Q10 Development and Vision of India
degrowth recall the idea of a wider reconfiguration of the objectives of politics in a well-being society?
the perspective of degrowth imply also the need for a deep reform of the institutions and of the democratic forms of participation
the impact of our technologies and production processes, our standards of consumption, demographic transformations, and thus evaluations of risk, of self-limitation, and of the responsible assumption of intergenerational duties, impose themselves as crucial aspects of a political rethink.
the emancipatory role played by free economic initiative in the construction of political democracy cannot be denied
the present crisis of democracy can be read as the crisis of the centrality of the traditional political sphere and of the prerogatives of the State in its capacity to govern society and economy. We are not in front of differentiated systems, where everyone functions autonomously, but in front of a more and more ambiguous and rampant interpenetration between economic interests and political decisions
In the current scenario, there are therefore a series of ‘‘hybrid figures’’ that move between the economic and the political sphere in a supranational space with a power that rivals that of many state actors and institutions [8].
Whose idea of development is it anyway? Smriti Gupta and Sohinee Thakurta Apr 04, 2022 https://www.villagesquare.in/whose-idea-of-development-is-it-anyway/
For two development professionals: ‘white man’s burden’ is still visible in the ongoing efforts for the upliftment of the marginalised. as development professionals, we have observed numerous instances of development being forced on people; supposedly because they do not know what is best for them.
For the government, it is only a village that got displaced. It’s a cost-benefit assessment, where the benefits significantly outweigh the cost of displacement. However, the long intergenerational trauma caused by displacement is ignored. It is essential to consult and carefully listen to those for whom the developmental effort is meant. It is the responsibility of those in power to give voice to the voiceless. To perceive what they signal and enable them to speak by creating appropriate spaces.
Recently, I started reading Raghuram Rajan‘s ‘The Third Pillar’, in which he brilliantly describes the critical role of community in a nation and how the state and markets do not give much importance to it. I could not help but circumspect those 3 pillars from the perspective of our country, where the state and markets have become powerful by oppressing the community.
A country consists of state, markets and community – the people. If we consider the case of India, the pandemic throws a shaft of light on the excruciating pain that our community is in due to flagrant policies, constant neglect by the atrocious state, and gluttonous markets which fund the political parties and get benefits from state in form of policy formation which suits their business interests.
Let’s first look at how the government neglected its people. First of all, the government did not fail; you only fail when you at least try. Going by their horrendous policies, they have actually succeeded in crushing the backbone of people economically, socially and politically.
During March 2020, the government announced a harsh lockdown with just a 4-hour notice period and crores of migrant laborers felt the brunt of the consequences of that unplanned decision. The government left them on the streets and a lot of them had to walk barefoot for thousands of kilometers without a penny in their pockets and food in their bellies. As if this was not enough, migrant laborers had to face the wrath of lathicharge by the police. After criticism and questioning from online media (as mainstream media was busy giving a communal angle to the Tablighi jamat case), the government started shramik trains and then there were issues regarding fares and trains deflecting, amidst which many died in trains without food and water. In the parliament, the government said that it did not have any data on deaths of migrant workers. After such atrocities, the shameless government denied even compensation for the workers who were murdered by government apathy.
Even the middle class has not been untouched by the wrong policies of the government. Our economy, which was already crippling and crumbling due to demonetization and GST, took a devastating blow due to the unplanned lockdown. A report by Aziz Premji Institute stated that 230 million Indians fell into poverty and the government’s response to it was a hollow rhetoric of Atmanirbhar. It neither gave income support to people in the form of direct income transfer nor gave any relief in income tax and GST.
Economically devastated people had to face the second wave of Covid or rather we should say had to bear the wrath of the government which does not care. From people gasping for oxygen to bodies floating in the Ganga, such was the dystopia we went through due to negligence by people in power. In the ongoing monsoon session of the parliament, the government has said that nobody died due to the lack of oxygen, implying that Indian lives do not matter at all to them.
With job losses and declining income, we are crushed by the soaring inflation due to high fuel prices. We can be sure that this would not be the end of our pain. By looking at their policies, it looks like policymakers have taken an oath to crush common people in every possible way, from poverty to healthcare facilities. Every section of our society, be it workers, farmers, middle class, students, activists or journalists, have felt and are still feeling the brunt of a government that only wants to hurt people.
Now, let’s move on to the accomplice in apathy- capitalistic markets. The fact that India Inc.’s profit to GDP ratio is at 4 year high of 2.6 % and Indian billionaires’ wealth increased by 35 % during the lockdown while 230 million Indians fell into poverty summarizes the two extreme points of reality of heaven and hell in the same country. The rich made profit on the backs of the stressed and overworked working class by firing, cutting salaries and slashing bonuses. Corporates donated generously to political parties (the ruling party of BJP in 2019-2020 got Rs 750 crores in donation money, five times of the Congress- the main opposition party) and as result they got reduction in corporate taxes. The fiscal burden was put on common people as GST has increased government reliance on India’s indirect taxes, which is hurting the poor and middle class of country. In addition to all these, the government catered them new labor codes, farm laws and diluted environmental laws which will help the capitalists grow rich while creating inequalities and putting our environment in danger. People are suffering at the hands of the private sector in education and health too as with dropping incomes they are unable to pay fees. These are consequences of low budgets in public education and health, and not just an immediate effect of economic distress. Neo liberal economists and market oriented policy pundits celebrate these facts as factors inducing growth. They have not only normalized but glamourized this modern slavery by corporates and governments.
