by Santhosh Chandrashekar
Daily Lobo columnist
India's economic boom continues unhindered.
Together with China, it is emerging as the most important nation that will keep the economic wheel spinning at a time when the developed world slows down to re-examine what capitalism-led economic reforms have done to its human capital and social well-being.
The growth of India has been indeed phenomenal. The Forbes magazine noted this year that India has the highest number of billionaires in Asia -- 36 -- exceeding the 24 billionaires in Japan. Together, the Indian billionaires hold among themselves assets worth $191 billion.
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While this growth is laudable, there is another India, or Bharat for some, which escapes attention. India's unquestioned acceptance of neoliberal policies and the resultant prosperity has largely bypassed the nation's poor --- a reaffirmation of the trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
India's agrarian crisis has successfully dismantled the rural infrastructure and hastened the migration of those dependent on farming to cities in search of jobs.
The migration of the rural poor to cities in search of jobs has created frequent skirmishes between city dwellers and migrants of different economic, social and cultural backgrounds. Another problem is the packaging of these issues as cultural conflicts without looking at the economic crisis that is driving this antagonism.
India's agricultural crisis continues to aggravate and the economic reforms initiated in 1991 under the P.V. Narasimha Rao government and accentuated under the NDA government led by A.B. Vajpayee have eroded the agricultural infrastructure of India. The current UPA government led by Manmohan Singh has been of little help, a fact made obvious by the heightening plight of cotton farmers in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.
Another worrisome aspect of India's economic growth is that it is mainly led by the service sector, particularly IT and IT-enabled services, in which the country has emerged as a force to be reckoned with. But this also raises the question of sustainability of growth in this sector. While agriculture has been systematically altered to meet the dictates of neoliberal policies, the secondary sector has also experienced a steady setback with the major growth being realized in what academician David Harvey calls as FIRE: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. With these sectors emerging as the major areas of growth in the future, a prominent feature of all neoliberal economies, India's embracing of the free market is almost complete.
But what is alarming is the set trajectory of India's economic growth, with most of it being realized in areas that are driving the world economic order. The rise of information technology as an integral tool through which economic growth is managed, the steady abandonment of agriculture for corporate takeover, the ignoring of the industrial sector and increased dependence on export-oriented growth - all features conducive to and dictated by Western economic forces - places India in a peculiar position and intertwines its well-being excessively with global economic conditions.
This dependency, though desirable as it promotes global harmony, may place India in the hands of dominant economic forces that have a vested interest in promoting the global integration of economies.
The fear that globalization is the next phase of capitalist expansion is not totally unfounded. While India needs to be a part of the global economic apparatus, allowing the latter to control it excessively would hurt its interest. The only way out would be to create a self-sufficient India, a condition almost impossible if the primary and secondary sector continue to be kept out of the policy makers' priorities.
