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By Aseem Shrivastava "Globalisation is really the best way to lift millions of people out of poverty because it increases trade; it increases job creation. It's a positive force." --Nandan Nilekani, CEO Infosys, Interview with San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 2004 .  
"Globalisation creates growth by destruction of the environment and of local livelihoods. It therefore creates poverty instead of removing it. The new globalisation policies have accelerated and expanded environmental destruction and displaced millions of people from their homes and their sustenance base."
-- Vandana Shiva, Scientist and environmental expert
Resurgence, June 1997 It has become a clichAc to say that there are two countries, India and Bharat. And yet, it is a truth whose full significance is being experienced and digested only as the multifarious processes of a globalised capitalist economy unfold in the two countries. The two countries breathe differently, inhaling quite distinct vapours, living off markedly different diets, wearing clothes of different materials, moving in different modes of transport which are each heading for different destinations, and so on. The cleavage between the two continues to grow with each passing year of rapid growth. And yet the two countries are joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, one overfed ("mall-nourished"?) in virtually the same degree to which the other is malnourished. The overfed one cannot last a day without the labours of the malnourished one. In turn, the malnourished one waits each day in anguish to feed off the crumbs spared by the overfed one. And the twins are placed together with breathing masks in an incubator called globalisation, which in turn needs the twins in different ways to maintain its own temperature. In fact, as we will see, it needs many such twins elsewhere on the planet, incubated in similar fashion. This is how our predicament can be summed up today. For over four decades India followed a set of policies inspired by the Soviet economic model. The Soviet Union, just so memory does not deceive us, recorded historically unprecedented rates of economic growth during the 1930s and 1940s, using a model of socialist planning. Nehru and his planners took inspiration from this success to design a policy-framework suited to a democratic, multicultural society like India. Massive public investments were made in heavy industry, energy, transport, irrigation and other infrastructure to set the ball rolling for economic growth and development to happen. After four decades there were notable successes - most crucially the fact that the country became self-sufficient in foodgrains by the early-1980s and created the foundations for industrial growth. However, the neta-babu class held the reins of economic growth through the license-permit raj. There was frustration for Indian businesses, made vocal by the time Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1984, promising to "take India into the 21st century". In the summer of 1991 India suffered a severe crisis in its external accounts, having only enough foreign exchange to pay for a few weeks of critical imports. The policy-making elite took the opportunity to change course radically, accepted a big loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, threw out both the good and (only some of) the bad features of the erstwhile policy-framework, and launched a whole new set of measures across the board to guide the destiny of the Indian economy on to uncharted waters. International trade was liberalised, many industries and services were privatised, fiscal and monetary policies were made more deflationary and restrictive, in line with the IMF prescription of a 'free-market economy' left to its own devices by a non-interfering government. This has been the biggest shift of policy in India since independence in 1947. If the Indian policy-making elite felt after 1991 that the best chance of lifting millions out of poverty was to hitch the Indian economy hook, line and sinker to the ship of global capitalism, it becomes crucial for us to examine whether the goals of global capitalism (which includes Indian big business) are compatible with the objective of ending poverty, malnourishment and hunger, and of ushering in economic development. If we are to make any sense of the increasingly chaotic world around us, it is crucial to understand who and what globalisation was meant for. It is vital to note, in particular, that regardless of official rhetoric, it was not conceived for the poor of the world. In actual fact, it was launched in order to consolidate and expand the global capitalist system. Aseem Shrivastava has a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He taught Economics at universities in India and the US for many years and most recently taught Philosophy at Nordic College, Norway. He writes on issues of contemporary concern (globalisation, US foreign policy etc) for a number of magazines and websites, including Outlook, Z and Counterpunch. InfoChange News & Features, January 2007 |
