Telling Tall Tales is a fortnightly column by Tara Krishnaswamy on matters that matter.
Imagine if a government scheme incentivised political aspirants from families of royals. What if a scheme offered subsidies for doctors descended from doctors to set up clinics? Or, at the lower economic end, if a scheme offered loans to youngsters whose parents and grandparents had been in sanitation work to train themselves to pursue the manual occupation of their forebears?
Cut to the PM Vishwakarma scheme.
It offers collateral-free, subsidised loans for artisans and craftspeople who work with their hands, including goldsmiths, potters, carpenters, cobblers, and others. A loan of up to Rs 3 lakh can be availed by self-employed descendants of families practising the same profession, along with training for better quality products, entrepreneurial skills, and go-to-market support.
So, what is the problem?
There are three red flags. One, applicants must compulsorily belong to ‘family-based traditional trades’ and declare that they received their craft through the ‘guru-shishya’ methodology. With this, the Union now propagates the familial passing down of manual occupations to young descendants, which, in Indian society, is wholly rooted in castes or jatis. How many cobblers and dhobis (washers) labouring by hand do we know who don’t hail from families engaged in the same professions?
Second, the minimum age for applicants is 18 years, with no requirement of school and college completion! This signals that even school education is not mandatory and college education can be skipped in favour of their caste-based occupation. Occupations eligible for the scheme are practised by those classified as Other or Extremely Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and some Muslim communities.
This scheme is potentially retrograde to educational attainments, given that the high school completion lag for OBCs is 7%, SCs 2.5x, and STs 3.5x, and further, college enrolment lag for OBCs is 7%, SCs 3x, and STs 8x, against general category students. The share of Muslim students enrolled in high school is barely 8%, compared to their share of the population, which is double that.
It would have been simple and consistent to devise this loan policy only for the constitutionally sanctioned, socio-economically underprivileged OBC and SC/ST castes and include the relevant Muslim communities, conditional upon educational attainments. This would preclude future extensions to traditionally (so-called) ‘upper caste’ familial occupations practised by hand, like temple priesthood. Also, school and college completion requirements would ensure that the young generation from socio-economically disadvantaged communities does not prematurely pursue caste-based occupations, simply due to a lack of other options.
The irony is that the ruling party and its chorus troll hereditary politicians from opposition parties while offering the PM Vishwakarma scheme, which cements and advances hereditary trades!
The third issue is that no census has ever counted artisans and craftspersons as a category. Other surveys that may not be authoritative or official have enumerated them a couple of decades ago but undercounted women by as much as 4x, as per estimates. With a near complete lack of data, it remains a mystery as to how a 5-year budget of Rs 13,000 crore was sanctioned and on what basis the Union claims that 30 lakh families will benefit.
The stated objective, which is to support the scaling of products and services of traditional artisans, is hoary enough that one is unsure whether the Union wants to promote the products or better the lives of the people, or both. At any rate, past programmes via the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, Central Cottage Industries Emporium, Handlooms and Handicrafts Export Corporation, etc., have not been linked for marketing and promotions. In fact, the Modi government has already disincentivised Khadi flags and hastened losses by amending the Flag Code to enable rayon and machine-made flags.
The very reason that artisans and craftspersons stay deprived and slip into construction and informal labour is their lack of privilege, otherwise dubbed as socio-economic backwardness. This has two components. Low social standing due to immutable, oppressed-caste birth status, leading to lower educational attainments, and a peer network, also of low privilege. Economically, there is a lack of generational wealth and hence, low access to large capital and collateral, higher education, and skill levels. Ditto for their networks. Such networks are intrinsically hobbled from helping each other since everyone lacks leverage.
Now comes a scheme with explicit insistence on ‘family occupations‘ and ‘guru shishya parampara‘, coupled with implicit elision of school and college education. The first qualifier means that their network ‘must‘ only be caste peers, who are also disadvantaged. The second means that the beneficiary who has acquired the craft has not been in diverse groups, with standardisation and healthy competition. Worse, with the elision of the school and college requirements, the scheme artificially and deliberately confines their breadth of knowledge, networks, socialisation, and exposure.
The PM Vishwakarma scheme effectively obstructs the social mobility of artisans and craftspersons, ensuring that their entire knowledge acquisition process, practice, and profession stays within the confines of caste. In actively furthering caste and disengagement from school education, the policy seems to impede the right to equality, and the right to livelihood and social justice, as constitutionally envisaged.
Tara Krishnaswamy is a political creature with an urge to write. She works on political and policy communication.