How Can a Village Produce What It Needs?
Many villages today sell their raw produce cheaply and buy back almost everything they use. Madhyasth Darshan says a village of around a hundred families can produce most of its ordinary needs itself. Here is how to work out what yours can make, and where to start.
A farming village sells its wheat to a trader, and buys biscuits. It sells its milk, and buys soap and shampoo. It sells its sugarcane, and buys sugar. It sells its mustard seed, and buys bottled oil. Each time, the raw produce leaves cheaply, and something made from it comes back at several times the price.
The work of turning the raw thing into the useful thing happens somewhere else. So does the income, and the skill. The village is left with the hardest and least-paid part.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), Shri A. Nagraj makes a confident claim: among a hundred families, all or most of the things needed for ordinary life can easily be produced in the village itself. This post looks at how.
This may sound like cutting a village off from the world. It isn’t. The plan expects villages to buy what they can’t make and sell their surplus outside. The point is that a village shouldn’t have to buy back, at a high price, what it could easily make for itself.
Nine areas of village production
The book lists nine areas a village can work in:
- Farming: grain, pulses, oilseeds, spices, vegetables, fruit, fibre, tubers, aromatic and medicinal plants.
- Animals: for ploughing, milk and ghee, biogas and manure; also bees, sheep, goats and silkworms where they suit the place.
- Forest and forest produce, including medicinal herbs, where there is forest.
- Minerals, for local building and roads.
- Handicrafts: painting, sculpture, weaving, embroidery, printing, tailoring, dyeing, spinning.
- Village crafts: metalwork, woodwork, farm tools, leather, bamboo, furniture, pottery, toys.
- Cottage industries: handloom, carpets and mats, soap and oil, leaf plates and bowls, flour milling, oil pressing, rice hulling, jaggery, pickles and jams, fruit juice, incense, herbal medicines.
- Village industries: homes built from local materials, preserving fruit and vegetables, tools and spare parts, wells, ponds, channels and roads.
- Services: washing, haircutting, and repairing bicycles, radios, televisions and farm machines.
Read that list against what a household buys in a month, and a large share of it is there.
“The raw produce leaves cheaply, and something made from it comes back at several times the price.”
Step 1: Map what the village needs, and what it has
The plan begins with a survey. On one side, what the village needs: the food, clothing, housing, fuel and tools that its families use in a year. A family that has worked out its enough, as in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, already has its share of this list.
On the other side, what the village has: the crops it grows and in what quantity, farmed land, fallow land and land that could be farmed, water and irrigation, animals, forest, minerals, and, most important, skills. Who is good at farming, weaving, carpentry, repairs? The gap between the two lists is the village’s plan.
Step 2: Join farming, animals and soil into one loop
The book insists that animals go with farming, and that biogas goes with animals. The reason is a loop. Animals plough and give milk. Their dung goes into a biogas plant, shared or per family, which gives fuel and light. What comes out of the plant, with compost, feeds the soil. Each farmer rotates crops so that there is enough fodder for the animals they keep.
Keep animals in the right proportion, the plan says, and the village has enough manure to stop the soil becoming salty, acidic and hard, and to stop it losing its fertility. The village also produces its own seed, and plants fruit trees and herbs on land that is otherwise waste. One loop supplies food, fuel, light and fertility, almost none of which has to be bought. These are the plan’s claims: how well manure and rotation keep soil healthy depends on the soil, the climate and how they are managed, and is worth checking locally.
Step 3: Process at home, not elsewhere
This is where the wheat-and-biscuits problem is solved. A village with its own flour mill, oil press, rice huller and jaggery pan keeps the work of turning raw produce into food. One that makes its own pickles, jams, soap and leaf plates keeps that too.
Madhyasth Darshan locates value in the labour that makes things useful, as we set out in How Should Things Be Priced? Processing is exactly that labour. When it happens in the village, the usefulness, the skill and the income stay there.
Step 4: Build and repair locally
Homes can be built from earth and other materials found nearby. Tools and spare parts for farming can be made locally, from local materials. Wells, ponds, channels and roads can be built by the village, with the knowledge to do it shared. And some people take up repairs: of bicycles, radios, farm machines and more, with their fees set openly by the village assembly.
Each of these keeps things working longer and money circulating closer to home. It is also the practical side of How to Make Things Last for the Next Generation.
Step 5: Train each other
None of this works without skill, and the plan is clear about where skill comes from. Those in the village who are already expert at farming teach those who farm now, and those who will. The village’s production committee arranges training in crafts and industries, starting from what local people already know and helping them become more skilled.
The book also asks the village to change a habit of mind: from a “job mindset” to a “production mindset”. The question shifts from “who will employ me?” to “what can I make that my neighbours need?” That is a change schools can help with, as we describe in How to Design a School.
Step 6: Sell only the surplus, together
The village isn’t meant to be closed. Each family sells what it produces beyond its needs to the village exchange fund. The fund sells it to other families, and sends what the village can’t use to the town. It buys from outside, in bulk, what the village can’t make, and any incidental gain goes to facilities everyone shares. We set out how the fund works in How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough.
The difference is in what leaves. Instead of raw produce leaving cheaply and coming back expensive, what leaves is a genuine surplus, much of it already processed, and what comes in is what truly couldn’t be made at home.
And the planet?
Producing nearby is not automatically better. Sometimes buying from outside uses less, costs less or is safer, and the exchange fund exists for exactly those things. Where local production does fit, the farming–animals–soil loop can replace much of the bought fertiliser and fuel. Processing at home means far less carried back and forth. Homes built from local earth need far less cement and steel. The plan also gives every villager responsibility for protecting the forest, and lets the production committee decide how much wood is taken, according to good use, so that its protection is never weakened. It is the rule from How Much Should We Take from the Earth?, applied to one village.
And our happiness?
A village that depends on distant markets for almost everything lives with a quiet insecurity: prices can change overnight, and there is nothing anyone nearby can do. A village that meets most of its needs together has far less to fear. And there is a different satisfaction in eating oil pressed down the road from seed grown in the next field, by people you know. Exchange becomes a relationship again. The plan adds one more thing worth noting: land that can be farmed is made ready and given to those who have none.
A protocol to try
List the last twenty things your household bought. Next to each, write where it was made, if you know.
Then mark the ones that could have been made within ten kilometres of your home, by someone you could meet. Pick one, and next time, find the person who makes it.
Limitations
- Not every village has the land, water or forest the plan assumes. A village in a dry region or on poor soil will be able to produce far less of its needs.
- Some things, such as medicines, machines and electronics, can’t realistically be made in a village. The plan accepts this, but we don’t say exactly where the line falls.
- Small-scale processing can cost more per unit than a large factory. Whether it is worth it depends on what is counted: we count labour, soil and fuel, a factory price may not.
- We have described the plan as Madhyasth Darshan sets it out, and arranged it in steps. We haven’t yet seen it carried out in full.
References
- Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), p. 114 (around 100 families can produce most ordinary needs; farming, animals, village crafts, cottage and village industries), pp. 133–134 (the nine areas of production; village farm plan; land for the landless; fruit trees on waste land; seed, biogas and compost; animals with farming), p. 135 (forests, minerals, handicrafts), p. 136 (village crafts, cottage industries, village industries, services), p. 137 (production mindset instead of job mindset; surplus sold through the exchange fund)
