A scent of what may become a major social and civil conflict in the early 21st century in India came these days when tens of thousands poor Indians marched hundreds of miles to claim their rights on land, and the governmental obligation to protect these rights. This is the hidden face of the Indian economic boom, in a country where traditionally there were more people than resources to sustain their lives, taking on the agricultural land in order to achieve industrial growth most often means acting against the wish of local peasant communities. What for some is the sole opportunity for economic progress, for others is a theft. With the Indian economy poised for many more years of high growth, such protests may only get from bad to worse. Luckily, India isn't China where peasantry has no voice in public policy; nevertheless, the logic of growth after several decades of economic autarchy puts major economic interests on a collision course.

After the independence, India had a choice between what some developed countries in Europe did for centuries, and what it actually did, following its own specific way of progress. The choice was between moving large masses of peasants to the cities where they would work for capitalist (or state owned) industries; and keeping the peasants as longer as possible on the land. It was of historical coincidence that the major textile industries of colonial times remained in Pakistan after the partition. Without industrial base ready to take millions and to expand, and with strong sentiment of spiritual superiority over the West and its decadent materialism, the new independent India leaders opted for a model where hundreds of millions of small peasants will represent the social base of the political regime.

This model is over now, in everything but in the name. India no longer claims to be superior to any other civilization, and given the accepted logic of economic development, it actually falls far behind many other civilizations, both from the West and from the East. Worse, the logic of development needs more and more land turned into industrial use (and waste), and millions of peasants moving to the cities, where there is still no big industry ready to absorb them in such huge numbers. Even worse, the process of land taking looks increasingly like the worst examples of land grabbing in the West (e.g. the liquidation of the commons in Britain in 17th and 18th centuries). The difference is that in pre-modern Britain we deal with unclear property claims and common ownership; in India now under pressure are the legal owners that just happen to live in a wrong place, a place for big investment, both public and private.

Luckily for India, this clash over the land won't take the Chinese proportions, where officially there are more than 70,000 peasant riots each and every year. It seems that even one march of desperate and poor owners is sufficient in a country that possesses a rule of law system and a democratic government to make this issue a priority far before it growths out of control. Nevertheless, no matter how this system deals with such problems, objectively speaking, there will be losers, and the loss for some will mean abandonment of the land and moving toward marginal status in the booming cities.

India country profile:

• Area: 3,287,590 sq km
• Climate: varies from tropical monsoon in south to temperate in north
• Population: 1.129 billion (July 2007 est.)
• Population growth rate: 1.6% (2007 est.)
• Life expectancy at birth: 68.59 years
• Total fertility rate: 2.81 children born/woman (2007 est.)
• Ethnic groups: Indo-Aryan 72%, Dravidian 25%, Mongoloid and other 3% (2000)
• Religions: Hindu 80.5%, Muslim 13.4%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.9%, other groups including Buddhist, Jain, Parsi 2.5% (2001)
• Languages: English is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi spoken by 30% of the people; 14 other official languages.
• Literacy: 61%
• GDP per capita: purchasing power parity $3,800 (2006 est.)
• Population below poverty line: 22% (2006 est.)
• Labor force by occupation: agriculture 60%, services 28%, industry 12% (2003)
• Main trading partners: the U.S.A., China, UAE, and EU countries.
• Internet users: 60 million (2007 est.)

(Sources: CIA World Factbook 2007, Reuters)

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