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Title: Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel: Grassroots Entrepreneurship and State Directed Development.

Summary: Leading India’s struggle for independence from Britain, MK Gandhi had adopted the spinning wheel into an instrument for national reawakening. Gandhi saw it as an instrument for cultivating self-reliance, dignity of labour, and a shared national experience and enterprise. His critics saw the spinning wheel as an indication of Gandhi's rejection of modernity, science and industrialisation.

Over the past seventy years, independent India has defied the predictions of many within and outside the country by preserving its democratic institutions. At the same time she has belied the expectations of many who hoped to see a rapidly developing India making its presence felt on the world’s economic stage. Could this dichotomy between democracy and development reflect the misunderstanding of the true significance of the spinning wheel? Is the spirit of the spinning wheel underlying the wide prevalence of grassroots entrepreneurship in India? Has the rise of the Indian state after Independence, modelled on western notion of the nation-state, come to dominate the economic space, and suppress the inherent spirit of enterprise in society? Could Gandhi’s spinning wheel spin the yarn that would weave democracy and development, economic growth and environmental quality into a common fabric in the 21st century?

Barun Mitra is a thinker and writer, always trying to explore ways to translate ideas into possible actions. His key interest is to find ways of generating political capital from the ideals of liberty, peace and prosperity, in order to make these principles and policies socially and politically viable. He firmly believes that the strength of citizenship lies in being able to engage actively on public issues, without being an expert, and with people holding diverse views. Sovereignty of citizens depends on this capacity to engage. Two areas of particular interest that have stayed with him over the past few decades are grassroots entrepreneurship and free market environmentalism.

Since 2017, he has been actively associated with grassroots farmers organisations on a range of agriculture issues. Early in 2019, he had taken the initiative to draft a Farmers Manifesto for Freedom. In the summer of 2019, he was a part of the Kisan Satyagraha in Maharashtra, where farmers publicly sowed unapproved GM cotton to express their demand for access to latest technologies. This is an effort to reconnect the network established by one of the foremost farmers leaders, the late Sharad Joshi, with whom he was associated between 1995 and 2015. Barun delivered a talk at Manthan, in 2019, on India’s path to prosperity goes through agriculture. He has analysed the three new farm laws that has attracted widespread protests in India, over the past 18 months.

Between 2010 and 2016, he worked with ARCH Vahini, Gujarat, to help poor forest dwelling communities claim their property rights over land and local natural resources, and develop a web platform to implement the Forest Rights Act 2005. Through grassroots activism and legal interventions, ARCH has been successful in helping tens of thousands of tribal families secure their rights over land and resources. A short outline of the initiative is here from the 23.40 min to 39 min, as part of the documentary film, India Awakes (2015).

The exposure to a wide range of grassroots movements over the decade rekindled an interest to take a relook at MK Gandhi, not as the mahatma, but as a political leader who inspired the largest mass movements in history. One of Barun’s initial analysis of Gandhi is here, ‘Gandhi: A Champion of Freedom Who Defied Political Labels’. He has been on an exploration to discover the deep roots of freedom in Gandhi’s words and deeds.

Barun was the founder and director of Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi, from 1996 to 2016. Liberty Institute had received the Templeton Prize for social entrepreneurship in 2003. In 2011, the Empowering India, an initiative to inform and encourage active citizenship, was recognised with the Manthan Award for innovative use of ICT in South Asia in the category of becoming the largest repository of data related to Indian elections since 1952, upto 2014.

His writings have been published and been invited to speak across the world on a wide range of issues from economics to environment, trade and technology, agriculture and land. He received the Sir Anthony Fisher Award in 2001, the Liberty Torch in 2001, and the Julian Simon Award in 2005, for his writings and advocacy of freedom.

Some of his in-depth analysis of the Indian situation has appeared on the GIS Reports

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/

Some of his other writings are available on the personal blog.

http://barunsmitra.blogspot.com/

Barun Mitra

Email: mitra.bs@gmail.com | Twitter: @barunsmitra | Mobile: +91-9810416662