How to Organise a Village So Every Family Has Enough

Most plans for villages arrive from somewhere else. A scheme is designed in a capital, funds are released, targets are set, and the village is asked to fit in. When the scheme ends, much of what it built goes with it.

Madhyasth Darshan describes the opposite direction. In the last two chapters of Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र, “cyclical economics”), Shri A. Nagraj sets out, in unusual practical detail, how a village could organise itself from its families upward, so that every family has enough and the land around it stays healthy. It is one of the most concrete answers in the whole philosophy. Here it is as six steps.

This may sound like a blueprint handed down from above: levels, committees, rules. The plan itself says the opposite. Every level exists only because the families below it chose it, and every committee answers to the village. Still, a plan on paper is only a plan until it is lived.

Step 1: Survey the village before changing anything

The plan begins not with rules but with knowing. Before anything is set up, the village gathers the facts about itself:

• People: how many, by age, and how far each has studied.
• Work: who farms, who has a job, who works for wages, who practises a craft or a home industry, and who has no work at all.
• Trade: how many shops and traders there are, what the village buys from outside and what it sells.
• Education: whether there is a school, how far it goes, whether it teaches what the village needs or only what is in books, and how many educated people have left.
• Health: births and deaths, clinics, harmful habits, home remedies and the medicinal plants that grow nearby.
• Justice: whether every person produces according to their ability, whether exchange happens without exploitation, how much trust there is between people, and how many disputes are waiting to be settled.
• Land and nature: the farmland, forest, minerals, water sources and wasteland within the village boundary.

From this survey, a time-bound plan is made for each family. A village that knows itself this well can see its real needs, and its real strengths, before anyone decides what to build.

Step 2: Choose representatives family by family

Each family, of about ten people, meets as a family assembly and chooses one member to represent it: someone who lives with resolution and prosperity in their own family. Ten families form a family group assembly. Each group chooses one person for the village assembly, so a village of about a hundred families has an assembly of ten. Larger villages grow in multiples of ten.

The same pattern continues upward, through groups of villages and regions, all the way to a world assembly. At every level, each person only ever has to judge ten people they know. The plan points out a striking consequence: elections cost almost nothing, so office becomes much harder to buy. Cheap elections alone don’t stop a small group taking control, though; that would still need open records and a way to replace representatives who don’t serve.

Representatives serve four years and can then be replaced. The plan asks that each be at least 21, live with resolution and prosperity, be self-reliant in their work and social in their behaviour, and show humane conduct in how they live now. We say more about the larger pattern in How Can Eight Billion People Share One Earth?

“At every level, each person only ever has to judge ten people they know.”

Step 3: Form five committees

The village assembly sets up five committees, each answerable to it:

Education and culture. Its aim is that every person becomes social in behaviour, self-reliant in work, trusting in themselves and respectful of excellence. It teaches production based on usefulness rather than on passing likes, and a way of life with more production, less consumption, no hoarding, and use of nature in proportion to what nature produces. Its own members must already live this way. We look at what such a school might look like in How to Design a School.

Production. It helps every woman and man in the village find productive work suited to their ability, and arranges training. Production is aimed at real needs: food, homes, clothing, and the means to travel, communicate and see at a distance. Protecting the environment comes first, and no polluting production is allowed. The plan goes into detail:

• Farming with useful trees, fodder, vegetables and aromatic plants; good seed; compost; crop rotation that feeds the village’s animals.
• Animals alongside farming, with biogas plants, shared or per family, for fuel, light and manure, kept in proportion so that the soil stops losing its fertility.
• Crafts and home industries such as metalwork, woodwork, bamboo, pottery, handloom weaving, oil pressing, flour milling, jaggery, preserves and herbal medicines.
• Village industries such as homes built from local materials, tools and spare parts, wells, ponds and roads.
• Services and repairs, with fees set by the village assembly.

Exchange. A cooperative exchange fund, described in step 4.

Health and restraint. Cleanliness of homes and lanes, help in leaving harmful habits, exercise and games, awareness of prevention, home remedies and local herbs, and clinics where they are needed.

Justice and security. Disputes are settled as close to home as possible: first by the families’ own representatives and their family group, and only then by the committee. It looks for justice in four places: in conduct, in behaviour, in production and in exchange. It also protects the village’s land, forest, minerals and water, under three rules: use nature’s wealth only in proportion to what it produces, let no one obstruct nature’s production, and help it. And it holds a simple idea of kindness: where someone is able but lacks the means, providing them is the village’s responsibility.

