Some Remarks about Agricultural Villages and Migration, and Four Suggestions

Mark Lindley
My first suggestion is to replace the theoretical binary distinction between rural and urban settle-
ments with a notion of a theoretical spectrum extending from “100% rural” at one extreme of the
spectrum, via gradually more and more "urban" (according to a certain rule of thumb), to the least
rural and therefore “most urban” settlement in the set under consideration.
The rule of thumb I have in mind is a ratio between two amounts of money: (1) the estimated
annual cost of producing agriculturally – wherever the production takes place – the food that is con-
sumed in the settlement, and (2) the cost of packaging and transporting and selling (or otherwise
distributing) the food to the consumers in the settlement, and of properly disposing of the waste
entailed by the packaging and transporting. A theoretically 100% rural settlement would be one
where all the food that is consumed there is grown within walking distance, and none of it has had
to be packaged, transported at monetary cost, or vended, and no money has to be spent on disposing
properly of the waste.1
(A better rule of thumb would be based on a ratio between two rates of flow of “exergy” –
i.e., of “available energy” – rather than of money. In physics, these terms (and the synonyms “free
energy" and "available work”) mean energy available to make things move faster or slower than
they’re already moving, and/or available to heat things up (which is a matter of making molecules
move faster in a higgledy-piggledy way).2 Radiation from the sun is a vast example of exergy that
we get without paying for it. Exergy that we pay money for is called “consumable energy.” From an
exergy-economic analysis of how a national population is fed, one could predict whether under cer-
tain conditions of infrastructure as to how the nation produces its consumable energy, it wouldn’t
have to import fuel in order to feed its people properly. However, very few economists know how to
make exergy-economic analyses, whereas the current costs in rupees of transporting food to various
settlements, packaging it, etc., can be estimated from statistics already available to India’s govern-
ment. That is why my proposed rule of thumb is derived from a ratio between rates of flow of
money, rather than from a ratio between rates of flow of exergy.)

1. Vegetarians in Antarctica would be, according to this definition, extremely "urban" as all their food would be flown in
from far away. An organic farmer in Karnataka who has a doctorate in chemical engineering has suggested to me that
a good rule of thumb for how 'rural' a village is would be the ratio between how much “photosynthetic energy” it ex-
ports and how much fossil-fuel energy it imports.
2. Two units of measure for available energy are joules and calories. A hundred joules are the amount which, when made
available electrically, get a 100-watt bulb to shine for one second. This is nearly the same amount of energy as 25 cal-
ories in your diet; so, a calorie amounts to approximately four joules.
 India’s government could, in designing its economic programs, make good use of the notion of a
theoretical spectrum (for human settlements) such as I have described. Government has already a lot
of different-strokes-for-different-folks policies. Assessing quantitatively to what extent each settle-
ment is “urban” could prove useful for refining the design of such policies. Programs for alleviating
destitution could be designed in such a way as to incentivize villagers to migrate to nearby small
towns rather than to distant mega-cities, and could incentivize some of the people in mega-cities to
shift to small towns near the villages where their families live. The net effect would be to reduce the
share of the nation’s costs that are spent on travel and transportation instead of on productive activi-
ties. I am mindful of E. F. Schumacher’s wise precepts that food and fuel are the primary factors in a
modern economy3 and that "Local, short distance transportation should receive every encourage-
ment, but long hauls should be discouraged."4
Without trying to plan the economy in such a way as render “a district of average size, having
roughly a population of ten lakhs, as nearly self-sufficient as possible in respect of consumer goods
which supply daily needs” (this was a goal of Gandhian economic thinking in 1948),5 the national
government could design its subventions and taxes and charity programs in such a way as to have
a somewhat similar effect, yet with no need for Five-Year-Plan-type goals in that regard. A plan
designed and undertaken within a village can be adjusted, as need be, by lots of small talk among
people who have the benefit of adequate first-hand observations as to how it has been working out;6
but a grand scheme outlined (sometimes perforce in deliberately vague compromise language) by
a national planning committee is likely to be far more cumbersome.

