Beneath the Flyover, Beside the Temple

COLIN TODHUNTER

The word ‘development’ is often invoked as a moral good. Corporations and international investors regard it as a massive business opportunity, and politicians sell it as a template for ‘progress’.

For decades, development has been framed as the path out of poverty and a holy grail. But there are certain things that are seldom questioned, at least in mainstream narratives: what is development, who defines it, and what does it destroy?

Perhaps we should begin by answering the last question first by turning to India: it destroys the rural—by the deliberate running down of agriculture resulting in a decades-long crisis in the countryside.

Veteran Indian journalist P Sainath says:

The agrarian crises in five words is: hijack of agriculture by corporations. The process by which it is done in five words: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. When your cultivation costs have risen 500 per cent over a decade, the result of that crisis, that process in five words: biggest displacement in our history.”

That’s what ‘development’ destroys while indicating who defines it: global capital. A few years ago, influential ‘global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy’ company APCO Worldwide stated that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn and financial crisis of 2008 had made governments, policymakers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy in the years ahead.

In other words, a neo-colonial venture aimed at boosting corporate profit by moving into regions and nations to displace indigenous systems of production and consumption, with India being a top priority.

What is happening here echoes what post-development thinkers like Gustavo Esteva have long warned: that ‘development’ is less a neutral aspiration and more a top-down strategy to reorder societies to serve global markets. As Esteva put it, the very concept of development “has connoted an escape from the undignified condition called underdevelopment, which the West itself created.”

So, we have seen accelerated urbanisation, more privatisation and India significantly relaxing its foreign direct investment (FDI) rules, aiming to attract more international capital and integrate deeper into the global economy.

In 2016, the government introduced a comprehensive FDI liberalisation policy. For instance, the civil aviation sector permitted 100% FDI in airport projects and up to 49% in air transport services. The pharmaceuticals sector allowed 100% FDI in greenfield projects and up to 74% in brownfield projects. Retail trading of food products manufactured or produced in India was also opened to 100% FDI under the government approval route.

The business journals and supplements celebrate this as reflecting India’s commitment to creating a more business-friendly environment and underscoring the country’s strategic shift towards greater ‘economic openness’ and integration into the ‘global market’.

Leaving aside the critique that ‘integration’ and the ‘global market’ function as euphemisms for India’s subordination to global capital, what these cheerleaders of development fail to mention is the economic, cultural and ecological devastation brought about by a ‘development’ that systematically undermines the autonomy of people, dismantles their life-worlds and then presents this disruption as progress.

For ordinary people across the world, development manifests as farmers being pushed towards cities because agricultural policies make farming financially non-viable; as rezoning notices; as evictions that cite ‘beautification’; as permits withdrawn; as neighbourhood stores shutting up shop due to e-commerce platforms using predatory pricing and fraudulent practices; and as markets relocated and replaced. It manifest in planning documents that treat people’s homes as ‘encroachments’ and in municipal crackdowns that treat self-organised economies as threats to order.

And it is amplified by an ideology that insists that anything informal, unplanned or traditional is by definition backward. The informal vegetable seller becomes an eyesore. The smallholder farmer must ‘get big or get out’. The local market, passed down through generations, becomes an administrative problem.

The development paradigm centralises capital, expertise and control in the hands of state institutions and private corporations while marginalising the knowledge, networks and survival strategies of ordinary people. It demands that people surrender their autonomy in exchange for infrastructure and regulation they did not ask for. And when they refuse, they are criminalised, displaced or simply erased from the picture.

In this context, three recent image-based projects are not just aesthetic records of urban India. What they offer is a counter-narrative: fragments of lives that continue amid urban transformation, taking place under the banner of development.

Mainstream development narratives often rely on spectacle to justify themselves. Think of images of slums next to skyscrapers or polluted rivers beside new highways. These juxtapositions allow the viewer to feel momentarily disturbed but secure in the idea that progress is at least happening.

Scant attention is paid to the unremarkable spaces where modernity and rootedness exist together—those informal, sacred and geographically rooted community locations.

Renowned cultural anthropologist James Ferguson, who passed away this year, in his critique of “development as an anti-politics machine”, notes that development projects often depoliticise deeply political questions like land, labour and justice by framing them as technical problems to be solved. What gets lost is context and the capacity for people to shape their futures on their own terms.

Hundreds of reports have been written over the years that ask how development can be made more inclusive. But they seldom focus on what and who are being erased to make room for the official future. A future built on conformity, order, glass buildings, wide roads and megaprojects achieved through systematic exclusions and dispossession: pushing people away from the convenience of cash to benefit the surveillance state and finance capital; driving out informal markets in favour of corporate retail; and enforced by regulations that penalise people for doing what they have always done, not least living together in dense, culturally coherent ways.

Local food systems are not being displaced simply because cities need to grow. Agribusiness and retail giants require access to consumers on their terms. And informal housing is not cleared just for safety or sanitation. It frees up land for investment. Anything that does not conform to the rationalised, monetised, hyper-visible modes of life promoted by urban planning is erased or marginalised.

There are other ways of living, trading, building meaning and are already here. They persist in lanes, in markets, in rituals performed in the shadow of concrete flyovers. And despite the pressures faced by agriculture, they continue to thrive in the fields.

Is all of this merely a yearning about a return to some romantic past? Not at all. It’s about a future that does not begin with displacement and a recognition that the dominant development paradigm operates through a slow, systemic and almost invisible ‘violence’.

Anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues that people do not simply need development alternatives; they need alternatives to development. Alternatives that rethink what is valuable, what constitutes wealth and who gets to decide. When development experts claim that a community is ‘underdeveloped’, they are imposing a particular worldview that values corporate planning and economic ‘growth’ over local traditions or spiritual understandings of land and life.

So, whether it is tribal communities, farming communities or city residents, resisting development isn’t just about saying no to a mining project, an industrial corridor, a highway or a dam. It’s also about saying our way of life and doesn’t need validation from outside experts or trampling on to serve some spurious notion of ‘development’.

What, then, is being offered in exchange for the vibrant and meaningful life-worlds that are being dismantled? The official future promises order, efficiency and, most crucially, consumption (in the Wesatern nations, an authoritarian trend towards limited consumption is emerging). But what gives meaning to life once entire communities are gone, a new gadget is no longer new or when food itself is ‘optimised’ via bio-digital interfaces, patches and implanted neural laces as futurists now envision?

The dominant paradigm has constantly raised the bar on what is considered necessary for a good life. And what has this resulted in? For many, a kind of existential dissatisfaction.

This is where the notion of spirituality in its broadest sense becomes critical, even in the most secular, concrete urban setting. A spirituality that’s about people’s fundamental need to feel rooted in something that transcends mere monetary value and material ownership. According to writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry, rootedness is found in an intimacy with place, a commitment to community and a stewardship of the land.

In the urban realm, this translates into resisting the consumerist definition of the self and finding meaning in the enduring, the non-monetised and the communal. We see this in the persistence of informal markets and shared spaces and in rituals and sacred practices that continue ‘beneath the flyover, beside the temple’.

These enduring human connections and attachments to place are the spiritual anchors against the placeless logic of global capital. They demonstrate that meaning is built through shared history and embedded relationships, something that passive consumption of optimised technologies cannot deliver.

People are too often treated as data on a spreadsheet, as victims in need of rescue or disposable ‘assets’. There is no such thing as neutral development. The only question is whether it will continue to serve the interests of the powerful.

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