Way Ahead : The 100 Miles

Presented By: Ms. Ela R. Bhatt
Founder, SEWA
Self Employed Women’s Association, Ahmedabad – 380 001.
Tel No:+91-79-25506477, Fax No:+91-79-25506446,
Website: www.sewa.org, Email : mail[at]sewa.org

I would urge us to use things and services of primary needs to life that are produced within 100 miles around us. To name them: food, shelter, clothes, primary education and primary healthcare.

The 100 Mile Principle weaves decentralization, locality, size, and scale to livelihood. What one needs for livelihood as material, as energy, as knowledge should stem from areas around us. Seed, soil, water are forms of knowledge that need to be retained locally. Security stems from local innovations, not distant imports. Let us begin the Principle with our daily staple food. Essentially, the organic human link with Nature has to be restored. The millenia old link between production and consumption has to be recovered. Ultimately, the Nature as cosmology is the weave of life. Let us weave it tight.

I am searching the idea of community/citizenship by employing the slogan of 100 miles to do so.

I think citizenship is of two kinds. It is a membership in a community and membership of a nation state. The second is clearly defined by territoriality, passports, by other forms of certification and symbolism like the flag. It guarantees a certain membership to equality, uniformity, a central homogeneity of access. But democracy needs two forms of citizenship and minimally two kinds of the Social. The social space defined by citizenship in a nation state is inadequate. Without membership in a community the nation state alone can be alienating and coercive. It provides liberty without freedom.

The community I am talking about is not only the identity of caste, village or ethnicity. My sense of community centres around work, but work defined not as an occupation, a job, a career but as livelihood. A livelihood is a chain of being. It connects work to ecology, to a sense of community with nature. Livelihood has implicit in it two forms of access,

1. access to nature as a commons and
2. access also the means of production, consumption, distribution and renewal.

Renewability involves the renewability of all 3 – production, consumption and distribution. In recycling livelihoods you recycle both nature and community. Simply put you sustain both over time.

Livelihood is a more demanding term. It makes greater demands on citizenship. A citizenship based on paying tax, following traffic rules and voting is not enough. It demands more active involvement. It demands that you invent and sustain the community. Here rights and duties are not separate registers but forms of reciprocity, of complimentarity. Caring demands both rights and duties and without caring and access, it is difficult to sustain a community.

Such a community does not need a boundedness, a territory, a boundary as spatial lines, it needs boundary conditions, it needs a sense of the threshold, of the limits and possibilities of freedom. 100 Miles as an idea is a boundary definition, a threshold.

It is defined not as stock, as territory but through a flow of processes.

A community is three flows in time and space. It is a life cycle, a livelihood cycle and a cosmic cycle. Life cycles emphasize biography of birth, marriage, death. Livelihood is the cycle of labour of consumption, production and distribution. Cosmic cycles move from seasons to global climatic change.

It begins simply. Take food. Is it grown and cooked locally? How many energy miles has it consumed? Unless food is grown locally, you cannot sustain diversity. Food has to be grown locally, made locally. Ask yourself what happened to local fruits, local foods like Barley, and local staples like cotton. But when food is produced locally and exported, the locality has no access to its own labour, to its produce. You grow milk and vegetables for the city and survive on less. Freedom is right to your labour, your produce. Such a freedom needs a community. A community is autonomous when it controls food, clothing, shelter (roti, kapda, makan). This old cliché of roti, kapda, makan has to be within a hundred miles radius. The minute you extend the production cycle you lose control. Comparative advantage might be good economics but let us leave well intentioned economics outside communities. Otherwise instead of freedom, we face obsolescence. When food is exported, when technology is centralized, when shelter depends on some remote housing policy, we lose our freedom as a community. 100 miles is a guarantee that citizens retain control, inventiveness diversity. We could grow 50,000 varieties of rice because we followed the 100 miles principle intuitively.

Like all ideas, 100 miles can be conceived of badly or creatively. This is implicit in Gandhi’s distinction between Swadesi and Swaraj. Swadesi can be parochial, territorial, Swaraj needs the idea of oceanic circles. You don’t have the dualism of local and global. They enmesh each other. I care, therefore I am. I care for the community but my community as a set of flow encompasses the globe. The neighborhood implicates the cosmos.

Simply put, the 100 miles principle is an attempt to revive community citizenship which has become too passive.

1. One needs a citizenship and community with nature
2. One needs to understand the livelihood is a chain of being
3. That communities exist in space and time, therefore a community is both an ethics of memory and an ethics of invention.
4. 100 miles is a threshold principle. It shows when you export food or import seed you deculturate a community. 100 miles adds diversity and fraternity to guarantee equality.
5. 100 miles is an idea that liberty, equality, fraternity need renewability, sustainability and diversity to sustain them. It is a heuristic for combining the two frames.

The 100 Mile Principle weaves decentralization, locality, size, and scale to livelihood. What one needs for livelihood as material, as energy, as knowledge should stem from areas around us. Seed, soil, water are forms of knowledge that need to be retained locally. Security stems from local innovations, not distant imports. Let us begin the Principle with our daily staple food. Essentially, the organic human link with Nature has to be restored. The millenia old link between production and consumption has to be recovered. Ultimately, the Nature as cosmology is the weave of life. Let us weave it tight.