What happened to India’s economic miracle? Patience, wrote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, is a “minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue”. The economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze quote Bierce in their new book on the Indian economy, An Uncertain Glory: India has seen a lot of this alleged virtue. There has been an extraordinary tolerance of inequalities, stratification and caste divisions . . . There has been the silent resignation of Indian women. There has been patient endurance of the lack of accountability and the proliferation of corruption. And – of course – there has been adaptive submission by the underdogs of society to continuing misery, exploitation and indignity. An Uncertain Glory is a major work by two of the world’s most perceptive and intelligent India-watchers writing today. Sen is among the greatest minds of our time. His co-writer, Drèze, though lesser known in this country, is also a celebrated development economist.
Some of this continues today. This is the most shocking part of the book. Capitalism: A Ghost Story | Arundhati Roy. Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.” Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. But Gush-Up certainly has. The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla.
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have. A whole spectrum of corruption A. But the Litfest gave us our Aha! We Call This Progress by Arundhati Roy. From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion. Image of a coal mine in Dhanbad, India from Wikimedia Commons I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past.
I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Today, as we speak, the U.S., and perhaps China and India, are involved in a battle for control of the resources of Africa.
America has taken democracy into the workshop and hollowed it out. Since 1947, ever since India became a sovereign republic, it has deployed its army against what it calls its own people. Impunity in India by Shubh Mathur. Major Avtar Singh of the Indian Army’s counterinsurgency in Kashmir killed dozens. India refused to punish him. So did Canada and the U.S., where he killed his family and committed suicide. Image from Flickr via Austin Yoder On Saturday June 9, 2012, Major Avtar Singh, formerly of the Indian Army and living in Selma, California, shot his wife and three children. The execution-style gunshots to the head were identical to those which killed Major Singh’s most famous victim, the Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi.
The Death of a Lawyer Jalil Andrabi was a Kashmiri human rights lawyer who dared to challenge the army in the early 1990s as Indian forces fought a pro-independence insurgency. Andrabi went on to describe the absolute powers given to the Indian military by laws like the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and J&K Disturbed Areas Act. The killing of Jalil Andrabi was staged as a public spectacle.
The Nightingale. India's Economy: Expect Reforms. Economic Reform in India: Expect Political Backlash. Center for India and South Asia :: Exploring the lives and perceptions of call center agents in India.
Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India - 06 - 2012. Department of Anthropology and Department of Geography and Environment public lecture Date: Monday 11 June 2012 Time: 6.30-8pm Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building Speaker: Professor Akhil Gupta Sixty years after liberation from colonial rule, why has the Indian state been unable to eradicate extreme poverty? Although poverty rates have been falling sharply in the last twenty five years, almost a quarter of the Indian population still lives in conditions that can only be described as inhumane. How does one conceptualize the violence of poverty? Akhil Gupta is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA. Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEgupta This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Media queries: please contact the Press Office if you would like to reserve a press seat or have a media query about this event, email pressoffice@lse.ac.uk| Twitter and Facebook Accessibility.
India: dynasty, corruption and plunder. The Government of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Chief Mr. A P Singh on February 13, 2012 has acknowledged that Indians are the largest depositors of illegal money in banks abroad. With an estimated $500 billion, close to $ 40 billion in lost revenue, the money has been hoarded in tax havens. The colossal amount of money has been extorted out of the sweat, blood and tears of the metaphoric ’99 per cent’ of Indians. In his magnum opus Discovery of India(1946),the first prime minister of free India Jawahar Lal Nehru expressed his own anguish in detail about the corruption prevailing during British Rule.
According to Nehru, ’loot’ (plunder) was the only objective of early British India colonials. The teeming millions of India were awfully poor and growing poorer while the microscopic minority was prospering under colonial rule. In 1950, A.D.Gorwala’s report observed that quite a few of Nehru's own ministers were corrupt. Satyajit Das: The Great Pretender – India’s Economic Past & Future, Part 1: “India Shining”
By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011). Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, optimists hoped that the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) would drive the global economic engine. But China’s economic growth has slowed to its lowest rate in three years. Brazil’s economic growth has fallen from around 7.5% to under 3%. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on oil and energy prices. India also has stalled. Despite the world and its citizens earnest desires, India seems destined to never fulfil its economic potential.
