I have the same view of Gurcharan Das. At a private conf in 2003 in
Baltimore he was one of the key speakers. I was quite appalled about his
optimism and walked out. The then ruling coalition wanted to field him as
a candidate for the next general elections. He was one of those who was
sure all was going well and the incumbent ruling coaltion was going to be
returned to power. The 2004 general elections proved him completely
wrong.
anthony
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Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor
Comparative International Development
University of Washington
1900 Commerce Street
Tacoma, WA 98402, USA
Phone: (253) 692-4462
Fax : (253) 692-5718
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On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Louis Proyect wrote:
ZNet | Corporate Globalization
Globalization and Growing Disparities
by Girish Mishra; July 07, 2006
The present phase of the Washington Consensus-based globalization is now
almost two decade-old. Hence it is not premature to judge what its
protagonists promised and what results have accrued. To begin with,
globalization was to generate a high economic tide that was supposed to lift
all boats, no matter whether they were in developing or developed countries.
As Richard Hornik, an American researcher says, Any transitional pains that
the resulting huge commercial shifts would inevitably cause would be
fleeting. Everything from the expansion of the World Trade Organization and
the European Union, to the reform of government pension systems to force
workers to work longer than originally promised were sold with the same
political snake oil: Take a bit of pain now, politicians and pundits
assured the public from Warsaw to Washington, and well all cross that shiny
bridge to a new prosperity in the 21st century.
After more than one and a half decades, what is the situation? There is
uncertainty everywhere. So far as working class is concerned, no job is safe.
The corporate sector has got unrestrained power to hire and fire. Wherever
the government has not yielded on the demand for flexible labour laws, there
is an intense pressure to bend it. The threat of taking business and
investment elsewhere hangs like Damocles sword. All workers whether blue
collar or white collar, have to continuously worry about tomorrow. They may
be retrenched for no fault of their own because the company wants to reduce
labour costs or wind up the business and go somewhere else. Workers are all
the time unsure about health benefits and pensions and the fate of their
childrens education. With the states social welfare role all the time under
attack and the financial constraints becoming more and more acute, it should
not be surprising if working people become desperate.
Over the years, socio-economic and regional disparities have increased.
The distribution of the benefits of rising rate of economic growth has been
skewed. To quote the UNDPs Annual Report for 2006: Ours is a world of
extremes. The poorest 40 per cent of the world population the 2.5 billion
people who live on less than $2 a day account for five per cent of global
income, while the richest 10 per cent account for 54 per cent. Never before
has the goal of abolishing poverty been within our reach: there are no longer
any insurmountable technical, resource or logistical obstacles to achieving
it. Yet more than 800 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, 1.1
billion people do not have access to clean drinking water and, every hour,
1,200 children die from preventable diseases. Despite a growing world economy
and significant advances in medicine and technology, many people in
developing countries are not reaping the potential benefits of
globalization.
A report in The New York Times (June 28) by its correspondent, Celia W.
Dugger, has this to say: It is no secret that mosquitoes carry the parasite
that causes malaria. More mystifying is why 800,000 young African children
still die of malaria per year more than from any other diseasewhen there
are medicines that cure for 55 cents a dose, mosquito nets that shield a
child for $1 year and indoor insecticide spraying that costs about $10
annually for a household.
The report goes on to add: In Uganda, population 28 million, not one of
the 1.8 million nets approved more than two years ago by the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has yet arrived.
The World Bank, after pledging to halve malaria deaths six years ago,
had let its staff working on the disease dwindle to zero.
A recently published report by the World Bank, entitled Economic Growth
in South Asia, has highlighted the fact that in spite of the overall rate of
economic growth rising and the average incidence of poverty falling
disparities have increased. Obviously, all sections of the society and all
the regions have not shared the gains from economic growth equitably across
South Asia.
Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives and Pakistan have grown on an average
at over 5 per cent per annum while Sri Lanka and Nepal have grown at 4.7 per
cent and 2.5 per cent per annum respectively. The incidence of poverty on an
average has fallen by 9 per cent in Bangladesh, 10 per cent in India, 11 per
cent in Nepal and 6 per cent in Sri Lanka. All these impressive gains pale
into insignificance when one takes into account the fact that as many as 400
million people out of a population of 1.37 billion in the region are below
poverty line. In other words, over 30 per cent people do not get sufficient
income to keep their body and soul together. The report underlines that
Poverty is not just endemic, but increasingly concentrated in particular,
lagging regions. Not only are the regions poor, but their growth are
substantially slower than the better-off regions.
So far as India, the largest country in the region, is concerned; the
increasing economic inequalities in the society and the widening regional
disparities are becoming more and more acute with every passing year. This
poses grave dangers to Indias political and social stability as well as
national integrity. Political turmoil, criminal activities and separatist
tendencies are bound to gain in strength. In turn, they are bound to affect
future economic growth and development adversely. Already, the increasing
Maoist insurgency, rising graph of all kinds of crimes and the tensions
generated by the growing demand for reservation in jobs and educational
institutions by the downtrodden and backward castes are indicating the more
troublesome days ahead if necessary corrective steps are not urgently taken.
One can ignore the following observations by the report at ones peril:
The phrase two Indias exemplifies this difference in regional development
outcomes. In 2002-03, all-India per capita GDP was $480, the poorest seven
states (accounting for 55 per cent of the population) had a per capita GDP
that was two thirds the national average, while in the richest seven states
(33 per cent of the population) per capita GDP was nearly the double that of
the poorest seven states. In the two largest states (Bihar and Uttar Pradesh,
25 per cent of total population) per capita GDP was less than half the
national average and only a third of the richest 7 states. The four southern
states, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamilnadu (21 per cent of the
total population), at an average, enjoyed more than twice the GDP per capita
of the quarter of the population concentrated in the two poorest northern
states.
Furthermore, with average GDP growth rates of 5 per cent, the southern
states are galloping ahead of the poorest but populous northern states with
growth rates of only 2 per cent. This threatens to further increase the
poverty gap in the two regions, currently, head count poverty in the poorest
northern states and the better off southern states is 35 per cent and 18 per
cent respectively.
This report by Shantayanan Devarajan and Ijaz Nabi has unambiguously
warned about the dangers looming large on the horizon: rising inequality in
the wake of market-oriented pro-growth policies could elicit a backlash
against these policies, sometimes leading to distortionary policies that slow
growth
if inequality between regions rise above a certain threshold, it can
trigger a violent conflict which, in turn, can lead to decades of reduced
growth.
It was not without much thinking that founding fathers of modern India
time and again emphasized the importance of removing social and economic
inequalities and reducing regional disparities. All the plan documents
underlined them and economic policies and programmes were judged from this
angle. It is only after the beginning of the economic reforms inspired by the
Washington consensus that these two important objectives have been almost
discarded and a drumbeater of the Washington consensus like Gurcharan Das in
his article The India Model (Foreign Affairs, July-August 2006) has the
audacity to accuse Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi of shackling the
energies of the Indian people under a mixed economy that combined the worst
features of capitalism and socialism. Das seems to be so heavily doped by
his ideological masters that he forgets what has happened to Pakistan that
unquestionably followed the American dictates. It got split into two and
could never have even a modicum of democracy. India, in spite of all the
diversity, has been able to preserve its territorial integrity and democratic
institutions. Mr. Das, please look at the backyard of the USA, i.e., Latin
America, where democracy and independent economic development have begun
prospering only after discarding the Washington consensus. Lies and
distortions must be given up if one genuinely wants to debate and convince.
Girish Mishra
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
