During 1970's time frame that OP is talking about, it is largely the effect of thousands of years caste based discrimination that denied education and basic rights for a big chunk of the population.
Today it is problem of economics.
Coconut trees typically grow in state of Kerala, a lot of the population there work in the Middle East oil economies , the pay is considerably better there. Paying competitively does not make enough money to be worth the effort.
Coconuts outside the big cities event today are dirt cheap you can get a dozen for something like $1.
Kerala is not easy place to be a immigrant, It is big semi urban region - think like American suburbs. There are hardly any cities where immigrants can get affordable housing, this is because lot of the money the state makes comes from remittances from middle east, they don't feel the need to migrate to the city for better jobs.
In recent times there has been some immigration into the state from North Eastern part of India especially in the food and construction sectors - housing is on-site or the restaurant is in the city.
Education statistics were compiled in the British era, and these were referenced by Dharampal in his book 'The Beautiful Tree' which records the extensive education present in South India. Like a lot of claims, this doesnt stand up.
Nor does the claim of 'caste system started in colonial era' make sense.
Aside: For people interested in learning more about what I am talking about, read up Nicholas Dirks, Balagangadhara or Jalki, Pathan.
In short, hierarchies existed between different groups in India, but these do not follow a 'ancient thousand year old varna system'. For instance, Majority of the kings(and dominant land owning jatis to this day) are not Kshatriyas,(nor Brahmins or Vaishya) who were initiated into thread ceremony. This includes famous Hindu kings like Vijayangara era Hakka/Bukka who came from shepherd jatis.
Lol , even today basic literacy is in the 70th percentile.
I can count in fingers how many from my village in south india from my grandfathers generation went to school or could read/write.
The reason congress first lost power in tamil nadu was partly because of caste based education proposed by rajagopalachari. Mid day meal program was pivotal in MGR's continued popularity . Education has always been key factor in politics since at least independence.
Sure there were exceptions and few kings could seize power with support from their powerful communities . They still remained illiterate though.
Education was only given to favoured few. Only few had access to God. A king could perhaps come from some random caste never the priest. he still comes from brahmins. Access to God and education was and still is weaponized to discriminate
The discrimination against women is the same, sure there were rare exceptions for women queens with power. never a single priest though.
If you want to read more about this, please look at the 11th chapter of James Tooley's book https://www.amazon.in/Beautiful-Tree-James-Tooley/dp/0670083... on "the uprooting of the Beautiful Tree". Tooley was researching low cost private schools in different parts of Asia and Africa.
He follows up the references in Dharampal in British Home Office records, which catalog the reports sent on native education by collectors to the governor Thomas Munro (including 'caste' statistics).
Tooley also read the work of Andrew Bell, on how mass education in Britain and later Europe was strongly influenced by what Rev Andrew Bell(who had come to Madras to manage a school) learnt about the methods of peer learning in native schools in Madras.
Dharampal's book is available online for free, and Arvind Neelakantan has a review of Tooley's book.
Some other disagreements, its not just 'few kings' but majority. The 'priest' claim is also not true. Majority of the mathas in say Karnatak and TN are run by non-brahmins, and there are plenty of pujaris from other jatis, not that that is a position of social privilege given how poorly paid they are and difficulty in getting married.
so are you saying india was economically flourishing in the 1970s and today suddenly there is poverty that you would not pay the tree climber? how much did you make in the 1970s selling coconuts? Re 1? equivalent to 1/50th on the US dollar?
Huh? I said today there are better jobs abroad what has that do with poverty ? . It doesn't matter how rich or poor the farmer is. If coconuts sell at some price and he has to compete with middle eastern job market he won't pay if he cant get returns on his efforts.
In India, dangerous stuff often pays less due to caste and other considerations. Manual sewage cleaners have a really high death rate in India and are paid peanuts.
Casteism is an Organized mafia operating in South Asia since 700 BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda which is evident from the fact that 50% Ministers in Modi Cabinet are Brahmin; And Brahmin are just 3% in India;
The caste system existed long before Europeans ruled India. Caste system has roots in the Vedic society.