* * *
My second suggestion is to improve the training of ecological economists: they should know
enough about chemistry to enable them to distinguish between genuine “strong sustainability-assess-
ments” and fake ones.7 I believe that such an improvement is an urgent need of the day. Let me,

3. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973; see apropos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful), Chapter 1.
4. See www.mkgandhi.org/articles/buddhist.htm.
5. The citation is from Jawaharlal Nehru et al., 1948, Report of the Economic Programme Committee (New Delhi 1948).
See my J. C. Kumarappa: Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist (Mumbai 2007), p.49.
6. Later in this text I will dwell on the fact that the binary dichotomy between rural and urban is related to a theoretical
dichotomy between community” and “society” that was established (in Western university-level academic theorizing)
in 1887.
7. E.g. "Global warming is a hoax."
before explaining why, offer the following remarks about some Western terminology8 for some of
the most relevant fields of academic study at universities and for what they study:

• The academic field called “sociology” studies human societies.

• The academic field called “economics” studies economic activities (which are also called “eco-
nomics,” but the history of economies is very different from the history of economic studies).
• The academic field called “market economics” studies trading among humans.
• There is no handy term for the study of barter (which is a kind of trading). The terms “micro-
economics,” “macroeconomics” and “national economics” are used for the study of buying and
selling, by means of money, goods and/or services and/or other money.9
• “Political science” studies politics (which includes the work of governments).
• The academic fields of “geography” and “geology” study our planet.
• The field of “ecological economics” studies (human) trading and material exchanges between
Humankind and the rest of Nature.10
Market economists assign monetary values to non-human parts of Nature. The accepted (but
weird) term for all such estimates is “weak sustainability-assessments.” They are needed for settling
certain kinds of lawsuits, such as (for instance) the “Exxon Valdez” case, which was about an oil
spill in 1989 whereby millions of gallons of the stuff were dumped into the water, "with immense
impacts for fish and wildlife and their habitats, as well as for local industries and communities."11
An unusually ambitious weak sustainability-assessment, ventured tentatively in 2011 by some
first-rate professors of market economics,12 was of the value of all the trees in India. The main
factors in the evaluation were estimates of (1) the average price per kilogram of lumber and (2) how
many kilograms could be brought to market by cutting down all the trees. The market-economics
professors attributed a (negative) monetary value to the aesthetic loss of beautiful scenery, but

8. I am a Westerner.
9. A good reason for the existence of the term “national economics” is that monetary currencies are issued by national
banks.
10. I say “the rest of Nature” because Humankind is, after all, part of Nature. (An important fact is that nearly all the
other parts of Nature don’t care, alas, about human welfare, even though a lot of domesticated animals care about the
welfare of certain humans.)
11. See https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/exxon-valdez.
12. This was a study-paper and was later withdrawn. Its authors included Sir Partha Dasgupta, who told me (in a private
email of 14 February 2021) that he found my plan for training ecological economists "attractive and laudable."
ignored that if all the trees were cut down, then none would be left to provide fruit or shade, to pro-
tect the soil from erosion, etc. All weak sustainability-assessments are absurd in some such way.
“Strong” sustainability-assessments are of the material aspects of the value to humans of the
non-human parts of Nature – i.e., of physical and often chemical realities, such as (for instance) how
many plants of this or that relevant kind are present, what are their ecological and economic func-
tions, locations, conditions, vulnerabilities etc., and whether this or that kind can feasibly be sub-
stituted for, in the economy or in the ecology, by this or that other kind. The chemical aspects of
such assessments are needed to help determine (together with estimates of monetary costs) what it
may be feasible to do, sooner or later, to alleviate some of the material (as distinct from spiritual)
problems that are already beginning, historically, to render ecological economics important. Some
of those problems (for instance re: climate and soil-quality) are causing problematically high rates
of international migration.
Since politicians and government bureaucrats take advice far more readily from economics pro-
fessors than from ecologists, it is tragic that hardly any economics professors – and indeed hardly
any professors of ecological economics – know chemistry well enough to understand strong sustain-
ability-assessments based on soil science, meteorology, epidemiology, or any other science that is
based in turn on chemistry. People without chemical savvy can measure and record changes in tem-
perature, in the heights of water-tables, in the rates at which coastlines are receding or at which
people are contracting this or that appalling and contagious disease, in the frequencies of certain
kinds of natural catastrophes (such as floods and fires), in the population densities of larger-than-
microscopic biological species, etc., but when it comes to addressing and mitigating such problems,
a modicum of savvy about a science based in turn on chemistry is likely to be indispensable.
Ecological economists’ lack of training in sciences dependent on chemistry not only renders
them incapable of devising useful new combinations of strong and weak sustainability-assessment,
but also renders them unable to distinguish between competent and fake strong sustainability-
assessments such as have become rife in civil societies worldwide.13