Hindu Growth… In the 30 years following independence, India achieved a modest rate of economic growth of 3-4% per annum and incomes improved by 1-2% each year. India’s poor economic performance was not driven by religious factors but the half-baked socialist policies of its leaders. The Indian economy was closed to the world. Mr. Satyajit Das: The Great Pretender – India’s Economic Past & Future, Part 2: “A Sea of Troubles”
By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011). Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, optimists hoped that the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) would drive the global economic engine. But China’s economic growth has slowed to its lowest rate in three years. Brazil’s economic growth has fallen from around 7.5% to under 3%. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on oil and energy prices. India also has stalled. This 3-part paper looks at the development and future trajectory of the “I” in the “BRIC”. In late 2011, the Indian government’s 12th five-year plan forecast growth of 9% between 2012 and 2017.
Elements of the “India Shining” story remain intact – the demographics of a youthful population, the large domestic demand base and the high savings rate. Public Troubles… The use of additional fiscal stimulus to restore growth is questionable. Foreign Troubles… India’s Economic Past & Future, Part 3: Political Atrophy. By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011).
Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, optimists hoped that the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) would drive the global economic engine. But China’s economic growth has slowed to its lowest rate in three years. Brazil’s economic growth has fallen from around 7.5% to under 3%. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on oil and energy prices. India also has stalled. India’s growth has slowed to around 6%, high by the standards of developed countries but well below the levels required to maintain economic momentum and improve the living standards of its citizens. Corruption Capital … Petty corruption by poorly paid local officials has been common in India for decades. Commentators now compare some Indian businessmen to 19th-century American robber-barons.
The problem involves both businesses and politicians. India's Broken Promise. India's political and business elites have long harbored a desire for their country to become a great power. They cheered when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finalized a nuclear deal with the United States in 2008. Indian elites saw the deal, which gave India access to nuclear technology despite its refusal to give up its nuclear weapons or sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as a recognition of its growing influence and power. And Indian elites were also encouraged when U.S. President Barack Obama announced, during a 2010 visit to India, that the United States would support India's quest to gain permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council, which would put the country on an equal footing with its longtime rival, China. In recent years, such sentiments have also spread to large segments of the Indian middle class, which, owing to the country's remarkable economic growth in the past two decades, now numbers around 300 million.
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India - curators... What will India look like in 2025? What will India, and the other South Asian countries, look like in 2025? There are two contrasting views on this, the optimistic and the pessimistic. The optimistic outlook is that India will achieve double-digit growth rates (Buiter and Rahbari 2011). South Asia too will experience strong growth, primarily due to India. The pessimistic outlook is that growth will be derailed by many transformational challenges the region faces. Which of these two outlooks will prevail?
The optimistic outlook is based on the favourable structural trends including improved governance, the demographic dividend, the rise of the middle class, and the new faces of globalisation. All countries in the region have an elected government for the first time since independence. While China’s spectacular growth has already benefitted from demographic dividend, India is yet to do so (Figure 1). A massive shift towards a middle class society is already in the making. Figure 1. Table 1. Source: Kharas (2011) Figure 2. The great land grab: India's war on farmers. Land is life. It is the basis of livelihoods for peasants and indigenous people across the Third World and is also becoming the most vital asset in the global economy. As the resource demands of globalisation increase, land has emerged as a key source of conflict.
In India, 65 per cent of people are dependent on land. At the same time a global economy, driven by speculative finance and limitless consumerism, wants the land for mining and for industry, for towns, highways, and biofuel plantations. The speculative economy of global finance is hundreds of times larger than the value of real goods and services produced in the world. Financial capital is hungry for investments and returns on investments. Land, for most people in the world, is Terra Madre, Mother Earth, Bhoomi, Dharti Ma.
Colonisation was based on the violent takeover of land. India's land issues The World Bank has worked for many years to commodify land. Violation of the land.