The Survival Game

 Have you ever played a board game named Monopoly? - A multi-player economics-themed board game where players roll dice to move around the game board, buying and trading properties. The player with the most capital or he/she who has not gone bankrupt is declared as the winner. What happens when Monopoly is played in real life with real situations specific to rural India where winning is equated with the mere survival of the participants?

Recently, as part of one of our electives (Competencies for Designing Livelihoods Intervention) in the MA Development course, we participated in a simulation workshop named ‘Foundation Express’ (adapted from the simulation exercise developed by IRMA, India). It’s a daylong workshop where participants experience the real world, its constraints and outcomes. The game focuses attention on the decision-making process - It seeks to simulate how decisions taken by large farmers influence the fortunes of small farmers and landless labourers and how the interventions by the government and civil society organisations can affect the lives of the rural poor.

The game:

The game starts in a village called Narayanpur (imaginary) and assumes a closed economy (No trade outside the village, all the necessities of the villagers are fulfilled within the village). The primary stakeholders are the agricultural households (landed and landless). Other community members include traders, money lenders, gram panchayat members, an NGO and a government representative. Now all the participants are divided into pairs and assigned roles of different stakeholders. All the pairs receive the profile of their households that includes members in the family, land size, initial savings to work with and the rates of basic necessities (clothes, food, seeds). For example, my partner and I got the role of an agricultural household belonging to the general category (caste) that had 7 members (2 adults and 5 adolescent children), 2 acres of land and 20,000 as initial savings. Each household is supposed to manage the assets they have in a manner that they can feed, clothe and educate the family, maximise their financial capital after meeting all these basic requirements and survive. Each household has to buy food, clothing from the traders and engage with agriculture to run life. The prevailing weather conditions determine the production (harvest) which the household sells after the end of the season. The non-landed households have to look for employment with the landed households by selling their labour. The traders are supposed to buy food, clothing and seeds stock from the government and try to maximise their profits. If any household has a child of marrying age (18 and above) the household has to fix his/her marriage in another household and both the families incur 5000 Rs each as a cost for the marriage. If the child is not married off in the first year (the game takes place in 2 or 3 intervals each lasting for 2-3 hours – each being considered as one year with one harvesting season), the family will have to pay 10,000 the next year for their marriage.

In case a household fails to secure foods or clothes or generate income, the family is declared ‘dead due to hunger and starvation’. The household that survives and has multiplied its assets the most is declared as the winner (The game is more nuanced and has many more details but due to the constraint of space and time, we won’t be disclosing them here).

Key take-aways:

Can the ‘invisible hand’ lead to a just and equitable development?

Adam Smith comes up with the concept of ‘invisible hand’ where he claims that the market force (invisible hand) helps the demand and supply of goods in a free market to reach equilibrium automatically; hence the government should not intervene if we want an efficient distribution of goods.

In the game, during the first half, all the households were competing against each other for survival. The behaviour of people was solely controlled by the market forces. There was no government control and no collectivization efforts by the villagers. The traders and money lenders were charging exorbitant rates to maximise their profits and the individuals had no bargaining power at all. Those who were better off in terms of financial assets (land and initial savings) were able to cope up and survive; those with marginal or no landholdings couldn't; in the first round, four to five households couldn’t survive due to hunger deaths of almost all the family members. Families were desperate to get their young daughters married by striking all kinds of deals since it reduced one mouth to feed and the charges were going up the next year (the second half of the game).

Hurdles in collectivisation:

The NGO present in the village tried to convince people to form a self-help group to add some security to their fragile livelihoods (The SHGs can provide loans to the community members), but people were more concerned about survival in the current season by taking care of short-term necessities than any long-term investment. It was astonishing that all of us being students of development and advocates of collectivisation, couldn’t make collectivisation our priority! We talk about the merits of mobilising people but when we were put in their shoes, we also started thinking on the following lines: “Pehle Apna dekh lete hai, fir meetings vagaira attend karenge”. Even while attending the SHG meeting, the first question we all asked was not how it’ll benefit everyone, but “hame kya milega”. This was an eye-opener – reflecting on our own behaviour at that moment made us realise the hurdles in the collectivisation efforts of the community. Firstly, People will lead the larger struggle only when their basic necessities are taken care of. In that case, the initiation of larger struggles, protests and unionisation should come from the regular salaried class (not the affluent ones) - those who have these daily needs covered, who can afford to devote their energy to larger causes. Secondly, the success of ideological mobilisation seems highly dubious and common people (workers) can only be mobilised when they have some personal stake or benefit in it. Thirdly, even if nominal, the SHGs do charge a contributory amount from every member – in the game, people didn’t even have 50 Rs as an entry fee to join the SHG. It partially explains the homogenous nature of SHGs with respect to their caste and class composition (only those having at least a marginal surplus are able to become members of the SHG).

