India's Trickledown Revolution

[xenia]

The Trickledown Revolution


By Arundhati Roy

The law locks up the hapless felon who steals the goose from off the common, but lets the greater felon loose who steals the common from the goose.

—Anonymous, England, 1821 ON the 64th anniversary of India’s Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soap box in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bonechillingly banal speech to the nation. Listening to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together?

“All of you have contributed to India’s success,” he said, “the hard work of our workers, our artisans, our farmers has brought our country to where it stands today… We are building a new India in which every citizen would have a stake, an India which would be prosperous and in which all citizens would be able to live a life of honour and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill.

An India in which all problems could be solved through democratic means. An India in which the basic rights of every citizen would be protected.” Some would call this graveyard humour. He might as well have been speaking to people in Finland, or Sweden.

If our prime minister’s reputation for ‘personal integrity’ extended to the text of his speeches, this is what he should have said: “Brothers and sisters, greetings to you on this day on which we remember our glorious past. Things are getting a little expensive I know, and you keep moan ing about food prices. But look at it this way— more than 650 million of you are engaged in and are living off agriculture as farmers and farm labour, but your combined efforts contribute less than 18 per cent of our GDP. So what’s the use of you? Look at our IT sector. It employs 0.2 per cent of the population and earns us 5 per cent of our national income. Can you match that? It is true that in our country employment hasn’t kept pace with growth, but fortunately 60 per cent of our workforce is self-employed. Ninety per cent of our labour force is employed by the unor ganised sector. True, they manage to get work only for a few months in the year, but since we don’t have a category called ‘underemployed’, we just keep that part a little vague. It would not be right to enter them in our books as unemployed. Coming to the statistics that say we have the highest infant and maternal mortality in the world—we should unite as a nation and ignore bad news for the time being. We can address these problems later, after our Trickledown Revolution, when the health sector has been completely privatised. Meanwhile, I hope you are all buying medical insurance. As for the fact that the per capita foodgrain availability has ac tually decreased over the last 20 years—which happens to be the period of our most rapid economic growth— believe me, that’s just a coincidence.

My fellow citizens, we are building a new India in which our 100 richest people hold as sets worth a full 25 per cent of our GDP. Wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands is always more efficient. You have all heard the saying that too many cooks spoil the broth. We want our beloved billionaires, our a few hundred millionaires, their near- and dearones and their political and business associates, to be prosperous and to live a life of honour and dignity in an environment of peace and goodwill in which their basic rights are protected.

I am aware that my dreams cannot come true by solely using democratic means. In fact, I have come to believe that real democracy flows through the barrel of a gun.This is why we have deployed the Army, the Police, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Pradeshik Armed Constabulary, the Indo Tibetan Border Police, the Eastern Frontier Rifles— as well as the Scorpions, Greyhounds and Cobras––to crush the misguided insurrections that are erupting in our mineral-rich areas.

Our experiments with democracy began in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. Kashmir, I need not reiterate, is an integral part of India. We have deployed more than half a million soldiers to bring democracy to the people there. The Kashmiri youth who have been risking their lives by defying curfew and throwing stones at the police for the last two months are Lashkar-eTaiba militants who actually want employment not azadi. Tragically, 60 of them have lost their lives before we could study their job applications. I have instructed the police from now on to shoot to maim rather than kill these misguided youths.” In his seven years in office, Manmohan Singh has allowed himself to be cast as Sonia Gandhi’s tentative, mild-mannered underling. It’s an excellent disguise for a man who, for the last 20 years, first as finance minister and then as Prime Minister, has powered through a regime of new economic policies that has brought India into the situation in which it finds itself now. This is not to suggest that Manmohan Singh is not an underling. Only that all his orders don’t come from Sonia Gandhi. In his autobiography A Prattler’s Tale, Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, tells his story of how Manmohan Singh rose to power. In 1991, when India’s foreign exchange reserves were dangerously low, the Narasimha Rao government approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an emergency loan. The IMF agreed on two conditions. The first was Structural Adjustment and Economic Reform. The second was the appointment of a Finance Minister of its choice. That man, says Mitra, was Manmohan Singh.

Over the years he has stacked his cabinet and the bureaucracy with people who are evangelically committed to the corporate takeover of everything —water, electricity, minerals, agriculture, land, telecommunications, education and health — no matter what the consequences.

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma, and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The most recent example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongaria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally Rahul Gandhi announced that he was a “soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite ‘giri’—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the “two Indias”— the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections to keep the charade of democracy going, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of win ning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice.To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs —judges, bureaucrats, and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.

(Excerpted from Arundhati Roy’s latest critique of the Indian political system. The full version will be available on DAWN.COM | Home | Latest News, Pakistan, World, Business, Cricket and Multimedia at 11am on Saturday (today).— Special to Dawn

The Trickledown Revolution

 

[SekrutYakhni]

We will die with our fixation! India despite having poor people has achieved a lot. What did we do? Perhaps, nothing. It does not take a day to finish poverty, it takes decades. Pakistanis are keen to point out poverty in India but they forget about their own house. India at least is becoming economically strong! What are we doing? Criticizing everyone?

 

[Kyusuibu Honbu]

A very good article which echoes the same message again.

There is an immediate need for reforms in the agricultural sector.If we make farming a profitable and lucrative occupation,60% of our population will be taken care of.

My Uncle's colleague a retired Bank Manager,who decided to cultivate his village farmland ,despite using effective and efficient methods for irrigation etc,at the end of the day realized in no way its profitable. He suggested a change in the procurement prices might help.

