I remember, as a child, one of the favorite lessons in the classroom was about how India is a great country because we represent unity in diversity. Take our national anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’ that elegantly evokes different regions of India, combine that with Iqbal’s assertion ‘Sare Jahan Se Achcha’ and we have a very powerful cause-and-effect relationship. In India, we have come to idolize our diversity, holding it dear to our hearts and yet inexplicably, we claim to have a common destiny.

In this post, I argue against the increasingly lofty ideal of diversity. I believe the costs of maintaining and acknowledging diversity far outweigh any benefits we derive from it, especially in the context of a developing democracy. I am not against diversity per se but I argue here that preservation of diversity need not be our avowed goal and loss of diversity may actually be helpful oftentimes. While I do that, I am also trying to inspire some skepticism towards what is often held as a ’sacred truth’. Let me also hasten to clarify that I do not intend to rant about individual forms of diversity like disability, gender, political leanings and sexual orientation. I am limiting my analysis to those collective motifs of diversity that are not essential to anyone’s survival and core identity. In the immediate context of India, the most celebrated bases of our national diversity are language, religion and culture.

My central thesis is that the private and public cost of catering to myriad groups of people is staggering, the schisms created by radically diverse interests are deep, the task of development is ridden with partisan ideologies and most of the benefits of a potpourri population are dispensable.

With over 1,500 dialects and 22 official languages that India is home to, our national linguistic scene reminds me of the biblical story of Babel. When God realized that men were building a tower to reach the heaven, He used his sorcery to achieve the best non-violent way to stop this development. He waved his wand and suddenly every worker on the tower spoke a different language. Once communication became tortuous, the first casualty was the tower.

Consider modern India a magnified version of Babel. Different voices, different sounds; how do you harmonize and develop in unison? As a reprieve, we had English. But that was seen as a symbol of foreign domination, so our government valiantly tried to impose Hindi on every Venkat, Jignesh and Debashish. It was a foul and stupid plan that was doomed to fail because people value freedom over development. It did fail miserably. As a result, we now accommodate every possible language. Road signs and government gazettes have to be created in at least 2 languages everywhere, in some cases even 3 or 4. I remember seeing some signs in Delhi that were in Hindi (the supposed national language), Punjabi (local vernacular), Urdu (don’t know why) and English (for all those who don’t understand the first 3). Unilever has to perhaps create multiple ads in multiple themes to sell the same damn soap in Tamil Nadu, UP, Bengal & Gujarat.

Consider religion. I am not suggesting that people from different religions can’t coexist peacefully however we could rule out a big potential cause of differences if all people belonged to the same faith. Experience over centuries has shown us that religion is a powerful force for most people - blind belief in a specific conception of God is an affliction that even education can not cure. Many of India’s issues can be traced to religion - notably, the 2-nation theory that divided India in 1947 was based on religion, Khalistan, riots against Christian missionaries and Kashmir. Arguably, it can’t be said that if all people belonged to one faith, there would be everlasting peace. People in largely homogeneous societies (Iceland, Scandinavia, Japan, some LatAm countries) also engage in conflicts however there are of a less severe form and are certainly not inspired by differences about who created the universe.

Having written until here, I am instinctively revolting against my own diatribes against diversity. One of the chief reasons I love India is its mind-boggling diversity. Travel just 100 miles and you are in a different world - language changes, food changes, level of development changes, attires and lifestyles change. But for some fixtures like Indian Railways, government offices, cricket and movie posters, one would think there are several countries jutting each other. On the other hand, I feel somewhat bored when travel in the US - more or less the same airports, same brands, same Inter-states, same language and same level of development.

If you noticed, the truth is hidden in the above lines. Too much diversity is co-related to uneven development. This co-relation is intuitive as sameness of language, religion and culture leads to sameness of aspirations which allows consistency in developmental priorities. US offers sameness in several things including a high level of development. Agreed, there is a rust belt in the US, but it does not differ as much from its North-east as India’s BIMARU states differ from an industrial Gujarat or a prosperous Punjab.

