Barter System

I met a poor rural guy living in the backwaters of Mulshi lake near Pune. He was saying that he was not getting kerosene from the government shop till he builds a WC of his own and stop clearing in the open. But he did not have money to build one. But he desperately needed to get kerosene. He needs kerosene to to light his home lamps (there is no electricity to his house though he lives near the lake which is built for generating electricity!) and as fuel for his cooking. These days there is hardly any forest left around and firewood is not easy to gather. He does not have money to buy material required to build a WC, neither he had money to employ a meson to actually build it. He somehow got a old WC pot from a urban relative and could uste little money buy little cement etc. Then he brokered a deal with a local meson. The meson does not get a lot of work to fully employ him as a meson. When he does not have work as meson he is employed for some petty work. So our man made a barter arrangement with the meson. When the meson is building our man's WC. our man goes to work for the meson on his petty jobs.

I find this interesting. I had heard of barter system only in terms of exchange of goods. But here manual labour and skills are being exchanged, or you can even say, traded, one skill for another, one's time for something with other's time for some other thing etc.

This could be one of the ways to reduce our over dependence of money valuation. Of course, there is nothing new in this. Such exchanges are going on all over India. There are many places where villagers share their agriculture labour by collectively working at one farm and then the next till everybody farms are worked upon. There may not be anything new in it, but whats hit me most was the direct one-to-one nature of transaction, which could possibly be collaborative undertones. e.g. our man might have helped the meson sometime earlier and so the meson was willing for the exchange for any additional returns and no apparant advantages to himself.