13. Several US cities and states are suing fossil fuel companies for deceiving the public about the climate crisis. An
example is Chicago’s lawsuit (filed in 2024) against British Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Phil-
lips 66 and Shell, alleging that they intentionally misled the public about the impact of their products despite their
long-standing knowledge of the climate dangers of oil and gas. The suit also names the nation’s largest oil and gas
lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, as a defendant for allegedly working with oil companies to sow
doubt about the climate crisis, and specifically for creating front groups to promote climate disinformation. See
www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2024/february/---mayor-johnson--city-of-chicago-
sues-oil-and-gas-companies-for.html.
 I have been trying for years – and will persist in this effort – to persuade some university some-
where to train potential professors of ecological economics who are savvy about finance and about
chemistry. My main reason for writing this paper is to appeal for help in this effort. Please write to
mark.lindley@bamu.ac.in.
At the end the following set of excerpts from a recent article by Ramachandra Guha about India’s
current and likely forthcoming economic conditions,14 the reference to “Indians yet unborn” evokes
implicitly a precept, mentioned by A. C. Pigou in his great book on welfare economics, that “It is the
clear duty of Government, which is the trustee for unborn generations as well for its present citizens,
to watch over, and, if need be, by legislative enactment to defend the exhaustible natural resources of
the country from rash and reckless spoilation”15 (even though neither the unborn generations nor the
present-day children can vote):
"Rampant environmental degradation across the country threatens the sustainability of eco-
nomic growth. Even in the absence of climate change, India would be an environmental disaster
zone. Its cities have the highest rates of air pollution in the world. Many of its rivers are eco-
logically dead, killed by untreated industrial effluents and domestic sewage. Its underground
aquifers are depleting rapidly. Much of its soil is contaminated with chemicals. Its forests are
despoiled and in the process of becoming much less biodiverse, thanks to invasive nonnative
weeds.
“This degradation has been enabled by an antiquated economic ideology that adheres to the
mistaken belief that only rich countries need to behave responsibly toward nature. India, it is said,
is too poor to be green. In fact, countries such as India, with their higher population densities and
more fragile tropical ecologies, need to care as much, or more, about how to use natural resources
wisely. In 2014, India ranked 155 out of 178 countries assessed by the Environmental Perform-
ance Index, which estimates the sustainability of a country’s development in terms of the state
ofits air, water, soils, natural habitats, and so on. By 2022, India ranked last, 180 out of 180.
“The effects of these varied forms of environmental deterioration exact a horrific economic and
social cost on hundreds of millions of people. Degradation of pastures and forests imperils the
livelihoods of farmers. Unregulated mining for coal and bauxite displaces entire rural communi-
ties, making their people ecological refugees. Air pollution in cities endangers the health of child-
ren, who miss school, and of workers, whose productivity declines. Unchecked, these forms of
environmental abuse will impose ever-greater burdens on Indians yet unborn.”

* * *
My third suggestion has to do with the fact that rural agricultural productivity in India is ham-
pered, efficiency-wise, by the massive number of small and scattered holdings. The average farm

14. Ramachandra Guha, "India’s Feet of Clay: How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise", in the
March/April 2024 issue of the American journal, Foreign Affairs. Dr. Guha has kindly permitted me to cite here
this little set excerpts.
15. A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (1920 and many later editions), Part I, Chapter 2, 5th paragraph.
size in India is now only one hectare (whereas the analogous number of hectares for, say, the UK is
more than 85, and for the USA nearly 180); and, that hectare – or the smaller amount in the case of
the hundreds of millions of smaller-than-average holdings – is often not in a single piece but is scat-
tered into bits here and there in the land surrounding the village.16
It might be feasible for government to address this systemic problem by offering guaranteed
partial basic income to landholders residing in very rural settlements who put their holdings under
communal village via panchayat raj or the like.
To explain what I mean by “guaranteed partial basic income,” I need to mention here another
little batch of terminological clarifications:

• John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s distinguished between “absolute” and “relative” economic
needs when he said that “the needs of human beings ... fall into two classes – those needs which
are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow hu- man beings
may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts
us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.”
• You are “destitute” if you have substantial unmet absolute economic needs. All destitution is
poverty, but not all poverty is destitution. (There is such a thing as decent poverty. Mahatma
Gandhi commended it.) When well-off people call themselves poor, they mean that they feel
distressed because they can’t “keep up” economically with their neighbors.
• “Basic income” is the rate of income required by an adult to fend off destitution by paying money
to purchase his or her absolute needs.
• “Partial basic income” is a flow of income at a rate sufficient to meet a certain (specified) portion
of the individual’s basic-income needs. An individual supplied with partial basic income would
have to meet his or her other absolute needs (in order to survive) either without paying money for
them or else by earning additional income via “gainful employment” (i.e. paid labor).17

16. In Western culture there has been, historically, a tendency for ownership of real estate to pass to the eldest son (or
maybe to the eldest child regardless of gender), rather than having it divided equally among the legitimate offspring
of the deceased owner; and so, the younger sons of wealthy land-holders might typically become clergymen or acad-
emics or soldiers (for instance, the knights seeking their fortunes in the Crusades, most of whom were younger sons
seeking their fortunes). But in India the caste system obliged younger sons to try to make their living in the same way
as their fathers did, and the phenomenon of scattered holdings has been, historically, due to efforts to ensure fair dis-
tribution of relatively fertile and relatively less fertile land to brothers sharing an inheritance.
17. Milton Friedman, an eminent American economist championing laissez-faire (i.e., the government never trimming
the sails of capitalist profit-making), advocated in the 1960s a “negative income-tax” for the USA. Every head of
household should, he said, have to send periodic income-reports to the U.S. government. (Diligent non-senile adults
with very good secondary-school training could do it.) While every household that had had, during the time in ques-
tion, income at more than a certain specified rate (analogous to the “poverty-line” rate in India, but let’s call it the
 However well “JAM” (“Jandhan-Aadhaar-Mobil”) may perhaps have served some of India’s
many destitute citizens, I can envisage a possibility that it might be improved upon and that the
improvement could render feasible the idea of government guaranteeing various shares of basic
income to various citizens according to various criteria.
Some economists and politicians have claimed that 21st-century digital technology will help to
create just as substantial a flow of opportunities for paid employment as it helps to destroy.18 I think,
on the contrary, that it will enable a smaller portion of the citizenry than now to produce all the
commodities for which there is a market, and hence that there will be a growth, in India’s vast “pre-
cariat,” of the number of citizens who would be unable, without a government-guaranteed partial
basic income, to rise above destitution and attain a decent level of moderate poverty. I expect the loss
of gainful-employment opportunities to be acute in agriculture. Business firms announced in 2023
that they had received US Department of Agriculture approval to sell meat cultivated artificially
from livestock-cells fed and grown in steel vats; the US Food and Drug Administration had determ-
ined that it is safe for humans to eat; the companies are planning to serve it at fancy restaurants and
then ramp up production to reach a lower cost for grocery-store sales.19 Artificially cultivated fish-
fillets are also likely to be marketed in the near future.20 These animal-protein products may become
cheap by 2050 – whereby fewer people may be malnourished but the poverty of fishers and of farm-
ers producing meat and producing fodder for animals grown for the sake of meat will be aggravated
unless those folks become entitled to Basic-Income-type financial relief. Re: production of fodder, a
current trend is toward cultivating (in labs, not on farms) protein-rich insects as fodder for chickens
and pigs.21
In assessing a five-year “basic-income pilot project” initiated in rural Madhya Pradesh in 2010
by SEWA and UNICEF, it was found, in a follow-up study afterwards, that charitable receipt (for

