you paid the rightful price of hand-work embroidery and how often have you bargained that on"xyz" footpath the same embroidery is available for 1/10 the price. How often do we realise that we are not just killing a culture but by pegging a persons labour equal to an exploitative regime we are also killing the chance of survival for these folks by making life more unsustainable.. As a parting shot i'll ask you to work out the relations of a community of people that lives an unsustainable life with illegal activities. and you will know where we are headed in the "growth only" regime.
Hail Growth - Whither Growth
Today morning over a cup of tea i got discussing about the culutre of doing sewing , embroidery , stitching at home. It is a dying culture or has already died in most parts of India. my counterpart was trying to tell me "why do you worry if we can help generate employment by getting someone to do it what's so bad in it?" ...it made me think why was it that i was disliking this change in culture.. i'd like all of us to think through this with our understanding of life, money, jobs, economics, or whatever.
To me the answer was not strange or unknown.. The answer to my predicament not that i have the best understanding on the same. I had to patiently tell my friend that everytime we outsource, we bring in an element of consumerism into services. While to our eye this consumerism has only one effect - generate employment for someone who provides services to us, to a seasoned rural manager and IRMA passout it is not too difficult to realise that consumerism has dual effects on the poor populace. The first is the effect of rising consumerism which raises the prices for services that were otherwise delivered within the household free of financial cost. They never the less had an economic cost. In being provided in-house they avoided the unnecesarry economic costs of packaging ( a shop or an office to provide services etc. ) and develoment (skill training etc.) . The second effect is that the poor
generally survive on open access and community or common resources and as such increasing consumerism draws on their meagre financial resources and increasingly renders their community and common resources non-tradable and as such they do not get monetary benefits of the same or the monetary benefit gets significantly reduced.In summary by killing such cultures we are pushing the poor away from a sustained common resource livelihood to an unsustainable private rights resource livelihoods that simply do not give enough returns.
Now the question is why do they not give enough returns. Well to answer this question we have to look back at our own behaviour - how many times have you paid the rightful price of hand-work embroidery and how often have you bargained that on"xyz" footpath the same embroidery is available for 1/10 the price. How often do we realise that we are not just killing a culture but by pegging a persons labour equal to an exploitative regime we are also killing the chance of survival for these folks by making life more unsustainable.. As a parting shot i'll ask you to work out the relations of a community of people that lives an unsustainable life with illegal activities. and you will know where we are headed in the "growth only" regime.
Hail Growth - Whither Growth
1 comment:
that's a very sentimental post but very true too however we need to figure out a way that changes the processes and behavoiour but is not so extreme as your suggestion. nature usually does not resort to violent extremes unless pushed to the wall.. the calamities are yet to arrive we are near but there is still hope and we need to capitalise that hope NOW
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