Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Corporate Globalization and Conflict in New India

By Graham Peebles

Dissident Voice / October 19th, 2013

Developing divisions
Participation is a cornerstone of the democratic ideal. It sits alongside those other marginalized tenets: social justice, freedom, and equality. Forgotten principles in a world of corporate politics driven by the quest for endless economic growth and maximum market share. Hailed as the world’s largest democracy and touted as ‘an emerging economic powerhouse’, India’s economy is beginning to cough and splutter with the rupee trading at an all time low, and the ‘current account’ showing an $88 billion deficit.
A decade of 9% growth has created 55 US$ billionaires, a new and burgeoning middle class and a vast underclass of people living in extreme poverty. The middle class has doubled since 2001, growing from 6% to 13% (amounting to around 153 million). Yet inequality stalks the land: in the cities with their sprawling, overcrowded slums alongside the new high-rise designer boutiques and between desperately poor rural communities and urban dwellers. There is inequality within inequality, as government definitions of what constitutes poverty are re-imagined to exclude great swaths of people in need.
India’s economic growth, (neatly tied together with government corruption and neglect) has been fuelled by a toxic cocktail of elements that includes: twenty years of market liberalisation, land grabbing and mineral extraction, the privatization of water supplies and extensive dam building. Millions of mainly Adivasi (indigenous), who make up 9% of the population and Dalits (so-called untouchables) have been displaced by a range of enormous infrastructure projects, most notably the corporate takeover of the countryside, which has seen subsidies to small holder farmers scrapped, access to credit made all but impossible, the Indian market opened up to foreign multi-nationals, and a plethora of state incentives provided to Indian corporations. The selection box of socially unjust, government policies have been promoted “in the name of the poor, but [are] really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy”, Arundhati Roy states in Democracy’s Failing Light (DFL). They are driving a rupee rich wedge between the elite, the aspiring elite, and the millions in poverty, causing divisions to deepen, resentments to grow, and tensions to strengthen. The most acute sign of the community carnage being inflicted on the poor is (perhaps) the plague of farmer suicides. Drowning in debt and despair, farmers are committing suicide at the unimaginable rate of one every 30 minutes, with around 250,000 taking their own lives between 1995 and 2009 alone.

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