barely-not-destitute rate) would have to pay income-tax on all its earnings above that rate, government would pay,
to each household that had earned some wages and yet less than enough to fend off destitution, a certain percentage –
Friedman suggested 50% – of the difference between the actual earnings and the theoretical barely-not-destitute
amount for a household of that size and composition during that period. For instance, if the barely-not-destitute
level of earnings for a household during the period under consideration were reckoned to have been theoretically
$500, and yet the wages earned by the folks in the household during that period had totaled $300, government
would now pay the household $100 in negative income-tax (50% of the difference between $500 and $300). See
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM.
18. See https://fee.org/articles/technology-creates-more-jobs-than-it-destroys.
19. See www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/21/us-lab-grown-meat-sold-public.
20. See www.fastcompany.com/90932558/fish-filet-lab-grown-3d-printed.
21. See www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8831830 (re: fodder for poultry) and
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34991213 (re: insects as feed ingredients for pigs).
five years) of a flow of income amounting to about 1/3rd of the official “poverty-line” level of
income had had the following results: increase in gainful employment, especially on small farms;
increased spending, by small and subsistence farmers, on agricultural inputs, resulting in better
agricultural yield and improved food security; improved nutrition (and thus a significant reduction
in the proportion of malnourished girls in the villages where the cash grants were given); reduced
incidence of illness, and more regular medical treatment and implementation of medical prescrip-
tions when people did get sick; better school-attendance and greater household expenditure on
schooling of the family’s children; and significant increases of savings and reductions of indebted-
ness.22
To manage a village’s agriculture on a share-and-share-alike basis could promote efficient use of
such factors of production as (1) farm work, since the farmers would presumably, if their work were
organized cooperatively, spend less time shifting between different tiny plots of land, and (2) fresh-
water resources from underground, since the tendency for each farmer to spend money on digging a
deeper well than his neighbors have yet dug could be replaced by scientific consideration of such
facts as how long the local aquifer(s) are likely to last if they aren’t replenishable. One effect of these
spiritual and material benefits might well be to reduce the rate of emigration.
The work of Elinor Ostrom should be studied apropos. She was a sociologist who won in
2009 the “Nobel Prize” in economics for disproving, via field studies on how people in rural com-
munities in many parts of the world have managed their shared natural resources (such as wells and
common pastures), the market economists’ doctrine that natural resources collectively managed by
a community are bound to become overexploited and destroyed (the so-called “tragedy of the com-
mons”23). Her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
(1990) describes “design principles” of successful “local common-pool resource management,”
including: clearly defined geographical boundaries (for exclusion of unentitled parties; rules (re: the
provision and use of the commonly held resources) adapted to local conditions; collective-choice
arrangements whereby most of the resource-users in the decision-making process; effective monitor-
ing by monitors who are part of, or otherwise accountable to, the community; a scale of graduated
sanctions (warnings and punishments) against resource-users who violate the community's rules;
mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access; and political self-determination
of the community recognized by higher-level authorities.24

22. Video reports can be accessed by googling “sewa basic income video.”
23. See the Wikipedia entry on "Tragedy of the commons" if the history of the concept is unfamiliar to you.
24. Implementation in India of some of those “design principles” would have to be squared legally with the precept, in
the Constitution of the Republic of India, that governmental policies re: water supplies, agriculture, and rights in or
 * * *
My fourth suggestion is to strive politically for realistic reforms rather than for a Marxist Revolu-
tion tearing up too much of the nation’s social fabric.
Some Gandhians feel – and I agree – that non-industrialized agriculture and its products can be
so good,25 and some of the products of industrialism and some of its “negative externalities” are so
bad,26 that humankind ought to shift away from the precept that capitalist control of industry and
agriculture is beneficial.
It seems to me that India’s wisdom could lie more in getting government to offer the positive
incentive of guaranteed partial basic income than in counting on a brave but unrealistic psycho-
logical notion like that of the USSR’s “New Soviet Man”:27

