Mining – this is the sector in the news today, with two editorials on it. The context is political corruption and subversion of democracy. I recommend both: Mint, here; and the Express, here.
What I would like to add to these learned opinions is something my father once told me. He said, “Son, in the USA if there is oil or gold under your property, then this belongs to you and you are rich. But here in India everything belongs to The State.”
True, isn’t it? The millionaires of Texas made their millions by striking oil. They had a California Gold Rush.
About mineral resources, a wise man once told me that it was perhaps the greatest curse to ever befall a people: Look at Africa, with vast quantities of mineral wealth. And look at Hong Kong and Singapore, without any such wealth at all.
As the Express editorial rightly points out, mining is a “primary sector” activity, there along with agriculture. There are many books and ballads about the hard life in mining towns. In our own country, mining towns are the most miserable of towns. As with agriculture, so with mining, it would be preferable if other economic activities are allowed to flourish, and less and less people work in the primary sector. All along the Western Ghats, including in sunny Goa, iron ore mining rules the roost. Entire mountainsides, which could be great real estate, are being exported. Every port there is engaged in iron ore exports – export everything, import nothing: the Kamal D Nutt theory of international trade.
What is the solution? Once again, it is Property. This is a function of the local civilian administration. If they apply this Principle to their work, they can solve the problem. As Leon Louw once told me, “Even if your Constitution does not protect property, the government can.”
In other words, the civil administration has some “work” to do. In British times, the average district was three or four times larger than they are today. And there were no satellite maps. The basic task of land administration appeared to them as daunting as “mapping the waves of the great oceans.” But they did it. Mason’s great book has pictures of their rough, hand-drawn maps. There is another picture of a district officer, smoking his pipe under a tree, talking to the villagers, and sorting out land disputes on the spot: “finding” the Law, not “making” it. Those days, a good district officer was known by the wear on the seat of his pants. He spent much of his time on horseback. The entire mess in India today is only because socialists don’t believe in the Principle of Property. And they have destroyed the entire civilian administration with foolish ideas.
I have done my bit to inform India’s elite administrators of their grave philosophical errors. It must be more than a decade since I first lectured in their Mussoorie academy, accompanied by Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society and Yazad Jal of the Association of Youth for a Better India. I lectured there again some years later, this time accompanied by Barun Mitra of Liberty Institute. I smoked a joint or two with Yaduvendra Mathur, then deputy director of the academy. I met Wajahat Habibullah, then director, and we presented him with many of our books. I personally told Habibullah, a Doon School product, that it was ridiculous to have a Marxist professor of economics at this academy after a decade of “liberalization.” Teach them Liberalism, I told him. And it must be 10 years since I appeared on the Barkha Dutt show along with very senior IAS men – Abid Hussain, N Vittal and others. I told them on prime time television that nonsense is being taught in the IAS academy.
How were British administrators taught? It was not too long after the Wealth of Nations came out that the Honourable East India Company established their college at Haileybury to train recruits. The biggest component of their training was Classical Liberal Political Economy – then not taught in either Oxford or Cambridge. Haileybury was in operation right through to 1857, after which the Crown took over India. Hundreds of great HEICS officers were produced by Haileybury. The acronym stands for Honourable East India Company Service, the precursors of the ICS. It is they who "founded" British administration in India.
One IAS man, though, told me something wise: “We are knowledge-proof,” he said.
“Bravo,” I replied.
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