From Uran, there was a long and difficult journey by road to Goa, to the southern village of Verna, near Margao, where Olympia’s family lived. I was to visit Verna many times in subsequent years, yet the first impression remains etched in my memory: emerging over a bare, treeless plateau to see an implausibly emerald-green band of paddy fields and coconut palms stretching along the coast from the hills to the sea, with its ten-mile stretch of pristine sand, Colva Beach. And then, rising above the vegetation, numerous white churches, the legacy of Portuguese Catholicism. It would be dishonest to convey the impression, though, that this was an idyllic paradise designed solely to please the eye of a Western visitor; on a hill overlooking the sea stood one of the state’s proudest monuments, a large fertilizer factory owned by the Birla group, which never appears on postcards but was, and is, an important part of the local economy.
In the densely populated coastal lowlands, along the main roads, there was a ribbon of old Portuguese haciendas, many then unoccupied and dilapidated, but later, when painted and restored, magnificent colonial buildings. They were owned by the leading land-owning families, among them Mr Rebelo. In a third of a century much has changed. At that time Goa had been ‘liberated’ by the Indian army barely a decade earlier (and although Olympia’s immediate family subscribed strongly to this version of history, there were plenty of more distant relatives who lamented the passing of the Portuguese; indeed, some left for the ‘mother country’). The Portuguese had left behind a moderately prosperous colony (by Indian standards), but one characterized by poor infrastructure, a sense of genteel decay, and an economy dependent on the bounties of nature rather than the intensive application of brain or brawn.
With my family I explored this corner of Goa. Opposite the house was a small patch of jungle leading up to the plateau. On our first visit the woodland was alive with chattering monkeys and, as we emerged on the hill, there was a nest of cobras writhing in sexual ecstasy in the sun. Our initial horror turned to fascination as they indulged their pleasures unconcerned at our voyeurism. We were never to see them again, as development and increasingly busy roads pushed nature back. The plateau, however, retained its fascination, and on my last visit with Olympia, before she became too disabled to travel, we walked the country lanes up the hill behind the village cemetery, where the remains of her father were interred, to find an old Hindu temple in the arid rocky landscape which contrasted with the lush coastal lowlands a few hundred feet below. We found this spot to be a haven of peace, but when I last visited it, after Olympia had gone, developers were building blocks of flats across the plateau and a militant Hindu organization was rebuilding the temple as a statement of expansionary intent.
In the opposite direction, leading away from the back of the Rebelos’ house, where the house-servant lived with her family and a couple of pigs were being fattened up for the next celebration, a maze of lanes and tracks led westwards to the ocean through the paddy fields. I never quite came to understand the Portuguese comunidade system of land tenure, which entailed a mixture of private ownership and collective rights and duties; but the Rebelo plot had been handed down in perpetuity. Mr Rebelo explained his plans for developing cash crops and, many years later, Celso and his family have indeed established a small coconut plantation interspersed with peppers and cardamoms. But coconut theft, meandering cattle and irregular water never seemed to make it a commercial proposition. I came to know very well the lanes to the sea, best enjoyed in the cool of the monsoon season when the rain has stopped and the paddies are full of water and young saplings. Over the years the lanes have progressed from sleepy walkways used by the occasional bicycle, cattle, barking dogs, hens, pigs, toddlers and budding young Indian Peles, to busy thoroughfares full of motorbikes taking farmers and their families off to the town and tourist vans ferrying foreigners to the beach hotels. And running parallel to the sea is a new railway, the Konkan, which connects Bombay to southern India.
When we first discovered Colva Beach, we shared it only with the fishermen, local courting couples and the occasional hippie. It has now become, if not quite the Indian Costa del Sol, a bustling resort with hundreds of Indian and European tourists from the nearby hotels, and local beach huts serving Goan fish delicacies and Celso’s local beer (he having moved from Uran to Goa to establish a new brewery in partnership with a local politician).
The biggest changes have been in the quality of infrastructure and the rise in vehicle ownership. A generation ago our main means of communication were local buses, packed to overflowing but ridiculously cheap, running to the sleepy market town, Margao, now a bustling city with traffic jams to match. To get around Goa was an odyssey in itself, since the big rivers that run across Goa into the Indian Ocean had no bridges and there were erratic, sometimes hair-raising, ferry crossings. Now the road to Panjim, the state capital, is a major thoroughfare and, as if to make up for past neglect, there are two parallel bridges a few yards apart across the main river.
One unchanging delight is the city of Old Goa, once one of the world’s greatest cities until cholera epidemics led to a drastic contraction in the seventeenth century, from which it never recovered. The magnificent baroque churches remain and their golden altars must have absorbed a sizeable share of the plunder from the New World. Goa was a Jesuit stronghold: St Ignatius Loyola is the most revered saint; and for those, like me, with a morbid curiosity, there are displays of the instruments of torture and execution that helped to ensure that Goa remained a particularly obedient and devout outpost of Christendom. I came to learn that piety was qualified by self-interest among the Goan land-owning classes. When the Portuguese arrived, the local elite was offered a deal: to keep their land they would have to adopt their conquerors’ names and religion. The Rebelos, like other ‘good families’, are able to point to temple records that show them to be descended from the Kelkars, a Brahmin sub-caste. These historical details are not just a matter of curiosity but affect such everyday matters as marriage, landholdings, and status in the church and at village feasts. However educated and urbane, the ‘good families’ of Goa are as caste-and class-conscious as any others in India. And the genius of the Catholic Church was to have gathered and held to the faith this corner of India while respecting its idiosyncrasies, many of which predate Christianity.