over land are to be determined by the various state governments (see, in the Constitution, the Seventh Schedule, List
II–State List, Items 14 - 18).
25. I agree, even though it seems to that Gandhi himself is vulnerable to an accusation of sentimental pastoralism.
Although his manner of day-to-day living at Tolstoy Farm and later at Sabarmati Ashram and at Sevagram was
in some ways closer in spirit to “rural” than to “urban,” he flourished financially for quite a while (in Africa) in a
booming gold-rush city (Johannesburg) and then in India he would often reside in Bombay or with friends in New
Delhi, and he never lived in a typical Indian village for any length of time. And yet, knowing as he did that the peo-
ple of India were mostly in its villages, he would, as a “man of the people,” praise the culture of the villages more
than he might have done had he been more intimately familiar with it (see www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/village-
swaraj/cities-and-villages.php).
A feature of the tradition of sentimental pastoralism in Western culture, going back as far as that tradition can
be traced historically, is the notion of a remotely ancient “golden age.” This notion is evident in the extant writings
of the ancient (to us) Greek poet Hesiod (see the Wikipedia entry on him), who held that there had been a pastoral
“golden age” long before his day, and that his contemporary age was merely “iron” and thus not as good as the
intermediate “silver” and “bronze” ages had been. Myths of a Vedic Golden Age flourish in modern India; see
https://hindutvawatch.org/the-myths-of-hindutva-golden-age-of-the-vedas.
26. In “neoclassical” market-economic theorizing, the word “externalities” is a term for the effects of economic activi-
ties on people who aren’t party to the contractual arrangements for those activities. (A quick example is that if I pay
a marching band to play music for my wedding, the effect of the music on people who happen to be passing by is
“positive” if they enjoy the music, but “negative” if it annoys them.) Climate change is one of many disastrously
looming negative externalities nowadays of capitalistically managed industrialism.
27. See the Wikipedia articles on "New Soviet Man" and on "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman."
 The binary dichotomy between “rural” and “urban” is related to a dichotomy established in
university-level academic sociological theorizing in 1887 (by Ferdinand Tönnies) between “com-
munity” and “society”. A simple hallmark of the difference between a “community” and a “society”
is that warning your children not to take candy from strangers is a feature of life in societies only.
(There are no strangers in a community; everyone knows everyone else.28) More directly related
to Gandhi’s championing of panchayat raj is that artful rhetoric (for which he expressed, in Hind
Swaraj, deep scorn) has been vital in the tradition of Western governing of city states and nation
states, as well as in Western judicial procedures before a judge or jury. It is mainly an urban kind of
art, and so we may link together with Gandhi’s pastoralist advocacy of panchayat-raj governance his
disdain for the kind of brilliant rhetoric which he had observed in political discourse in London (and
which he himself mastered in the construction of this arguments,29 though not in the quality of his
voice).
A good deal of this essay has been about steering away from extremes. (For instance: a “99%
rural” settlement, even though it may appeal to some people as a charming notion, is in my opinion
not a kind which government ought to spend its tax revenues to maintain in that condition; and
likewise for excessively congested cities.) My suggestions are for mitigating some problems or for
making it easier for them to be addressed in a rational and cooperative way; none of my suggestions
are for revolutionary solutions to problems. Great technological advances do occur now and then, but
it seems to me that eager hopes for this and that kind of Revolution are often childish and can cause
pitfalls and a lot of missteps, whereas an adult hope, especially in politics, is for a series of diligent
reforms to be done in such a way as to yield (in time) a socially beneficial outcome.

* * *
My four suggestions have been (1) for sociologists to replace the theoretical binary distinction
between rural and urban settlements with a notion of a theoretical spectrum extending from 100%
rural (at one extreme of the spectrum) via gradually more and more urban (according to a certain
rule of thumb), to the least rural and therefore “most urban” settlement in the set under consideration;
(2) for universities to train some potential professors of ecological economics who are savvy about
chemistry as well as about finance and can thus distinguish between genuine and fake “strong sus-
tainability-assessments” drawing upon such sciences as agronomy, meteorology and epidemiology;

28. See, however, Benedict Anderson's important book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London 1983 and later editions), and see Wikipedia's articles on the book and on the concept of merely
imagined communities. Some examples of them are: all the members of your nation, of some big religious organiza-
tion to which you happen to belong, of your gender, of the biological species Homo Sapiens, etc.). They can be vast.
29. See www.academia.edu/1503878/Gandhi_s_rhetoric.
(3) for government to offer guaranteed partial basic income to landholders residing in very rural
settlements who put their holdings under communal village management; and (4) for political
activists to strive for realistic reforms rather than for a Russian- or Chinese-type Revolution.

