Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

ELVALAPAKKAM, INDIA — The monsoon has been vigorous this year, with heavy rains for days and even weeks at a time. The roads are in bad shape, potholed and filled with puddles. Low-lying areas of the countryside are waterlogged. Village reservoirs are dangerously full.

One of my fondest childhood memories is of the rice fields that emerge after the monsoons. I remember hectare after hectare of emerald green stretching to the horizon.

This year, I have been struck by an unmistakable sense that there are fewer rice fields. I have had several conversations with farmers in this area. They confirm a shift in farming patterns. Partly, this development is underpinned by a familiar tale of agricultural decline. Many traditional crops are labor or water intensive, drawing on two commodities in increasingly short supply. Farmers around Elvalapakkam can no longer afford to grow what their ancestors did.

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

In recent years, there has been growing talk about an Indian model of development and governance — what Larry Summers recently referred to as a Mumbai Consensus. He positioned this as an alternative to an ascendant Beijing Consensus, which emphasizes the role of the state, plays down the importance of democracy and human rights, and has been embraced by authoritarian regimes around the world.

This Mumbai Consensus is far less established than its Beijing counterpart. Still, with India’s economic success now receiving general — and sometimes exaggerated — international recognition, and with a growing number of Indian companies embarking on acquisitions around the world, the outlines of an Indian model that could light a path toward development for other countries are starting to become clear.

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

The Bishnoi are devoted ecologists. Although they are friendly people, full of toothy smiles and warm hospitality, they can also be fierce when defending nature. Their ecological ethic represents a remarkable ideology in modern India, where the environment so often seems to take a back seat to the quest for economic growth.

Across the country, forests and glaciers are dwindling, air and land are being polluted, and coastlines are disappearing.

I wanted to visit the Bishnoi settlement outside Dhundli because I wondered if their way of life offered a path to sustainability. Historically, India’s environmental consciousness (such as it is, anyway) has often been driven by grass-roots, traditional movements.

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

Conventional measurements define poverty with reference to national or individual income. Critics have long argued that this narrow focus is flawed.

I first came into contact with an alternative, less reductionistic, approach to development when I studied with the Indian economist Amartya Sen as an undergraduate. It was in the mid-1990s, the Indian economy was picking up, and much of the country (and, indeed, the world) was euphoric over the rising prosperity of the nation.

Mr. Sen sounded something of a cautionary note. Arguing for a more holistic view of development, he drew attention to the failures in education, women’s liberties and health that persisted despite India’s rapid growth. He exuded a broad-minded humanism that I found not only morally compelling, but accurate. It reflected the complex nature of deprivation that I had seen (if not experienced directly) while growing up in rural South India.