Sanjeev Upretee’s ‘Samrachanatmak Labhansha’ (Structural Dividend) is a powerful book that forces one to pause and reflect. A book rooted in the critical self-examination of the author, it urges readers to do the same. Upretee challenges the concept of the ‘self-made man’—a bedrock of modern individualism and central to the American Dream since the nineteenth century—by arguing that those who reach the top of the ladder have been able to do so rarely through individual merit alone. Their journeys are often invisibly shaped at the helm of systemic privileges embedded within the social structures into which they are born and through which they move.
Unlike many books that move readers, the real impact of this book begins after one reaches the final page. It is during those moments when someone makes a choice, takes a decision, passes a comment, or embraces the boastful ego of having achieved so much on their own. The concepts put forward in this book are not the kind that can be absorbed in a single reading. They linger, resurface, and demand renewed engagement at different phases of one’s life, revealing a different layer of meaning. In each rereading, the book offers new insights as our lives, responsibilities, and social positions evolve.
At the heart of the book is Upretee’s attempt to develop a new vocabulary. Building on Johan Galtung’s idea of Structural Violence, he argues that while the concept helps in explaining inequality, exclusion, and deprivation, it is masked from questioning the advantages that social structures systematically provide to certain individuals and groups. Upretee then introduces Structural Dividend, which are the benefits that individuals and groups gain just from having advantageous positions within existing social structure. These dividends extend from material resources to education, healthcare, social networks, language, confidence, cultural capital, habits, behavioral norms, and personality development. And as these benefits are embedded into the social fabric, those who possess them often mistake structural advantage for personal merit.
Throughout the book, Upretee examines the idea of structural dividend from multiple perspectives, drawing on his own lived experiences as well as incidents that have occurred in Nepali society in recent years. Discussing the murder of Dalit youths in Rukum, he illustrates how members of the Dalit community have historically been denied the benefits and opportunities that others receive through social structures. Similarly, his discussion of Prem Prasad Acharya, who immolated himself in front of the Parliament building in Baneshwor, brings to light how structural inequalities can leave individuals feeling excluded and powerless. The case of Ganesh Nepali, too, reflects a similar absence of structural support and opportunity.
These cases invite readers to look beyond individual success or failure and to consider the broader social systems that shape people’s lives. More importantly, they leave us with an uncomfortable but necessary question: Do we possess structural sensitivity?
Upretee then proposes moving beyond critical consciousness to self-critical consciousness. Critical consciousness teaches us to question institutions, dominant narratives, and systems of power. It encourages us to ask difficult questions, to seek out what has been omitted, and to examine social realities from multiple perspectives. It is outward looking. Self-critical consciousness, on the other hand, redirects those questions inward. It pushes us to question not only unjust systems but also our own location within them. It requires us to examine our privileges, opportunities, assumptions, and the ways we may have unknowingly contributed to reproducing inequality.
Even those of us who think we are progressive or open-minded might have contributed to reproducing inequality within the system through structural insensitivity, which Upretee defines as an inability to recognize the challenges and hindrances faced by those who are systemically disadvantaged and marginalized. Even such individuals may perpetuate the oppressive system blinded to the invisible network of privilege that has shaped their own lives as it stems from never having had to question the advantages one takes for granted. And this confrontation is unsettling for most of us. This book invites us to rethink not only how inequality is produced but also how privilege is normalized and defended.
To extend Upretee’s argument further, we can apply the lens of self-critical consciousness not only to our position within socioeconomic structures but also to our position as a species. If self-critical consciousness asks us to examine the privileges that shape our social lives, it can similarly ask us to question the privileges conferred upon us by our status as human beings. Humans occupy a disproportionately powerful position within the Earth’s ecological systems. We transform landscapes and appropriate other species as resources. We draw and redraw the lines to determine which environments are preserved or destroyed. And we increasingly use technological advancement to alter planetary processes themselves. Yet, since these privileges are so deeply embedded in human life, we rarely perceive them as privileges at all. We experience them as natural entitlements.
Rachel Carson describes nature as “the part of the world that man did not make.” Her definition stimulates an unsettling question: how much of what humans did not make have we nevertheless claimed the authority to control, transform, and destroy? The question becomes even more urgent when considered alongside the long history of human exemptionalism. Human exemptionalism is the assumption that human beings occupy a fundamentally separate and superior position from the rest of the world.
Whether sustained through religious worldviews that place humans at the apex of creation or through secular notions of human mastery, exemptionalism has helped produce a worldview in which the more-than-human world is primarily understood as resource, property, or instrument. Forests become timber. Rivers become sources of energy. Animals become commodities. Land becomes territory available for extraction and development. The consequences of such a worldview can be visible in ecological degradation, habitat destruction, species extinction, and the accelerating disruption of planetary systems.
William Blake famously stated, “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.” Seen through Upretee’s framework, the problem is far beyond the notion that humans exploit nature; it is that our structural insensitivity makes us unable to see the conditions of the other-than-human beings and systems upon which our existence depends. Just as structural dividend can become invisible to those who benefit from it, the privileges of being human can make the interests, vulnerabilities, challenges, and forms of agency of other-than-human beings difficult for us to recognize. We do not generally perceive the forest as a community of living beings whose existence has value beyond its usefulness to us. Nor do we experience a river’s destruction as the loss of a world with its own material histories and relations. Our position within the human-centered structure of the world shapes what we are able—and often willing—to perceive. So, extending self-critical consciousness beyond the social requires an ecological self-critique. It needs an evaluation of how our species’ privileged position has conditioned our assumptions about what counts as life, whose suffering matters, whose agency is recognized, and what we consider ourselves entitled to take. Such an evaluation forces us to situate our human needs within the larger web of relations that makes human existence possible.
In this sense, Upretee’s call to recognize structural dividends can become an invitation to recognize the species-level dividends of being human and consequently to confront the structural insensitivity that those dividends may produce toward the more-than-human world. We could shift course by not blindly following others and instead harboring self-critical ecological consciousness.