* * *
APPENDIX:
Discussion, with a Private Referee for this Paper, of my Four Suggestions

The referee is Dr. Y. P. Anand, an elderly civil engineer with a postgraduate diploma in econo-
metrics and a Ph.D. degree in waste management. He served as Chairman of the national Railway
Board (and thus as ex-officio Principal Secretary to the Government of India) and then as Director of
the National Gandhi Museum. I have had hundreds of conversations with him and have always bene-
fitted from them.

YP: You rightly seek to replace the theoretical binary distinction between rural and urban settle-
ments with a suitable notion of a spectrum extending, via an apt rule of thumb, from "most
rural" to "most urban." I think that in order to choose an apt rule of thumb, the main changes
which the binary rural/urban distinction has undergone in India since Independence in 1947
ought to be reviewed. The population has grown more than fourfold, and rural areas have been
gradually joined into the expanding urban environments. An example is that on 11 March 2024,
India’s Home Minister inaugurated a project under Delhi Gramodyoga Abhiyan {Delhi Rural
Development Scheme} to provide piped gas in 41 villages and multiple developmental facilities
in 178 villages of India’s capital. This kind of process is going on all over India under various
schemes. So, an appropriate rule of thumb for measuring how rural a settlement is might be
designed to take account not only of the criteria that you have suggested, but also of this latter
kind of information.
ML: Indian citizens better informed than I am about the history of those schemes could develop
a more complicated gauge than the rule of thumb that I have devised.
YP: You suggest that universities train some professors of Ecological Economics who are (unlike
present-day professors of Ecological Economics) knowledgeable about chemistry as well as
about finance; you expect that they would be able distinguish between genuine and fake “strong
sustainability-assessments” by drawing upon sciences such as agronomy, meteorology, and
epidemiology. I think this may be too generalized and non-specific a recommendation. I believe
that for India, some suggestions regarding “sustainability goals" specific to agriculture would be
more appropriate.
 "Conservation" in agriculture should include effective use of natural resources and sustain-
able solutions to the problems in continuously raising agricultural efficiency and productivity.
Farmers need to turn to conservation agriculture to face challenges due to soil erosion, water
scarcity, and ecological imbalances. For this, concerned ecologists, economists, researchers and
technologists need to adopt right perspectives and strategies, such as those for tillage and crop
residue management. Socio-economic barriers too need attention, such as when farmers in north
India have to burn large-scale crop residues and this causes air pollution in the national capital
and other states.
ML: I agree that 21st-century ecological economists need to be savvy about ecologically conditioned
modern agronomy and storage and delivery of food. I believe they also need to be savvy about
the swift and relentless current depletion of our non-renewable natural heritage of economically
useful minerals (such as cobalt, nickel and copper) in the planet’s ores, about environmental
changes and public health, about current and forthcoming issues re: waste-disposal, and about
economic supply of consumable energy.
YP: I agree with your suggestion that Government should offer guaranteed partial basic income
to landholders residing in very rural settlements who put their holdings under communal vil-
lage management. But I feel that the resulting amounts of guaranteed basic income should
be nuanced by taking into account the rural individuals’ current economic conditions. Quite a
few government schemes benefitting our rural citizens in cash and in kind – schemes instituted
by the Government of India and implemented by the state governments, plus some schemes
established by the state governments themselves – have been set up, particularly during last
couple of decades.... [Dr. Anand commented here on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Em-
ployment Guarantee Scheme, etc.] People whose benefits from those schemes have rendered
them less likely to suffer destitution should receive less by way of guaranteed basic income.
ML: This is food for thought. Jean Drèze, who designed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Em-
ployment Guarantee Act (2005), has told me (in an email) that he likes the idea of UBI as far as
Europe is concerned, but that "in India today it strikes me as a bull in the china shop,"30 because
he believes that "if the idea makes headway in India, it will be used mainly to dismantle what-
ever is already there by way of social-security programs." I believe that to govern perfectly is
impossible and hence that priorities are in the last analysis of primary importance. Here is an
example. Five years ago, the World Bank said that in China, the minimum-standard-of-living

