“Brand India” is fast becoming a mantra that is claimed as the benchmark for development in India. With economists, bureaucrats, policy-makers, industrialists, and even the media jumping on to the bandwagon, with “Brand India” becoming the ethos of the upwardly mobile middle class, it is imperative that the implications of such branding be critically analyzed.

With urban growth and development – destruction of slums, focus on multi-lane highways, building of cyber cities – being defined by Brand India, even at the cost of increasing breakdown of the agrarian economies, closing of small businesses, etc, one has to ask questions about this branding of India.

At the onset, it is important to recognize that brands are the benchmark of economic institutions. A brand is a measure of how well a company is doing economically. To strengthen a brand, a company may discard certain activities that do not contribute to the economic metric of the brand and focus on others that do. It may downsize, change markets or align with other products.

India is not a corporation even though India Inc. and Brand India are being used increasingly by a certain elite of the nation. Even economists today recognize that GDP – or any other economic metric (including PPP) – cannot define this changing India. India Shining – a campaign based largely on this claim to economic growth – was rejected by the Indian electorate in the last elections.

An Incorporation named India cannot understand why forests need to be preserved or land cannot be sold to the highest bidder. After all, these processes will bring in more funds. It cannot understand why genetically modified crops are not being introduced. Clearly, they will increase yields. Maintenance of biodiversity, and of dropping water levels owing to intensive agricultural practices make no economic sense. It does not make sense why 70% of a billion people are part of the agrarian community – clearly fewer people can produce as much food if we gave our food production processes to agro-based corporations.

For one, questions of food, land and water security lie outside the realm of economics and on the understanding of human rights. Second, even as senior members of the judiciary system from South Asia acknowledged through the Kathmandu Declaration, destruction of the environment affects the lives of the poorest the most. Governments must proactively work to prevent the destruction of national environment even though economic reasons may dictate otherwise. Both of these are significant reasons that a nation cannot operate on the same rules as a corporation.

Most importantly, though, most democratic nations around the world recognize that communities are based on the right to access certain aspects of nature within which they live – land, water, clean air – and the ability of these communities to sustain themselves is based on such access. These aspects of the world are termed commons – the community forms a common trustee for future generations and is responsible for the well being of these aspects.

And yet, the state and national governments are increasingly developing their policies based on Branding of India. The Maharashtra government went on a slum cleaning drive that destroyed more houses than the dreaded Tsunami. All because Mumbai needed to look like a modern city – Brand Mumbai. Where had the people living in slums come from, under what conditions and where they would go was no concern of the Mumbai government.

The Karnataka state government had approved the Bangalore Mysore highway despite the presence of a parallel highway that serves the same purpose. That the new highway requires displacement of people and farmers are losing their lands is of little concern. Where will these people who have lost their livelihoods in rural India go? To populate slums in cities which will be subsequently destroyed? No matter – the policy is a reflection of what is important. Brand Bangalore.

As per the state policy papers of 2005, the Uttar Pradesh government, led by the Samajwadi Party – no less – is considering open sale of certain categories of land. Entities from India and abroad – individuals and corporations – can buy land in UP. In a state where land reform has been minimal and with a large landless peasant population, such a policy will create more exploitation of this large population of landless and marginal farmers. But the state government thinks this is a good way to raise money for the state coffers – besides, there is much money to be made through kickbacks. Again, Brandname building wins.

It is this focus on Brand India that drove the government to make economic policies vis-à-vis food distribution in a way that ensured about 100 million tones of food grain were available for export even while UNDP showed that India was home to almost half of the world’s poor and tens of thousands of starvation deaths occurred in the country. Brand India needed to show that India was a major exporter of food grain. That rural India’s capability to afford food today (measured in per capita calorie) is less than its capability during the Bengal riots, as pointed out by Amartya Sen, is of little concern to Brand India. That the democratic Government of India care even less about this than the colonizing power based in England is chilling, to say the least.

With Brand India increasingly focused on economic growth, large sections of the Indian population have been marginalized. With increasing exploitation of agricultural resources and breakdown of the agrarian economy, millions of people have migrated into the cities. Or are committing suicides in our villages.

While farmers commit suicide owing to debts of hundreds of Rs (or else give their children to bonded labour), crores of Rs are being defaulted by large industries. Coca Cola for example defrauded the Indian government of about a crore Rs by forging numbers; it has yet to pay the penalty for the fraud more than a year after it was penalized. While huge subsidies are being provided to the high tech sector, subsidies to the agricultural sector are much lower than developed countries. Annual investment in social welfare is less than even developing countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The role of a government is being redefined. As per Brand India, if a nation is supposed to focus primarily on economic growth, a government begins to largely play the role of a board of directors finding policies to increase its economic revenue at the cost of all other aspects of governance. And that is the role that our government has begun to play.

That, however, is not the role of the government. The Constitution of India clearly says that India is a socialist, secular and democratic nation and the government of India will be formed by the people and work for the people. The role of the government is to ensure that ALL people in India have the opportunity to find livelihoods, to access aspects of our world that we need to live and to live with dignity. The governments in India have very little to do with any of these aspects. Branding of India is priority number 1.

By formulating policies derived from Brand India that limit access of a large section of people to water, food and livelihoods, the government has marginalized large sections of its people. That is counter to the word and the ethos of the Constitution of India. The Branding of India, as a defining concept for India’s policy, is anti-people and anti-constitutional. The government can make this the basis for its governance only as a proof of its short sightedness or its corruption.

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