Many of us, including myself, cherish diversity because of the cultural richness it offers. Such pride is closely related to touristic pleasure and subtly smacks of exclusive elitism. In this world, the spectator wants everything exotic (e.g. tribal cultures, handicrafts, ancient arts & customs) to survive for future generations, regardless of whether people practicing the exotica are better off moving on to a modern sameness. Imagine a hilly village where people still use dung-cake for cooking, tend cattle, crush grain using old manual instruments, attend a weekly farmers’ bazaar and rely on the resident Sanskrit-trained pundit for all rituals. Well-heeled tourists staying at a nearby luxury resort would come visiting and find everything very ‘quaint’ and would rue the fact that a road is being built to connect the village with the outside world and electricity is also in the works. Development brings choices to marginal societies, and in their effort to benefit by merging with the mainstream, their diversity gives way to sameness. If development comes at the cost of diversity, is it still desirable? City-dwellers and prosperous folks may pause before answering but ask the impoverished masses and they will approve resoundingly.

Yet, as a society, we loose something unique when this happens. The cost of such a loss is largely psychological and is felt by only those who had been tickled by the existence of the outliers. Overtime, with newer generations, such loss is forgotten and rationalized. Recently, Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language, died in her native Alaska at 89. Like several other languages that have been lost over the ages, nobody knows Eyak anymore. Does it matter? May be we lost some folk songs and some interesting idioms but surely, Marie’s progeny is better off knowing English. Economics always trumps the feel-good factor of knowing one’s mother-tongue. Some may argue that a language also preserves knowledge gained over generations (in the Indian tradition, this is called Shruti - the Heard) but in today’s day and age, if the knowledge is useful and marketable, someone will take the effort of translating it into a vernacular before it is impossible. That has happened with several Sanskrit treatises and epics.

There is a fine line between acknowledging that diversity is not always useful and in seeking conformity forcefully. I agree that rationalizing the need for homogeneity is the first step that ultimately leads to barbaric events like Holocaust, Apartheid, Cultural Revolution in China and some genocides in Africa in recent years. However, they are still separate constructs and we, as a people, should have the courage to recognize them as such.

We know that some level of diversity is inevitable due to the nature of our environment and society. We also know that diversity does increasingly give way to sameness, as communication and development allow people to join the mainstream. We should welcome such change.

(This is a reproduction of the latest post on my blog: serialbus.wordpress.com)

If asked to recount 5 top events of my life, I will perhaps always include my participation in the Azad Bharat Rail Yatra (Free India Train Journey) in 1997-98. A chartered train with over 200 students cris-crossed India in an exciting journey that celebrated India’s 50 years of independence. The second edition of this journey, called Jagriti Yatra (Renaissance Journey), takes place this winter, 24Dec08-11Jan09.

Jagriti Yatra (JY) succeeds the Azad Bharat Rail Yatra (ABRY) after 11 years. These 11 years have not been a blink in time for the world, and certainly not for India. We have seen a great deal of change in these years. As JY unfolds, we need to perhaps assess our ABRY direction and evaluate where we need an inflection and where an about turn is necessary.

To that end, the JY team has rightly positioned this journey as a forward-looking, future-oriented event focused on India’s need of the hour: Entrepreneurship. As an ABRY participant, I am also in position to point out certain themes & messages of the last Yatra that need to be revised for the consumption of the new generation that will come aboard.

As many participants will recall, we had a 5-point agenda on the train (Population Control, Environment & Sustainable Development, Values, India & the Globe, Agro-Industries & Entrepreneurship) and additionally, a focus group on an Ideal Village and Ideal City (which we named Azad Gaon & Azad Shahar). While certain messages have remained topical and have acquired an even bigger importance, a few themes need repackaging:

a) Population Control: ABRY’s consensus was that population growth is a problem and we need to control our numbers. This position was heavily conditioned by the state propaganda and our biases. Indians (and people from other developing countries) are sometimes diagnosed as possessing a ’scarcity mindset’ as opposed to an ‘abundance mindset’ of Westerners. Growing up, one would look around and easily associate the scarcity of resources with number of people claiming them. This thinking expressed itself during events like ‘load-shedding’ (this concept is unknown in the West) or queuing up at the railway station to purchase tickets or over rising prices and while dividing waters. Research (not necessarily recent) has revealed no causation between population and poverty. Thinly-populated countries can be miserable (think sub-Saharan Africa) and heavily-populated regions can be rich (think Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, New York etc). True, larger numbers require more resources but they also accelerate innovation. Innovation fuels prosperity which eventually shrinks the birth rate and populations reach stable levels. To focus on population control as a means of reducing poverty is like rowing against the tide to escape the storm. India needs to focus on creating opportunities for the people, accelerate development and reap what many economists are beginning to term as ‘demographic dividend’. In the process, population will take care of itself.