30. A metaphorical "bull in the china shop" is likely to destroy fragile (but valuable) things inadvertently.
 cash-transfer system was being administered so inefficiently that 90% of the rural payments
were being made to people who weren’t entitled to them.31 In that same year, Dr. Furui Cheng,
an economics professor in Beijing at China University of Political Science and Law, in a work-
ing paper entitled "UBI Could Prove to be a Befitting Aspect of 'Share-Economy' in 21st-
Century China" (co-authored by me), advocated winding down the parts of the current social
security system (in China) which involved "inefficient administration" or which were "widely
regarded in China as "aggravating rather than diminishing the excessive levels of income in-
equality," and suggested that "The cheaters’ annoyance about losing their illicit payments might
be mitigated by the consoling UBI payments, and an overarching cultural effect of the change
might be for more and more citizens to shift gradually away from gaming the system and toward
cooperating patriotically." This year (2024), the Director of the University of Hong Kong’s
Center for Chinese Law, Prof. Angela Huyue Zhang, has said that certain "seemingly random
policies" which the Chinese government has introduced since 2020 "are all connected by a com-
mon desire to combat inequality," and yet that "the way the government has gone about imple-
menting them has led to serious unintended consequences."32 Notwithstanding these problems,
however, the Chinese government believes that it has in the 2020s eliminated destitution
amongst its resident citizens. That has been its priority.33
YP: Your fourth suggestion is that political activists ought to strive for realistic reforms rather than
for a revolution. I feel that this suggestion should be nuanced to take properly into account the
large-scale protest movements by farmers’ unions regarding such issues as MSP (Minimum
Support Price), procurement of farm production, and government loans. The legalization of
MSP has been hindered due to exaggerated claims about its fiscal costs. But legalizing MSP
does not entail the government procuring all the produce. The Agricultural Produce & Livestock
Committee Act should be amended by saying that to auction farm produce in APMC’s markets
below the declared MSP prices would be illegal. Government intervention is needed only when
market prices fall below MSP and would not entail government procurement of all the market-
able surplus.

31. The World Bank Group, The Changing Nature of Work: World Development Report (2019; see
www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2019).
32. See www.project- syndicate.org/onpoint/an-interview-with-angela-huyue-zhang-on-china-innovation-regulation-ai-
high-wire-2024-03.)
33. See www.statista.com/statistics/1086836/china-poverty-ratio.
 Farming is inherently risky, influenced as it is by factors such as weather conditions, pest
attacks, and market dynamics. Effective implementation of MSP will reduce the farmers’ vul-
nerability to market fluctuations, which would stimulate the rural economy. Government poli-
cies can lead the way towards a more secure and prosperous future for farmers by addressing
their concerns. Replacing the old inefficient MSP policy with a legislatively guaranteed MSP
will also promote diversification, inclusivity, and economic resilience, contributing to farmers”
well-being and rural economy.
ML: It would be more appropriate for a citizen of India to delve into such details than for me to do
it.34

34. I have, however, been a friend of India since 1951 when I participated briefly in a conversation that was mainly be-
tween a top member of the US government’s State Department, Averell Harriman, and my father, Ernest K. Lindley,
who was at that time a journalist. Harriman came to our home in order to invite my father informally (during dinner)
to become the next US ambassador to India. They had been friends since 1931 when they had both been close sup-
porters of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a candidate for the US presidency. Harriman said, “Ernie, why don’t you go out
there for us?” The US government was mooting at that time whether to enact the 1951 India Emergency Food Assist-
ance Act to mitigate (in Orissa) the Republic of India's first famine. My father suggested that the assistance should
be given on condition that Nehru abandon his non-aligned stance in the Cold War. (He had interviewed Nehru more
than once, and he knew (he said), that “Nehru prefers our way to the Communist way.”) I spoke up (my voice hadn’t
yet changed): “Sometimes you have a friend, and you want him to do something, and he can’t do it just then; if you
leave him alone, he’ll be a better friend later.” Harriman chuckled and said, “Ernie, I agree with the boy. How about
Morocco?” (My father declined that offer, but later served as a Special Assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
ghost-writing his public statements.)
NOTES
N.B.: All Internet addresses were accessed in the third week of April 2024.