IN the recent past, the state of debate on feudalism was that it is dead and to worry about it is like beating a dead horse. It was established through this debate that feudalism either as production system or a mindset or a disvalue system is not dead.

So, the new argument is that, if not dead already, feudalism is dying slowly which pace need not be accelerated through radical land reforms, as these reforms are redundant since feudalism is headed towards extinction anyway. This is an old tactic of the wealthy who keep telling the commoners to wait it out as change is taking place and will reach them at some point in time.

This point in time never arrives for the commoners as the wealthy remain caught up in a zero-sum game for which they too have to surely work hard as wealth is not easy to come by either. The only difference is that the efforts of the wealthy to become more so bear fruit even before their sweat is dried up while the commoners keep sweating it out mostly to no avail.

Not all amongst the “masses” are as gullible and uncomprehending as the “high-born” would like the commoners to be. The new pitch regarding a “dying” feudalism and lean/mean corporate organizations to meet global challenges is a tough sell in an environment where agricultural reforms lead to more landlessness amongst the peasants and corporate reforms lead to more joblessness amongst the workers and managers alike.

And, where the corporate world too is by and largely managed with a virtual feudal mindset of a few well-connected in which elite networks remain impervious to merit and talent. As potential of many a talent cannot be realized, the organizations remain ill-equipped to meet global challenges regardless of the number of heads and hands they may offload in the name of efficiency and productivity increase through layoffs and retrenchments.

Since organizations enter into a zero-sum game with the society, they add to domestic challenges as well rendering the country even more ill-equipped to brave global challenges. And, why must global challenges be given a priority higher than domestic challenges? Must not the challenges within be taken on first or in parallel or should, at least, not be accentuated?

The single-most important challenge is the utilization of the human capital available and to not let it depreciate and decay through evictions from the land or the jobs or through sub-optimal utilization on the land or on the job. In the agricultural sector, sharecropping is believed to be the best arrangement by big landlords. Certainly, it is the best way of employing sharecroppers in a coercive environment in which all other opportunities of engagement are denied to them.

Sharecropping, therefore, is the best in a virtually option-less environment just like the employed in organizations keep counting their blessings in the absence of alternative employment opportunities. As the employer knows this too, the employees remain most vulnerable to exploitation just like the sharecropper on an agricultural land.

So, to get the best out of human capital, it is the cloak of the talent- and potential-inhibiting environment that needs to be removed instead of defending an environment that compounds both domestic and global challenges alike.

The sharecropper is trapped in interlocking factor markets with the landowner providing inputs as well as taking the output. The upshot is that the sharecropper is not just working with a mere owner of land but the owner is an actual overlord overseeing all operations and is, therefore, more of a landlord than a mere landowner.

The lord is also happy to provide “protection” to the sharecropper from risk which paternalistic approach may further trap him into what is known as a patron-client relationship or in local parlance a “mai-baap” relationship. Why must adult peasants have other adults as their mai-baap? Are these haris retarded mentally to always be in need of mai-baap? If they are perpetually in need of mai-baap, certainly there is a major flaw in what we call our “development” process that develops some more than others with the majority in permanent need of “care” and “protection” from risk.

With the latter being the case, it is under-development that has developed more with agricultural/rural population being relegated to “care units” overseen by the lords in the countryside. For, development is about creating an environment in which people not only grow up, they breathe free, are free to choose and are free to pursue their pursuits and realize their potential.

It is when people are allowed to grow and adults treated as such that a nation is poised to develop and attain maturity. If the people are not allowed to develop and are constantly trapped in mai-baap relationships whose variant can also be found in corporate offices, they will remain underdeveloped and so will be the country.

So, we cannot develop a few micro-organizations for global challenges at the expense of the people and believe that the country has taken off. Unless the people as a whole take-off together and simultaneously, we as a nation will be nowhere near take-off because the nation is made up of people not of bricks, mortar, and a few gigantic structures of concrete and cement nor of a few white-collared upwardly mobile that would in fact be a very small fraction of the population nor indeed of a few lords in urban and rural areas alike.

Of these, the people either cannot breach the elite-elite networks in urban areas or cannot go past the patron-client /mai-baap relationships in rural areas. Emerging from this mai-baap relationship is the sharecroppers’ single-most important challenge failing which neither can agricultural efficiency and productivity be enhanced nor can the agricultural-industrial and service sectors enter into a synchronized mutually beneficial virtuous cycle of growth and development.

For, it is agriculture that must be developed first, if we want the development of industrial sector. And, development of agriculture is development of the ability of the tiller to take charge of agricultural land through radical land reforms. For this purpose, the government needs to enable the tiller.

For, reliance on sharecropping alone is to believe that we can develop through this system pronounced as inefficient long time ago and borne out in contemporary times too. Sharecropping has been found to be inefficient as compared to owner farming since the sharecropper gets only a part of his marginal product and is thus not inclined to give his best. It is in our world of uncertainty and skewed land distribution that sharecropping is found to be the “best” arrangement.

In the interest of growth and development, it is this environment of high-risk and high inequality for the peasant that needs a quantum change. That is, if efficiency is to be enhanced, land must go to the tiller whose risk-aversion needs to be addressed not by “protection” from the landlord but by relentless government support programmes that should aim at minimizing risk and enabling the small farmers to make their operations commercially viable.

It is this kind of institutional support that should facilitate the transition until they gain the confidence to operate independently by which time they will have been adequately engaged in the process with sufficient knowledge and experience to also access the input providers that currently can be reached only by the privileged few. It will be only then that development in the countryside, where bulk of the population is concentrated, will be ushered in with equal opportunity for all and not for a few.

That is, land reforms needed essentially to rectify skewed distribution of land so that incomes may be distributed equitably and the bulk of the population is integrated that will then provide a fillip to demand for industrial goods as well as for education and the country can then be placed on the development trajectory.

This does not call for a bloody revolution but it calls for an intellectual revolution that the educated elite ought to facilitate instead of using education to argue for status quo. It is said that it is social capital of being able to work together that we lack when it is precisely an abundance of social capital that we possess but which we unfortunately use to justify and aim at status quo.

The ‘qibla’ of our abundant social capital needs to be set right without which no amount of education will enable transformation. For, the educated wealthy will use education to pre-empt a rapid transformation and the educated low-income groups will just use education for mere personal gain to join the ranks of the upper-income groups thus getting co-opted and silenced in the process.