Wystems Thinking 5: Flourishing Melukote

Introduction

As the famous story of the seven blind men and the elephant shows, it's very hard to see the whole when all you can do is grasp some of its parts. But imagine how much harder it is if you want the elephant to go somewhere. How do you grasp the elephant to make it move? Do you pull it by its trunk? Do you drag it by its feet? And now imagine an elephant being pulled in different directions by different people. Which way will it go and how can you make it go in all the directions that people want it to move?

In the previous few Messengers, we discussed some of these challenges in the abstract. This week, we want to report on a roundtable held at the SELCO Foundation last week, with participation from civil society leaders, philanthropy and elected representatives with the intention of making Melukote into a model constituency that combines economy and ecology to become a flourishing society.

Melukote is a constituency that abuts the Kaveri River. One end of the constituency is right next to Mysore. It has 236 villages and one municipality. Most of the constituency, about 90%, is engaged in farming, and because of the Kaveri, 45% is wetland and then the rest is dryland.

Challenges

We started by discussing some of the multidimensional challenges in making Melkote into a model constituency: economic, climate and governance. While you might think that being in the system should make it easier, sometimes electoral responsibilities can make it harder because everybody expects you to solve their problems. So how can we give agency to people? Unlike urban areas, villages still have the memory of a more sustainable life. How can we evoke that memory while still being pointed towards the future? Can governance be brought to people's thresholds so that they don't have to petition the government system and instead it comes to their doorstep? Infrastructure provision, especially for inhabitation and the management of natural resources, is crucial so that economic benefits hit all households.

We discussed a range of issues that are in need of improvement:

1. How are people spending money? Can you turn household consumption from an average of 30,000 rupees to 50,000 rupees? In order for people to want to stay in Melkote, can you create infrastructure that makes them want to stay?

2. Can we improve the schools? Can we improve the quality of the health care? Most households are run by women working in garment factories and making about 20,000 rupees a month. They are spending about half of that money on schooling for their children, which leads to debt, and that debt is added upon by health care debt. Can we turn this into a constituency in which both men and women have a reason to both stay and work?

3. Agriculture, as we know, is in crisis all across India, and some of those problems are there in Melkote as well. There's a lot of soil erosion, and it's important to diversify cropping patterns and to connect to new markets. Most importantly, we want to increase the farmer's share of the final value, which is currently 27 percent, into a much larger number. Can this be done, for example, by a localized minimum support price, MSP, that gives more of the value of the final produce to farmers?

4. Can we reduce chemical fertilizer use, not just for improving soil health, but also for improving human health. Can Melkote become a cancer-free panchayat?

5. Waste management is in very poor shape. What needs to be done to turn Melukote into a zero waste constituency?

6. The 30% of the Melukote population who are migrating to Bangalore, what can incentivize them to stay back and create and work in value-added local industries?

Strengths, Institutions and Behaviours

These challenges are all interlinked wicked problems, but, fortunately, work in Melukote can proceed quickly because there's a baseline of advantages that we can capitalize upon. The first advantage is the presence of the KRRS cadre, which is a strong cadre with deep values. Those values have led to an energized electorate, as shown in the 96% turnout in the most recent elections. The second advantage is the possibility of tourist revenue - Melukote has famous temples and other sacred locations and, further, the proximity to the Kaveri River makes it an attractive tourist destination in principle. And finally, the Melukote MLA, Darshan Puttannaiah, is a strong leader who can wear three different hats: a civil society hat, an MLA hat as an elected representative and thirdly, as an intellectual leader.

Having outlined the challenges and the strengths of Melukote, the discussion turned to the institutions we can leverage to make life better for all citizens. Two institutions were highlighted in the discussion: PACs, the Primary Agricultural Cooperatives, and Panchayats. We estimated that 30% of the PACs and 10% of panchayats are functioning well. Can we double down on them and make them the archetypes for the other PACs and panchayats? Can we have data systems that give us transparency into how the PACs and the panchayats operate?

Functioning institutions are crucial, but institutions alone aren't enough: visions of the future have to capture the minds and hearts of people. In a primarily agrarian constituency, that means agriculture has to become sexy. Today, families don't want to give their daughters in marriage to young men who are farmers. How can we reverse that social hierarchy? For agrarian life to be seen as sexy, we need eye candy. Things that make the constituency look cool.

And that can take a couple of different forms. It can take the form of a state-of-the-art school in the constituency, and what was already mentioned, a state-of-the-art Centre for Excellence, an R&D center that innovates new forms of agricultural practice, of social life, and livelihoods.

We ended our meeting on that positive note.

Conclusion

The Melukote roundtable exemplifies the principles of Wystems Thinking we've explored throughout this series. Like the EPI (Ecological Programming Interface) discussed in our fourth essay, the effort to create a model constituency represents an attempt to bridge local and global scales of knowledge—combining intimate understanding of the region's agricultural traditions with wider technological and governance innovations. This approach honours what our first essay called "thinking locally and acting globally" while simultaneously "thinking globally and acting locally."

The multi-stakeholder collaboration we witnessed—bringing together civil society leaders, philanthropy and elected representatives—embodies the "scale-bridging knowledge systems" described in our second essay. By connecting different perspectives and domains of expertise, this collaboration aims to achieve "unity in diversity," allowing different approaches to coexist while working toward common goals.

The challenges identified in Melukote—from agricultural sustainability to waste management—are precisely the kind of interlinked "wicked problems" that conventional problem-solving approaches struggle to address. They require what our third essay termed "wisdom-centric design"—systems that work efficiently, feel intuitive and actively promote trust, foster empathy, and advance justice.

By leveraging existing institutions like PACs and Panchayats while reimagining them through a lens of transparency and data-driven governance, this initiative aims to create what our fourth essay described as "trust architecture"—systems that establish accountability through visible interactions and clear feedback loops.

The journey toward a flourishing Melukote—where economy and ecology reinforce rather than undermine each other—represents Wystems Thinking in action: a living laboratory for creating systems that promote collective wisdom while respecting local autonomy and ecological boundaries. In this way, Melukote becomes not just a model constituency but a model for how we might address our most pressing challenges across scales—from village to planet, from traditional wisdom to cutting-edge innovation.

From Climate Recipes, Bhitarkanika edition on coastal ecosystems of Odisha