No wonder that from 1990-2001, 8 million farmers quit farming.
And for those it was too late ,they ended up in the farmers suicides statistics.

Once upon a time agarian products were a famous Indian export.

Today however post Industrial revolution era,we are crazy about the services sector.

Europe despite having lesser amount of arable land and required climatic conditions,their agricultural sector output is greater than ours.

European Union- $312 billion
India $210 billion

 

[TextMiner]

It is very important to know of where we are, what challenges we are up against, and most importantly how are we going to overcome them reach our destination (whatever that may be). The Entire Article can be read here. We may loathe Susanna Roy for all we can, but ignoring parts of her subtext would be only at our peril. For me, the most incredulous and touching part was this

Between 2008 and 2009, the ministry of panchayati raj (village administration) commissioned two researchers to write a chapter for a report on the progress of panchayati raj in the country. The chapter is called ‘PESA, Left-Wing Extremism and Governance: Concerns and Challenges in India’s Tribal Districts’. Its authors are Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury. Here are some extracts:

“The Central Land Acquisition Act of 1894 has till date not been amended to bring it in line with the provisions of PESA.... At the moment, this colonial-era law is being widely misused on the ground to forcibly acquire individual and community land for private industry. In several cases, the practice of the state government is to sign high-profile MoUs with corporate houses and then proceed to deploy the Acquisition Act to ostensibly acquire the land for the state industrial corporation. This body then simply leases the land to the private corporation—a complete travesty of the term ‘acquisition for a public purpose’, as sanctioned by the act....

There are cases where the formal resolutions of gram sabhas expressing dissent have been destroyed and substituted by forged documents. What is worse, no action has been taken by the state against concerned officials even after the facts got established. The message is clear and ominous. There is collusion in these deals at numerous levels....

The sale of tribal lands to non-tribals in the Schedule Five areas is prohibited in all these states. However, transfers continue to take place and have become more perceptible in the post-liberalisation era. The principal reasons are—transfer through fraudulent means, unrecorded transfers on the basis of oral transactions, transfers by misrepresentation of facts and mis-stating the purpose, forcible occupation of tribal lands, transfer through illegal marriages, collusive title suits, incorrect recording at the time of the survey, land acquisition process, eviction of encroachments and in the name of exploitation of timber and forest produce and even on the pretext of development of welfarism.”

In their concluding section, they say:

“The Memorandums of Understanding signed by the state governments with industrial houses, including mining companies, should be re-examined in a public exercise, with gram sabhas at the centre of this inquiry.”

Here it is then—not troublesome activists, not the Maoists, but a government report calling for the mining MoUs to be re-examined. What does the government do with this document? How does it respond? On April 24, 2010, at a formal ceremony, the prime minster released the report. Brave of him, you would think. Except, this chapter wasn’t in it. It was dropped.

And what Susanna Roy says is perfectly true

If you pay attention to many of the struggles taking place in India, people are demanding no more than their constitutional rights.

 

[anurag_singh]

A very good article which echoes the same message again.

There is an immediate need for reforms in the agricultural sector.If we make farming a profitable and lucrative occupation,60% of our population will be taken care of.

My Uncle's colleague a retired Bank Manager,who decided to cultivate his village farmland ,despite using effective and efficient methods for irrigation etc,at the end of the day realized in no way its profitable. He suggested a change in the procurement prices might help.

No wonder that from 1990-2001, 8 million farmers quit farming.
And for those it was too late ,they ended up in the farmers suicides statistics.

Once upon a time agarian products were a famous Indian export.

Today however post Industrial revolution era,we are crazy about the services sector.

Europe despite having lesser amount of arable land and required climatic conditions,their agricultural sector output is greater than ours.

European Union- $312 billion
India $210 billion

For agriculture to be profitable their should be a minimum size of land. So for small land holders combined agriculture is a better option but that needs government intervention to make farmer's union. Government should also provide market for farmers to sell their crop on reasonable prices. Government should also introduce insurance policy for farmers in case of draught or flood.

 

[Kyusuibu Honbu]

For agriculture to be profitable their should be a minimum size of land. So for small land holders combined agriculture is a better option but that needs government intervention to make farmer's union. Government should also provide market for farmers to sell their crop on reasonable prices. Government should also introduce insurance policy for farmers in case of draught or flood.

Good idea!

Smaller land means easier and more efficient management.

 

[T-Faz]

During Ayub Khans years, the myth of trickle-down affect was part of our national economic policy. A high number of our populace lived in rural areas and as we are an agriculture based society, many were farmers just as many are today. During his time, Ayub did well overall but shot himself in the foot with this theory, he had suggested that as the upper classes get richer, the poorer will benefit from the increased financial circulation in their respective institutions. The elites were supposed to invest more in various institutions especially our feudal lords and industrialists. They were supposed to increase pay rates, hire more people and overall improve the economic conditions of our poor populace. This did not happen as the rich hogged all the money rather than increasing pay or hiring more people. As a result, we foresaw high levels of economic disparity and this was partly the undoing of Ayubs otherwise good period.

MM Ahmed and his team were very vital in helping Pakistan achieve rapid industrialisation and growth. If only in those days, we elevated the poor rather than making the rich even richer, we would have been much better off.

In this is an important lesson for India, by serving it's poor populace, it would only expand it's middle class and prolong it's economic progress.

 

[mikkix]

It was the Bhutto who nationalizes the institutions..