"The varnas originated in Vedic society (c. 1500–500 BCE). The first three groups, Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishya have parallels with other Indo-European societies, while the addition of the Shudras is probably a Brahmanical invention from northern India."
... "there is no evidence in the Rigveda for an elaborate, much-subdivided and overarching caste system" [1]
Caste and any discrimination is abhorrent, and like others have commented is a more recent phenomenon. In old times and today, anyone can become a priest/Brahmin by learning. [2]
The "Caste system" has European roots connected to the monopoly of one book, one god and the all powerful church.
In Europe the king was the representative of god and got his powers through the church. Then came the merchants, landowners who funded the state. Artisans took the next rung. The unskilled workers took the most menial jobs came last.
We call this today as the class system but this was the original caste system imported from Europe and applied on the native population of India.
While one can not deny that there were/are different communities and a kind of class hierarchies in India just like in the rest of the world. The rigid caste system is actually the work of the Church. In India each community had its own gods and its own chieftains and priests.
Even in the West we consider some jobs off-limits to holders of certain offices. Imagine a SCOTUS judge cleaning sewers for money or shooting porn when the court is not in session.
Caste works in a similar way, but is determined by birth.
I donot Think children of potus would suddenly become sewer cleaners either. is that determination by birth?
Problem has been and is poverty. if british government treated india like england none of these problems would exist.
British government treated English (and much worse, Irish) working class like dirt too. Poverty in 19th century Britain was indescribable, even though people like Dickens tried their best to put the images into writing for future generations.
Victorian Britain was extremely classist.
However British government developed institutions in England and Ireland which eventually led to overall greater wealth and equality for most of the population. Whereas in India these institutions were systematically short-circuited to create inequality and a locus of power/wealth that favoured British colonialists.
Oh, the British Raj treated the Indian poor and lower classes like untouchables, with a good dose of racism mixed in.
I've seen images barring Indians from establishments; this report mentions "No dogs or Indians allowed" https://www.smh.com.au/world/no-dogs-or-indians-colonial-bri...
You still see casteism and classism in Indian today, although it may be more subtle.
They do demand more. My parents house has 3 trees. The price per tree has increased. Its difficult to get people and if we get someone they usually agree to their price. This in city though not village. Its still a dangerous job. One of the guys who used to come to our house broke his ribs falling from tree.
Palm thorns are letal. I don't have any problem with macaques being trained to do such dangerous job instead having humans doing it. They are much more fit for the job and have the right tools. I couldn't care less about what Petaheads, trying to collect money with sad histories, think about that.
On the other hand, to say that caste system in India is an European thing, is the same as claiming that British introduced Hinduism in India. This is a very naive point of view IMAO.
Most of them wouldn't have had formal education, which will make their negotiation skills weak. So there could be a prevailing rate based on poor pricing and general agreement of those rates (both on the supply and demand side). Additionally, this puts them in a different social bracket which is more used to taking orders than making fair demands. This of course is not unique to this particular trade.
However, I don't think the skills were particularly in short supply especially back then (I am from Kerala, which translates to 'land of coconuts'). Ultimately the coconuts did get pulled although the workers weren't paid so well.
- There are a lot of alternatives to coconuts so if they become too expensive at market, people will buy other fruit, putting a ceiling on potential harvesting costs. If no one will do it at the price, better to just not pick them.
- There might not be an actual shortage, but since harvesting is a specialty craft that the whole business is beholden to, and too seasonal to hire in-house, the harvesters have lots of temporary power and scheduling optimization requirements between farms that makes it feel like there is a shortage. Kind'of like swimming pool builders in spring.
Guessing up an explanation from half a planet away: if there are more palm trees than harvesting capacity, but harvesting capacity is sufficient for coconut demand, soft influence on harvesting capacity allocation will determine which coconuts get harvested. In a perfect market this would still balance out at maximising harvester income (on a low level but still), but it's easy to see that the market wouldn't be that perfect.
>>Just out of curiosity, if there was shortage of coconut harvesters, why were they poor? Can't they demand more money for the task?
