Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

After reading Farmer's account, I stayed silent for a long time; it pushed me into deep introspection. It reminded me of the displacement colony in Koraput. There are some unique tribal families living there in the colony. They were once very prosperous with acres of land and beautiful home in the ravine land irrigated by the Kolab river. Then came "Pembangunan". Orissa constructed the Upper Kolab hydroelectric project to electrify the capital towns and business hubs thousands of miles away and these families' houses, lands and villages  were submerged by the Kolab dam reservoir. The villages are still visible when the water goes down, an eerie, beautiful sight. The families moved to a nearby place. They again dug up foundations and built their houses. "Pembangunan" came again in form of a huge factory which manufactured aircraft parts; the proud leaders declared that we have been blessed with the important project by the Indian government. It produced jobs,...

In the rather excellent readings this week, I discovered many theories, the postulates and positions of which I have often discussed but not the names. An interesting one is the "Dependency theory". The theory posits that Euroean development was predicated by the under development of the non-European world (Peet and Harwick, 1999). Certainly, the theory holds water if we trace the development of the world since the renaissance, the emergence of the industrial revolution, and parallely the enlightenment. Many scholars opined that this does not hold true anymore and Peet and Harwick mentioned the World Systems theory. But I would argue even today, the dependency theory can be applied to myriad contexts and used to explain them, though we have to replace the "European" with the "Western" and use the framework of even newer theories. Development aid is an area which offers itself to such critiques and indeed is rife with discrepancies and anachronisms. I was r...