Just out of curiosity, if there was shortage of coconut harvesters, why were they poor? Can't they demand more money for the task?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah. Even in most rural places, coconuts are now priced at around 50 cents each.
The price flucatates and does drop below Rs 10 and even Rs 5 . Here the coconut board link [1] for wholesale prices.
I have personally traded with farms at Rs 5-6 range 3 years back in 2016.
[1] https://coconutboard.in/priceweb/Reports.aspx
Today I can see vendors quoting 10 per on some mundis.
https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answers/2...
Somehow the poverty and destitution seems to be always blamed on the natives.
Moreover Caste system is a European system introduced by the British to divide up communities.
"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."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India#Vedic_va...
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]
1. Same wikipedia page
2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/amaravati/first-bat...
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.
how much would you pay for a coconut?
Caste works in a similar way, but is determined by birth.
You still see casteism and classism in Indian today, although it may be more subtle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, not that different I suppose.
If I perceive a “perceived” value, who perceives the “actual” value?
Spreadsheets?
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.
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.
"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. :)
Dumping food in landfills, milk in the fields or in the sea. Good groceries thrown into the garbage. It is optimised to maximise profits.
Even though the overall efficiency from farm to table is very good.
Do you mean that there is some tradition based price and it's accepted as "unchanging", or something else?
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.