Because at some point, it's not viable to harvest them. We're not talking about thousand acre farms. But if you have a few trees and a coconut ends up costing you xx whatever, then F it, let them fall when it's too late.
Most Indians, me including and people I know of, do not understand the concepts of pricing that Western countries talk about.
Even now, in 2020, this comes up frequently in product pricing when I talk to founders in India who haven't seen the Western notion of pricing first hand.
Describing pricing according to demand as being the “Western notion of pricing” is one of the most bizarre things I’ve read on the internet recently. I say this as a resident of a South East Asian country where Chinese and Indian immigrant merchants have prospered plenty due to a keen sense of price and value.
Agriculture in Europe runs on underpaid, often illegal, immigration.
There's pressure on the consumer side not to pay, say, a tomato more than a few cents, which means you either pay workers peanuts or you just don't harvest them.
There are a lot of people that don't understand it in the west as well. It's also not as easy as some people make it sound. After all, it's the perceived value of both parties making the trade and not the actual value that's important.
Yes, take the original situation for example. The coconut harvester and the person employing him perceive the work to be of very low value.
As such, the actually valuable work with high danger, which should've been paid appropriately is significantly underpaid.
/edit: maybe its easier to relate in the context of the tech industry... while it has significantly less impact on the employees live its prevalent there as well, and in both directions.
fresh graduates which get less then a third of a full employee while still producing basically the same value to the employer. (this obviously depends on the graduate, but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable.
its just as easy to find the pendulum swinging in the other direction as well... people which might even effectively sabotage the work of others while still looking perfect to the person paying the bill, essentially increasing their perceived value to the person paying the bill while effectively reducing the actual throughput/quality.
> but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable.
If everyone knows this, then why isn’t there an employer taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity to pay the new graduates more and use their “valuable” labor to generate valuable products for sale?
The answer is that no one knows the exact numerical value of the “value” of someone’s labor. Hence we rely on the buyers and sellers’ making offers to each other and coming to an agreement. As long as there are many buyers and many sellers, working independently, the market value should become evident.
Sometimes the buyer pays a little extra, sometimes the seller pays a little extra. It’s when there is no price transparency and insufficient number of buyers and sellers that the signal gets noisy.
Pricing in the Western systems is all about finding out how high you can price so fewer people pay a lot more which offsets running a larger scale business to serve more customers at lower price points. So these systems have accepted that not everything is for everybody, and do not even make an effort to get things to people. US healthcare is a good example here.
Countries with much large populations can not run that way, not everything at least. We are still learning to balance, which is why I want to adopt a region-based pricing for anything I build. Since customers from Western nations get a kick by paying more, I say, let them. Get and money and subsidize for the rest.
The US is not "The West". Price/market segmentation, which is what you're describing (by region) is not exclusive to India or "The East".
"Finding out how high you can price" things is more of a strategy for veblen goods, it is certainly not how everything is priced nor exclusive to any geographic region... I don't think I'm following this at all. :)
The west has prices for lower income groups as well via coupons and other distribution channels hidden away or made inconvenient for higher paying customers. Part of pricing is capturing as much of the demand curve as you reasonably can.
I'm guessing that while there is a shortage, coconuts are so low value that no one will pay them more. So they tend to be hard to find but paid poorly.
As with any traditional profession in India, tree climbing is caste based and caste is based on birth. A persons profession is decided based on which family they are born into. In every village or town, there will be a family who does this job generation after generation. The castes who perform low level jobs such as tree climbing, weaving, farm labor etc. are collectively known as the Shudras. Shudras are the lowest level in the caste pyramid and were historically oppressed and were denied basic rights such as education.
Being illiterate and unorganized, they don't have any negotiating power, which is the reason for lower pay. They also had no choice because they were told that they were "born" to do this work.
The reason for shortage of harvesters is that, the latest generation does not want to take up the family job because of poor pay and low status. The younger generation wants to get educated and move to big cities to find better jobs, thanks to the progressive reforms and loosening of the caste system in the recent decades, at-least in urban areas. The current generation of tree climbers will probably be the last or second last generation who does this job.