My own acquaintance with Goa is framed by two marriages: Celso’s which Olympia and I first came to celebrate, and, thirty-three years later, that of his daughter Vanita (now, like her Goan groom, an American citizen). To the latter I brought my second wife, Rachel; and other close relatives came from across India, the UK, the USA, Canada, Kenya and Zimbabwe. The family, like Goa itself, had become part of the global village while still retaining a sense of identity, attachment and home.
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My interest in India was professional as well as personal. I was curious as to how such a sleepy backwater as Goa had developed so quickly and visibly and achieved living standards among the highest in India. Tourism is part of the story; and a lot of Indian government money went into making it a success. But there is more to it than that: multiple cropping and hybrid seeds on the farms; the transformation of industrial estates like that on the plateau above Verna from a sad collection of empty buildings into a collection of world-class Indian biotech and IT companies; and a generation of young people like my nephews and nieces who have acquired internationally recognized professional qualifications. Aesthetes and ecologists may question the meaning of ‘development’, but the transformation of living standards that I have seen within a generation is very real. More importantly, similar things were happening all over India, particularly in the south.
My exposure to Indian development might have been confined to the rather special case of Goa had it not been for a coincidental meeting shortly before I was to leave the Foreign Office. I had failed to find a role in the private sector, which I had been looking for, but happened to meet an old college friend, Sarwar Lateef, who was shortly leaving the Overseas Development In
stitute for the World Bank. He was looking for someone to carry through research work he had started on the European Union’s trade policy as it affected emerging economies like India, and to take on a wider research management role in the ODI. I didn’t need much persuading. He also passed on to me a consultancy commitment to write a substantial quarterly report on the Indian economy for the Economist Intelligence Unit, a task I carried out for the next twenty-five years.
The main inspiration behind the ODI project was K. B. Lall, the Indian ambassador to the EU and a former chairman of Hindustan Lever, who anticipated by a generation the opening up of India’s autarchic, protectionist trade and investment regime. He wanted to ensure that the ingrained export pessimism of India’s economic bureaucracy was not reinforced by trade barriers within Europe. My job was to make a convincing economic case to the European Commission to reform and liberalize the potentially prohibitive barriers for textiles and clothing, some footwear, and agriculture. In the course of this work, I came to understand a little about European trade policy-making processes, particularly as a result of sparring with the French-Vietnamese trade negotiator Tranh, a clever man who saw his job as maximizing access for developing countries’ products while appearing to do the opposite. Some of my main adversaries in the policy debate, like the powerful textile industry group Comitextil, represented major employment interests, but other trade barriers were less strategic, like the tariff on one type of garlic designed to protect a small processing plant owned by a nephew of President Giscard d’Estaing. The protectionism that permeated European trade policy thinking, and corrupt practices such as this, had the effect of deflating the somewhat idealistic view I had held of the European project. I remained a supporter, on balance, but the support was tinged with a growing scepticism.
This work was worthy but was outside the mainstream of economics. I was able to remedy this omission with, I think, some genuinely pioneering work demonstrating that competing imports, of textiles and clothing, simply did not have the negative impact on jobs that was claimed by protectionists in Europe and the USA. The analysis made a contribution to the wider political debate, because there were strong protectionist under-currents within Europe, expressed through complaints about ‘social dumping’ from low-wage economies. I was drawn into a global network of economists, orchestrated by Béla Balassa, Ann Kreuger and Helen Hughes at the World Bank, who developed a coherent and liberal approach to trade and adjustment which has broadly prevailed (in spite of some considerable resistance) to this day.
On the back of this research, I produced my first serious book, Protectionism and Industrial Decline, which also drew on some detailed fieldwork in (disappearing) industrial Britain: the cutlery industry of Sheffield; the footwear industry of the East Midlands; and textiles and clothing more generally. Whatever sentimental value attached to traditional industries, workers and firms were adjusting to new technology and a globalized economy, and nothing positive would be achieved by trying to stop the process. I produced numerous papers and reports on the global textiles and clothing industry which helped to build the case for phasing out the system of protection, the Multifibre Arrangement, built around developed countries’ industries: a process that was in due course agreed and is being implemented, without the disastrous consequences for textile-producing areas that had been predicted by the industry lobbies.