b) Ideal Village: There was a bit of Gandhian thought that hung upon us like still air throughout the journey, especially after the visit to the Sabarmati Ashram. While Gandhi was clearly a great individual and leader, no serious economist would term his notions of development well-considered. His focus on self-sufficiency may have been good as a tool of civil disobedience, but in post-independence India, it was a recipe for disaster. From that wellspring arose the idea of developing villages (because that’s where India lives, they say). Our well-meaning leaders relied unquestioningly on Gandhian insights and still do. However, this kind of thinking that treats assumptions as axioms is very harmful. Yes, majority of people live in villages but should they continue to live there? A cursory analysis of concentration of world’s wealth (and common sense) reveals that cities are where wealth is. In developed nations, very few people live in rural places or earn their living through agriculture. We can improve the lot of rural India by focusing on creation of cities, not on improving villages. There is a thin line between the two but this difference in paradigm has a powerful impact on how we allocate resources.

c) Agro-Industries: Similar to the Ideal Village discussion, the emphasis on agribusiness was not forward-thinking. In India, we often take agriculture as non-negotiable and then, proceed to think about how we can create more value out of it. It is a sound idea in the interim but our end-goal should be to wean our workforce away from agriculture, as much as possible. Today’s India is reflection of this trend where we have moved away from an agriculture-dominated economy to a services-dominated one. During 2005-06, agriculture accounted for 20 % of India’s GDP while Services accounted for 54%.

d) Values: I was a part of the Values group and remember that we created a poster of a Tree of Values which showed how there are some basic values (the trunk) and how they provide the bulwark for other values (branches) which ultimately help us in achieving success and joy (fruit/leaves). For us, the trunk was ‘Honesty’ and ‘Integrity’, and none of it is obsolete 11 years from then. This is a discussion that requires an inflection since a better understanding of values has assumed a much greater role in assimilating a global world. The more we are joining up, the more we need to learn to understand and respect differences. The predictions of homogeneity (’global village’) have fallen short and as different regions of the world develop at varying rates, the melting pot runs the risk of occasionally turning into a seething cauldron. Samuel Huntington’s 1993 thesis ‘Clash of Civilizations‘ appears full of prescience as he predicted that Post-Cold War conflict will stem from cultural, rather than ideological differences. At that time, this appeared counter-intuitive to many since ideology was supposedly a more powerful force than culture in modern times. Not many people doubt Huntington’s thesis anymore. 9/11 can be considered a watershed in this development and as an event, it stands between ABRY and JY. The next wave could be based on any other identity, beyond cultural or ideological. Therefore, it is important to widen the scope of the Values discussion and include not just culture/ideology but also gender, sexuality and race as possible fulcrums of the emerging world order.

e) Environment & Sustainable Development: We debated endlessly about how forests needed to be saved and rivers needed to be cleansed. The awareness regarding environment has peaked in the last few years with global warming taking centrestage with war on terrorism, so this presents another inflection point. While ABRY understood the importance of Sustainable Development and also endorsed several local and national solutions, I think JY needs to take this dialogue further and include the nuanced nature of the issues that now beset us on a global level. Some of the recent analyses have shown powerful connections environment has with peace (think Water) and terrorism (think Ivory), going beyond the traditional foil of industrial development. The debate has also taken on a moral shade due to clamor by the developed world that China & India need to rein in their emissions and energy hunger. While the West easily neglected any fallout on environment during its coming-out, developing countries are expected to show restraint when they need it least. This calls into question the fairness & politics of development. JY must explore these issues and present India’s case.

I am sure JY team is crafting a 5-point agenda for this year’s Yatra but if I may throw in my suggestions on which broad areas to focus on, these will be:

1. Role of Government & Civil Society
2. Sustainable Development & Environment
3. Religion & Values
4. Free Market & Regulation
5. Entrepreneurship & Education

I wonder what others think.

(The above is a reproduction of the latest post from my blog: serialbus.wordpress.com)