I was elated to be making myself useful in resolving some of the most critical issues in the world through my job at the World Economic Forum. But working with my tiny NGO in India also convinced me that firstly, I needed to return to India to be aware of the ground reality; and secondly, I needed to find a platform in India so that I could make an impact on a larger scale. The scope and outreach of my NGO was too small and the challenges in India were far too many and too large.
Another reason I felt I needed to return was that while we had brilliant development economists who had written on India, often based out of other countries, they rarely chose to be full-time practitioners in implementing the required changes. For instance, some environmentalists in India have been actively and vociferously engaged in protecting rivers and opposing large construction projects that damage the environment, but there are not many similar ‘practising’ economists at significant positions. Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, broke this trend, but he left the role in 2016 after a stint of three years.19 India’s Planning Commission was replaced by the government’s policy think tank, NITI Aayog, in 2015, and economist Arvind Panagariya from Columbia University in New York was brought in to head it, but he too left within two years. A number of other economists did not live in India, and their assessments of the challenges here were often made from universities and research institutes at a distance from the action in India. As a result, these assessments—however astute they may be—were often based only on secondary reports, sample groups, and at times their consultancy experience with the non-academic world, there being no actual engagement. So I wondered how they could reveal an accurate picture of India’s development.
While working at the World Economic Forum, I therefore searched various avenues for almost a year to find the best platform through which I could combine impact and scale to contribute. There were opportunities and offers that came my way from time to time, but I turned them down, mostly because they did not have the scale I was looking for.
On the afternoon of 26 February 2014, I had an exchange of phone messages:
‘How are you doing?’ wrote Naveen Jindal, a member of Parliament, and the owner of one of India’s largest business conglomerates, Jindal Steel and Power, and a friend of mine.
‘Doing well. Still trying to find a way to return and make myself useful to India,’ I replied.
‘Why don’t you join me in politics here?’
‘No, not politics.’
‘Oh.’
‘How about joining our company?’ he inquired after a few minutes.
‘I have been thinking about that.’
A week later, I flew to New Delhi to meet the chief executive officer of Naveen’s company. Together, we carved out a new position for me—chief sustainability officer. I would be responsible for ensuring that the growth of Naveen’s $3.6 billion company included the commensurate improvement of the lives of its employees and the well-being of local communities around their plants and factories. This included ascertaining that the surrounding air and water resources had not been polluted, and contributing to the development of our country in various other creative ways.
Three months later, I had started work at the Jindal Group’s headquarters in New Delhi, moving to India after fourteen years of being abroad.
The company’s production facilities were concentrated in the states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand—which had large tribal populations. I spent the larger part of each month living in these areas, touring the forests and surrounding villages and our factory premises. Some of the tribes, such as the Birhor tribe of Jharkhand, were so primitive that they were on the verge of extinction.
To establish mines and plants, private companies had to acquire land belonging to the Adivasis, with their consent and at times accompanied with various development programmes such as those offering free education and skilled jobs for the landowners and their families. These are all well-intentioned attempts at modernization. The Birhor tribals, for instance, are traditionally expert rope makers, skilled in tying knots and making traps for hunting.20 The Jindal Group provided them with industrial waste sacks—free of cost—from which they could extract jute to make ropes. Saranda was an Adivasi zone in Jharkhand where private companies had provided animal husbandry training to the Adivasi population. In the neighbouring Godda area, the Jindal Group had set up a formidable vocational college in which 60 per cent of all students were Adivasi; they had been enrolled in a specially designed programme to develop skills such as carpentry, welding, electrical goods repair. Their tuition, boarding, meals, study materials, and clothes were fully sponsored by the company.
However, all these efforts seemed fairly ironic because in reality the Adivasis had little use for the interference of private companies in their lives. They were reluctant to participate in the skills training programmes and take up jobs. Even the building of a road in the Adivasi area made them apprehensive, for roads brought with them external influences. The Adivasis I met were self-sufficient and content with the resources they had, isolated from the tumult of the modern-day world. Their path of progress, I felt, was not necessarily the same as the one that we in urban pockets considered desirable. I wondered, what gave us private companies the legitimacy to ‘develop’ the Adivasis? What gave us the right to believe that the Adivasis did not know what was good for them? If their well-being was our primary intention, why were we imposing on them a system that we felt must be appropriate for them?
To make matters worse, the Adivasis were threatened by violent insurgent groups—or Maoists—which claimed they were trying to ‘protect’ them from modern developmental attempts. In an essay titled ‘Adivasis,