Need for government interventions:

The first half proved to be a disaster since the village was left purely at the mercy of the market forces and there were no collectivisation efforts to demand government interventions. In the second half, we all had realised that there’s no survival for marginal and non-landed agricultural labourers if we do not come together. Through those efforts, the villagers were able to put pressure on the Panchayat members to organise Gram Sabhas, regulate the trade, do the social mapping of the village (like NSSO data), and demand interventions like PDS, mid-day meal and NREGA from the state. The impact of these interventions was immediately seen at the end of the second harvest season where no hunger deaths were reported. The PDS system took care of food security and NREGA assured additional & secured income to the agricultural labourers who could then buy clothes and seeds. The government school first didn’t see any enrolment as children's education was the last priority for those struggling to manage their food; but the moment the mid-day meal scheme was announced, almost all the households enrolled their children into the school as that meant fewer mouths to feed. This perfectly depicts the reality – the increased enrolment in schools after the launch of the mid-day meal scheme in 1995.  

 

Even if the point was proven that interventions were beneficial, they needed a lot of reforms (the government in the game was trying to act exactly like the real government – the role of government was played out by our professors). The daily wage rate in NREGA (100 Rs per person) was below the minimum wage rate (in reality as well, the unions are fighting for the demand to raise the daily minimum wage to 375 Rs), subsidies for seeds were announced at the end of the harvest season when farmers had already sold their lands in absence of seeds and any subsidiary income to just sail through the current season. When the distress sale of lands to money lenders and the traders brought down the price of a one-acre plot to 500 Rs, the government announced a scheme to buy land from the villagers which proved to be a big relief. However, there was a catch here. The government announced that it will give 15000 Rs per acre only for 25+ acres of land. Most of the villagers were marginal landholders, so we all had to take extra efforts to come together, convince others to sell their productive assets (toughest job), bargain with the government and after receiving the amount, distribute it across the contributors as per the amount of land they had given (fraudulent practices were observed here as well). 

The protests against the government couldn’t last long as people had to get back to arrange for the basic necessities within the 30 minutes time limit (This fact also sparked a conversation regarding the failure of unions and why workers’ protests cannot last long in our country).

Gender equations:

It was surprising to witness how subtly the patriarchal division of labour works. Even if we all were highly educated and the proponents of gender equity, it was observed that the decision-making positions (Panchayat representatives) were easily taken over by the male participants. The women participants were leading the decision-making process within the household, but not in the public sphere where community decisions/demands were being made. There were no initiations by women participants nor were there any proactive efforts from the men to invite or include women. The external environment and imbibed patriarchy were undoubtedly shaping our behaviour and strengthening the power dynamics already present in the environment. 

Surplus labour and exploitation:

To survive through the second harvest season, most of the marginal landholding families had to sell their lands leaving almost 3/4th of the families in the village landless. We all were forced to sell our labour to the better off agricultural farmers at a very competitive rate (the bargained value of labour came down to as low as 1500 Rs for an entire year, whereas the prescribed wage rate was Rs 800 per month!). In the end, we all were saved from this exploitative situation when the government finally launched NREGA.

The surplus labour, in the absence of any union or a cooperative, led to steep competition amongst the agricultural labourers that brought down the market rate of wages. We, as landless labourers, completely side-lined the option of collective bargaining which could have saved us from this extreme exploitative condition. We were shocked at our own behaviour considering how in the classroom we were the ones shouting: "workers of the world unite"! This reiterated the fact that collectivisation might be the toughest job – may it be in the form of a union, a self-help group or a cooperative.

Ethics – a privilege?

Before the game began, each of us was supposed to write down the values that are non-negotiable for us. I had written `honesty’ and `self-respect’ as my non-negotiable values. Within 1-2 hours of the game, my ‘values and ethics’ had already gone for a toss – To just be able to buy the basic necessities of life, to survive as a family, we had to resort to fraudulent practices and stealing. 

This raises crucial questions regarding the human psyche and the decision-making process. How do you really make a choice between `surviving’ and ‘being ethical’ when it becomes a zero-sum game? Is being ethical/moral also a sign of privilege? - A thought to ponder upon!

How everybody could have survived:

The results were obvious. In the end, when we calculated the initial assets of the families and the assets at the end of the game, it was clear that the winners were the traders and the moneylenders. Almost all the families of agricultural labourers couldn’t survive (verdict based on the assets each family owned at the end, the amount of loan taken and the surviving family members). The traders and moneylenders were successful in multiplying their assets and maximising their profits mainly because of the factors like access to physical assets, bargaining power and the market monopoly. The wealth and growth inequality was tremendous.

We literally lived the reality by putting ourselves in the shoes of the most marginalised section of our society. We were able to experience the barriers in implementing theory into practice, and see how the external social factors were controlling our behaviour. This, according to me, was a crucial realisation especially while addressing and working on social issues/practices such as child marriage or child labour.

After the end of the game, during the analysis round, our professor discussed with us how everybody could have survived. There was enough land and equivalent labour in the village (even if unequally divided) since the beginning of the game. If only all of us (those owning lands and the landless labourers) had come together and formed a cooperative, we all could have survived. But all of us coming together was itself hard – the landowners neither wished to give away their lands nor employ labour from outside. This is not surprising; as even in real life, this becomes one of the reasons behind the failure of producer cooperatives.

Overall, the simulation workshop proved to be an eye-opener, giving many insights, forcing me to reflect upon my convictions and making me experience the life of the communities (even if hypothetically) with whom I might be working!

(A big thanks to my batchmate Arati Tawade for sharing her reflections as well)