Is Growth about Wanting more or Needing less?

Lately, formation of rural 'economies' is a trending matter and the sad fact is amidst this trend, disguised under the name of growth, Rural India actually seems to be falling off the ever widening gap between people's primary expectations and what they're being delivered - either by means of government undertakings or their newfound proxies - corporate business houses.

This article in BM dated 20th March 2011, refers to a statement made by RBI governor attributing rising inflation to the increase in rural consumption - evidently implying either that increasing village consumerism is bad or that increasing inflation figures are good for the national economy!

With this as background, such relation of rural consumption to rising national inflation comes across as an accusation on the rural peoples and nothing else. But it is interesting to note occasions when the same governments taking pride in terming such rural consumption as 'development' and staking large claims of playing an active enabling role behind such 'developments'. What is not plainly apparent though is the fact that our governments seem to have struck a process of delegating development works to private business houses either under the CSR tag (Corporate Social Responsibility) or in the guise of PPP (Public Private Partnership) models. Now when things appear to be firing back with increased, inflationary and uncontrollable consumption patterns among rural areas, the same governments seem to be pulling back with such allegations as the one above made by the RBI governor. This is primarily because the supply chain created by the private partners is unable to source enough content that the market now demands - a failure on the part of this govt-market alliance.

To cite examples from the article: there is coke (soft drink) available in almost every corner of every street in some villages, but pure drinking water is a scarce commodity even today; there are cars and all kinds of vehicles being bought in these villages, but there's hardly a stretch of good road to drive them. There are cosmetic stores in most big villages, but women of the same village have to travel 30 kilometers (on those bad roads) to reach a hospital.

Are we forgetting our primary needs in the rush to reap modern day benefits, the ones that are created by corporate houses keeping no particular human being's benefit in mind? Are we, without our knowledge getting swept away by this tsunami of wants, uprooting and disconnecting us from our needs? Now, are we to call this a need-deficit, or a want-surplus?

(To be continued...)