India’s initiative to study the global benchmarks for water trading indicates that the NITI Aayog, as a national body of planning, has decided to continue with its neoliberalist stand and strengthen it further. 

If this comes into effect, though it is a national resource, water will be sold like gold and silver. As NITI Aayog Looks into Water Trading, it Should Know the High Costs it May Bring (thewire.in) 

Since the idea is directly concerned with property rights, the foremost challenge is how the legitimisation of monopolisation and exploitation of water and water resources will be justified in prevailing constitutional settings. How will the principles of equality and rights over water as a property be defined for water markets? Once water becomes a commodity for trade, a disturbing question will be what can be a ‘comfortable’ price of water for the poor and middle classes.

For a country like India, this idea also presents a challenge to equity. Instead of fighting for water for all, it encourages more water to the price payers. 

As the purpose of trade is to increase private surplus value, the worry is how the government will control the exploitation of groundwater. The NITI Aayog cannot afford to avoid the fact that big farmers and industrialists can collect excess amounts of water by investing in water trading. To ensure more water, they can establish water plants in plain lands and extract groundwater excessively by using advanced technology, as Nestlé is currently doing.

by Deepti Acharya

17/02/2023

Responding to a question by Communist Party of India MP K. Subbarayan in Lok Sabha on February 13, 2023, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that the Indian Council of Historical Research, a body under the Union education ministry, has not taken up any project to rewrite history and it is only working on filling the “gaps” in history.

How the ICHR Is 'Inventing History' Under the Modi Government (thewire.in)

In response, Congress MP Manish Tiwari pointed out in a supplementary question that Pradhan’s claim was in contradiction to the statements made by the council which is continuously and publicly boasting of ‘rewriting history’.

Professor Harbans Mukhia is an Indian historian who taught for a long time at the Jawaharlal Nehru University until his retirement in 2004. His work focuses on medieval India and he has written several books on Indian history and the medieval period.

When asked about the exhibition and the statement of the member secretary of the ICHR, Mukhia said, “They are taking us back to where James Mills left us in 1818…”

“Historiography has always been changing, but what is happening now is completely different. In the years succeeding 1947, history penned before independence was ‘decolonised’. Now, it is being ‘recolonised’ but they have no axis. To be honest, even graduation students do not talk of rulers as being Hindus or Muslims,” Mukhia said.

by Meenakshi Tewari

18/02/2023

Girish Kuber writes: Election Commission’s endorsement of Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena may hurt the BJP more than it helps https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/election-commission-eknath-shinde-shiv-sena-thackeray-symbol-row-8454944 Eknath Shinde and his faction may well end up as an albatross around BJP's neck: EC's decision could unite Opposition further, increase rifts within the ruling faction

Boston Review on the Welfare State

.. since the 1970s...  Republican calls for benefit cuts, Democrats have generally mounted at best a tepid technocratic defense.  ( The Frozen Politics of Social Security by James G. Chappel https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-frozen-politics-of-social-security/ The tone of exhausted pragmatism—even among friends of the program—is counterproductive. It is beyond time to fight fire with fire.)

..In  1797.., Paine laid out a scheme in which taxes on land and wealth would be used to fund old-age pensions and a one-time grant to all citizens upon reaching adulthood. For Paine, social insurance was not a question of charity but of right: since ownership of land deprived people of their common inheritance—the earth itself—justice demands that a portion of the rents that flow to property owners be redistributed to everyone. ( Common Property by Elizabeth Anderson..https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/elizabeth-anderson-social-insurance-thomas-paine-friedrich-hayek/  .. How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism.. Conservative criticisms of social insurance reflect profound misapprehensions of its relation to private property. Social insurance, in both theory and practice, arose in defense of private property and against communist and socialist threats. Exploring these origins is essential now because they contain important lessons that will help us strengthen social insurance to meet the challenges of post-industrial capitalism. The rich prefer that programs be funded from wages rather than rents, so that workers shoulder the costs. (Despite appearances, in the United States the cost of the employer’s contribution to Social Security and Medicare falls mainly on workers.) Funding benefits with wages poses a formidable political obstacle to diversion of revenues away from workers to other priorities. Benefits graded to contributions are also popular because low, flat benefits are too minimal to appeal to the middle classes, who can self-insure at the low levels promised. ..robust and universal social insurance is a constitutive feature of a sound economy based on private property and markets, not a threat to it. ..Capitalism .. has .. engaged in massive property innovation, including the creation of corporate stock, intellectual property, rights to the broadcast spectrum, and many types of derivatives. In constantly redefining property, capitalism has always engaged in redistribution. )

Comment: In India.. the so called liberatisation of pension and PF funds, seem to have ended in the changing of the pension scheme itself,  as welfare then turns to proximate "revdis" that yield better political dividends that assure security system, which become "rights".  

The Adani affair: Collapse of regulatory structures People's Commission on Public Sector and Public Service - Statement  10.02.2023
Extracts:   SEBI’s own “investigations” into the use of shell companies has been going on for almost two years without any tangible progress. This is indeed serious because it reflects at best either lethargy, carelessness and dereliction of basic regulatory duties, or, at worst, a permissive regulatory regime that encourages cronyism.

Recent media reports reveal that the authorities in Mauritius have been in touch with SEBI, indicating that SEBI may well know or may have already been in the know about the true identities of “beneficial owners” in entities that own shares of the Adani companies.