In parallel with this research and writing, I continued work on India, writing regularly, and made the acquaintance of a group of Indian economists who were questioning the conventional wisdom of inward-looking, planned industrialization. The most important of these was Manmohan Singh, who was then an economic adviser in the finance ministry but later, as finance minister and prime minister, launched and carried through the economic reforms that have taken India on to a much faster tempo of growth. Growth, in turn, is unlocking India’s vast human potential and lifting tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people out of extreme poverty. Manmohan was a shy and rather uncommunicative man, whose personal humility and modesty – and incorruptibility – enabled him to survive and achieve considerable power in the piranha pool of Indian politics. Together with Deng Xiaoping in China, Manmohan could reasonably claim to have done more to improve the material human condition than any other political leader of the twentieth century.
I developed a close collaboration with another Indian economist, L. C. Jain, who had many of Manmohan’s personal qualities but did not achieve the same pre-eminence, perhaps because he chose to operate through one of India’s fractious opposition parties, Janata Dal, rather than Congress and the Gandhi family. The problem he was wrestling with – as someone who embraced Gandhian ideals and had a frugal lifestyle to match – was how to manage the necessary move to economic liberalization in such a way as to serve the interests of India’s poor. Undoubtedly the policies that have been adopted have helped the poor, simply by virtue of economic growth stimulating demand for their services, but it has been a hit-and-miss process and the constant foot-dragging on reform by people claiming to be ‘ pro-poor’ is one of the most serious factors holding India back.
Jain’s view was that there were millions of artisans and craftsmen making fabrics and carpets, or jewellery, or wood and bronze artefacts, whose unique skills and livelihoods were gradually being lost in the face of mechanical technology and the Indian, middle-class consumer’s preference for standardized, Westernized consumer goods – like clothes made from man-made fibres. But these artisans could have a future supplying high-value luxury goods in international markets where uniqueness would be valued, and paid for. It needed, however, supportive governments, at both ends, to lift barriers to trade. The book we produced, together with Ann Weston, we called The Commerce of Culture. In producing it we carried out a lot of fieldwork, trying to understand the progression in the value chain from Indian village to Western shop, the way craftsmen were organized (and often exploited), and how modest but well-judged intervention by Indian official agencies or NGOs could make a difference. Spending time studying and talking to the silk weavers of Kanchipuram, the gem cutters of Bombay and Surat, the bronze craftsmen of Moradabad and the carpet weavers of Kashmir, I had the predictably squeamish Western reaction to the sight of very poor people, sometimes school-age children, working long hours in poor conditions for low and unpredictable pay, while remaining dependent on marketing intermediaries who marked up the value of their produce by improbable percentages. But it was clear from the evidence we gathered that communities that were able to access world markets for their traditional artisan skills were conspicuously more prosperous than those that could not. Jain’s political activism, backed by our analysis, concentrated on encouraging, not discouraging, trade and on helping the craftsmen to organize cooperatives in order to strengthen their bargaining power or to push up standards so as to ensure that the children in the carpet sheds received an education and had proper ventilation.
Some Western NGOs and pressure groups were, however, promoting the idea of ‘ self-reliance’ as an alternative to the ‘exploitation’ involved in international trade, and urged consumer boycotts of hand-woven carpets from the subcontinent. Since the practical alternative for most of the artisans and their families often involved destitution – for girls, domestic service or prostitution – I questioned not just the reasoning but the ethics of this approach. I also realized that, after several years working on trade policy issues, I was developing a somewhat bad-tempered intolerance towards people who questioned the merits of free trade.
Another growing obsession was my conviction that, from the early 1980s onwards, India had turned the corner in terms of both political stability and economic development. In the course of my quarter-century of reportage and commentary for the Economist Intelligence Unit, I produced around one and a half million words and built up a substantial bank of knowledge and understanding. How much of my relentless optimism, which strengthened on every visit, got through to the sceptical businessmen who were my target audience I canno
t say. It is only very recently that mainstream opinion – in the City, leading multinationals and government – has shifted away from the established, lazy consensus that India was hopelessly mired in regulation, corruption, unstable coalition governments and slow growth.
While at the ODI, I had other responsibilities which helped broaden my understanding of development. One was to help place ODI fellows in the Caribbean. Nothing could have been further removed from the huge scale of India than the tiny statelets of St Vincent, St Lucia and Dominica (or even the more substantial Barbados and Belize). Each had its own fierce island pride and flourishing, competitive democracy, but all were struggling to establish any kind of meaningful economy beyond a precarious dependence on the global banana trade and on tourism. By Indian and sub-Saharan African standards, most of the English-speaking Caribbean states were prosperous. But there was hidden poverty and frustration among underemployed young people, who found an outlet in emigration or crime. Small was beautiful, but also petty, parochial and dependent. The dependency remains. It has been profoundly depressing to discover, three decades after helping to place people to develop a strategy for diversification from bananas and sugar, that the banana states are still petitioning the European Union to continue indefinitely the special protection their products have long enjoyed.
In 1983 I was offered a senior post in the Commonwealth secretariat as special adviser to the secretary general. I had long harboured the prejudice that the Commonwealth represented the past rather than the – European – future. But its head, Sir Sonny Ramphal, was an energetic, charismatic figure who was succeeding in finding a positive, forward-looking role for the organization and I was attracted by the idea of working for him.
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