Step 4: Set up an exchange fund instead of profit

This is the centre of the plan. Instead of many traders each trying to buy low and sell high, the village runs one cooperative exchange fund (विनिमय कोष), working without profit or loss:

• Every producer has an account with the fund.
• Each family sells what it produces beyond its own needs to the fund, at the nearby market price minus what it would cost to transport it there.
• The fund buys what the village needs from outside in bulk, and sells it to members on the same basis. It sells the village’s remaining surplus outside.
• Any incidental gain goes to the village’s common facilities, decided by the village assembly.
• Members who need capital get interest-free loans, repaid later in the goods they produce.
• For a village of a hundred families, about three people run it: one trades with outside markets, one keeps the accounts, one looks after the store. Trained volunteers start it; local people take over once they have learned.
• Members meet regularly to hear its report and guide it, and the village assembly evaluates it.

The fund has a further purpose: to help traders move from hoarding to producing, and to replace a “job mindset” with a “production mindset”. Over time, the plan aims for exchange based on the labour that goes into things, in farming and in technology alike. The book is blunt about the alternative: today’s economics treats artificial scarcity as a standard way to make profit. An exchange fund that buys from neighbours and sells to neighbours has no reason to create scarcity. We look at what fair prices could be based on in How Should Things Be Priced?

Step 5: Provide what every family needs in common

Some needs are best met together. The plan asks the village assembly to provide a home for every family, built as far as possible by local people from local materials, along with clean drinking water, drainage, and shared energy from biogas. These come before anything else, because a village where some families lack a home or clean water can’t yet say it has enough.

Step 6: Measure what matters, every year

Finally, the village assembly evaluates each committee, and each family looks at itself:

• Production: total output across farming, animals, forest produce and crafts; its quality; the skill of the people doing it; whether raw materials are within reach.
• Justice: whether justice is available in conduct, behaviour, production and exchange; whether the land, forest, water and the village itself are safe.
• Health: physical and mental balance, clean homes and lanes, freedom from harmful habits.
• Every family: whether body, mind and wealth are being put to good use, and whether each person is taking part in the larger order.

None of these is a growth figure. Each asks whether a relationship is working, which is the kind of measure we argue for in How Do We Measure Progress?

And the planet?

In this plan, the land, forest, minerals and water within a village belong to the village’s care, not to a distant owner. The rule for using them is the same at every step: no faster than nature renews them, without obstructing nature, and helping it where possible. Production is local, aimed at real needs, and forbidden to pollute. Exchange happens between neighbours, with no reason to create scarcity. If anything like this spread, much of what drives extraction today would simply have no place to start.

It is also a plan for happiness. A village where every family has enough, disputes are settled close to home and nobody fears a neighbour is the kind of place where people can live well. That is the link between a happy life and a sustainable planet that we set out in One question, not two.

Where to start

Nobody has to adopt the whole plan at once. Each step can start small:

• Do the survey, even informally, for one village or one street.
• Bring ten families together as a family group, and meet regularly.
• Start a small exchange of surplus among those ten families: vegetables, milk, repairs, skills.
• Choose one committee’s work, such as health or production, and begin it.

Begin with a few families who choose to take part, alongside the institutions that already exist, and ask each household before surveying it. The whole arrangement has not yet been seen working, so a small, voluntary start is the way to learn what it needs: how money and losses are recorded, how disputes are handled, and how people whose needs a family delegate doesn’t represent get a voice.

Each family can also begin at home, by working out what it needs and what it produces, as in How to Calculate Enough for a Family.

A protocol to try

Take three questions from the survey and answer them for the place you live: What is produced here? What has to come from outside? Who here has a skill that nobody is using?

Then ask one more: what is one thing that comes from outside that we could make here? That answer is where a village starts organising itself.

Limitations

• We don’t know of a village that has run this whole plan. If you know of one, we would very much like to hear about it.
• We have summarised a long plan and left out a number of its details. Anyone who wants to try it should read the original.
• During any transition the plan has to work alongside existing laws, banks and markets, and that is where it is most likely to struggle.
• Chosen representatives can still concentrate power, as in other systems. The plan’s safeguard is the quality of the people chosen, which is hard to guarantee.
• The plan is written for a village. Cities would need a different version, which we haven’t worked out.

References

1. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra (आवर्तनशील अर्थशास्त्र), ch. 8, परिवार मूलक ग्राम स्वराज्य व्यवस्था का स्वरूप, pp. 110–121
2. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra, ch. 9, परिवार मूलक स्वराज्य व्यवस्था योजना, pp. 122–150 (survey pp. 122–125; assemblies pp. 125–126; common facilities p. 128; committees pp. 130–146; exchange fund pp. 136–138; evaluation pp. 146–148)
3. Shri A. Nagraj, Avartanshil Arthashastra, ch. 1, p. 5 (artificial scarcity and profit)