Answering a Rajya Sabha Question on shell companies on February 6, 2018, the Corporate Affairs Minister stated “The Companies Act, 2013 does not define the term Shell Company. In effect, the Union Government, by conceding that it has no laws to check the abuse of shell companies, has accepted that it has no interest in establishing structures that promote transparency in markets that ensure that the identities of the true beneficial owners of companies are visible to all instead of hiding behind opaque walls.

To make matter worse, the Government’s decision of August 2022, deciding to allow Indian corporate entities to invest in foreign locations, provides ample scope for Indian entities to use shell companies located in tax havens to indulge in round tripping, a mechanism that enables the rerouting of black money into the Indian economy. The decision also permitted domestic entities to make overseas investments, even if they were under investigation by any investigative agency or regulatory authority, a provision that opened the overseas doors for tainted individuals and companies to continue with round tripping. This raises concerns about the motives underlying the decision

The Adani fiasco highlights the futility of the government’s reliance on private global champions to power the Indian economy. Moreover, such a misplaced reliance necessarily rests on a culture of “cronyism”, while holding back the potential of publicly-owned Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSE).

There is widespread apprehension that many corporate entities appear to be operating through a multi-layered and complex web of shell companies set up in tax haven jurisdictions. This has the effect of creating a shadow economy, which enables them to not only evade taxes in India, but to manipulate markets, pass on funds to political parties through opaque vehicles such as Electoral Bonds, and mock at regulatory norms. The power to influence the political executive to adopt policies and laws that promote their own interests, and to the overall detriment of the public interest, is simply unacceptable to a functioning democracy.

Rajni Bakshi writes: The importance of George Soros’s Open Society – for India and the world   https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/george-soros-indian-democracy-modi-remarks-open-society-8454825/  Rajni Bakshi February 19, 2023
George Soros’ personal history is itself proof that the most serious contest of our time is not between the 'right' and the 'left' or capitalism and communism. It was between open and closed societies
 Soros did not stop at seeing repressive communist regimes as enemies of an open society. By the mid-1990s, Soros began speaking out against what he called “market fundamentalism”. He reformulated his understanding of open society when he realised that excessive individualism and lack of social cohesion are as dangerous as excessive state control. While Popper had limited himself to critiquing communism, Soros used his knowledge as a leading market player to bust myths about the “free market”.

Market fundamentalism, he argued, is a mindset which reduces virtually all human interactions to transactional, contract-based relationships that must be valued in terms of a single common denominator — money.

Many other voices, both in the West and East, helped to puncture “market fundamentalism”. They argued that when free market ideology is treated as an ultimate truth this destroys social good and eventually undermines an open society by insisting that “There Are No Alternatives”, commonly known as the TINA effect.

This is why, in India today, the division between “left” and “right” is unhelpful to grasp what is most urgently at stake.

open society is hanging by a thread. In India, this is a strong thread because, until recently, living with differences came naturally to us. And, however distracted we may be by the controversy of the day, old mental habits cannot evaporate so easily. We know that reality is made up of competing, sometimes contradictory, yet co-existing truths. Open society lives on as long as this is the anchor for a large enough number of people and they dare to speak out.

For full speech of Soros: https://www.georgesoros.com/2023/02/16/remarks-delivered-at-the-2023-munich-security-conference/

What degree of dominance do India’s biggest businesses enjoy? Decoding the Billionaire Raj TN NINAN 18 February, 2023   https://theprint.in/opinion/what-degree-of-dominance-do-indias-biggest-businesses-enjoy-decoding-the-billionaire-raj/1380898/ The rise of multi-business conglomerates stands in contrast to the earlier rise of focussed, single-business enterprises in telecom, IT services, pharmaceuticals, and automobiles.

Modi Claims 2004 to 2014 Was India's ‘Lost Decade’. Is That True?  https://thewire.in/economy/modi-claims-india-saw-a-lost-decade-between-2004-and-14-is-that-true Santosh Mehrotra

1. The so-called lost decade saw the creation of 7.5 million (75 lakh) jobs in the non-farm sector annually; the 2013-19 period saw only 2.9 mn (29 lakh) non-farm jobs created until 2019 (before COVID-19) (based on government PLFS data). It fell to even less after COVID-19.

2. Youth unemployment has tripled or at least doubled before, and even after, COVID-19, compared to the UPA period.

3. Real wages rose during the so-called ‘lost decade’ (despite higher inflation), they fell in recent years (according to PLFS data).

4. The number of poor fell sharply during this earlier period, and has risen in recent years.

योगी के 'इस्तीफे' पर अड़ा पूरा देश? बुलडोजर खिलाफ टूट पड़े लोग! | PM Modi | CM Yogi | Godi Media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka4mWaIZcrg 

Mother-Daughter Dies during bulldozer action in UP's Kanpur, Congress stages protests in Lucknow Yashwant Bhaskar Feb 15, 2023  https://zeenews.india.com/video/india/mother-daughter-dies-during-bulldozer-action-in-kanpur-congress-protests-in-lucknow-hindi-news-2573505.html
A heart-wrenching case has come to the fore in the Kanpur countryside of Uttar Pradesh. A fire broke out during the bulldozer action on the hut, in which the mother and daughter died. Congress party is protesting in Lucknow against this incident.

Eviction, yet another weaponised tool of the state in New India https://sabrangindia.in/article/eviction-yet-another-weaponised-tool-state-new-india MP, UP, Uttarakhand and Assam continue ‘Bulldozer action’ Tanya Arora 14 Jan 2023

अडानी मामले में आया नया मोड़! सारे भाजपाइयों के उड़े होश! जल्दी देखिए। https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2EhPVJcgro HNP NEWS 19 Feb 2023 Youth Congress Rally