It seems people in power are annihilating us on all fronts of life, from economic to political. This dystopia in which we are suffocating can never be forgotten; the images from walking workers to dying patients gasping for breath should always remind us that democracy cannot be taken for granted. If someone denies it we must fight for it and snatch it from them. Though the recent farmers protest gives a glimmer of hope, we will need a larger representation of various sections of society to turn protests into a larger movement. We need to overcome our religious, cultural and linguistic differences in order to form a strong united front against wrong policies. Our mindset, which criticizes being political, should change if we want to defeat fascist capitalist forces who use political platforms to crush our freedom and rights.
Sonit Surana is an undergrad student pursuing engineering from Howrah, West Bengal. He likes to extensively read and write on socio-political issues. He also writes poetry and believes in using art as a mirror to reflect truth to society.
Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society - Webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmA1rIFKBGU Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung India Jan 27, 2022 Rajni Bakshi , (Journalist/Writer), Kanchi Kohli, (Senior Researcher @Centre for Policy Research), Dolly Kikon, (Anthropologist @University of Melbourne)
Dossier - Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society, bringing together different approaches and perspectives to infrastructure development in India. https://in.boell.org/en/investigating-infrastructure-ecology-sustainability-and-society
Project potential and sustainability is in question. In the public debate are the extreme and unviable forms of infrastructure financing with a dependence on controversial models such as public-private partnerships. Then, there is a critique of the enormous scale and the extreme ‘kind’ of capitalist production and consumption promoted by ‘big-infra’ as ‘race to the bottom’. The elitist top-down politics in the planning and governance of massive projects has been known to sideline democratic local processes. There is fear of regulatory dismantling and harmonization of policies and of technological ‘lock-ins’. Not in adequate focus, and thus increasingly given short shrift are land, livelihoods, environmental and social impacts. Local concerns over these now plague India’s infrastructure landscape resulting in project disruptions and disputes.
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For an alternative paradigm of development https://in.boell.org/en/2019/02/25/alternative-paradigm-development By Rajni Bakshi 25 February 2019 In terms of tangible steps forward, perhaps, the most notable one is to make regeneration of local economies the cornerstone of Sarvodaya.
The emerging discourse on ‘Degrowth’ calls for a new framework in which the emphasis shifts from gross domestic product (GDP) to that which generates actual social, material and ecological well-being. It also prioritises the values of sufficiency and subsistence rather than equating development with the fulfilment of endless wants.
Degrowth or re-growth has broadly five dimensions:
Development is equated with actual well-being, not just throughput of materials
Steady-state economics are prioritised, instead of systems in which growth is a survival imperative
The aim is to foster a solidarity economy through sharing and cooperation so that the same resources can serve far more people
Consumption is reconfigured to make more judicious use of resources with social pressure and laws to discourage or prevent business models based on planned obsolescence. Instead products are designed to last and be reused.
Value is redefined so that the value of anything is not just what it is worth to a potential buyer in monetary terms, but rather in terms of the actual well-being it generates immediately as well as in the long term.
The Extractive Circuit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-extractive-circuit-singh-chaudhary
An exhausted planet at the end of growth Lead article in the Baffler issues "The squandering Earth".
accumulation-crazed multinationals ransack the planet for profit, making us all feel like used-up bottles of stuff while they amass exponentially more indestructible bottles of stuff. This waste-producing apparatus is vast, Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in “The Extractive Circuit,” “the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain.” This circuit, he stresses, “is not a metaphor,” but an accelerating systems-crash that steals time and resources from zones of least resistance, like fragile habitats.
Some extracts:
The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain.
Eighty-three percent of the emissions occur at the point of production. The majority of such phones are produced in China, whether their end-use destination is the United States, Germany, Japan, or any other country on Earth. And, if we start looking at the other ways phone production exceeds planetary boundaries, in purely ecological terms, we find all measurable boundaries breached.[2] It’s not just a matter of carbon dioxide and other production emissions but also the processes of resource extraction (mining) itself: excessive freshwater use, eutrophication from biogeochemical flows, deforestation of nearby lands, biodiversity loss from land-use and others. At the same time such extraction is dependent, for just one component, on cobalt found primarily in mines in the DRC. The labor in such mines is, almost without exception, either slave labor, child labor, or both.
there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion. Value is extracted not only through human labor but also through a series of natural and social inputs. Ecologically speaking, value at the simplest level can be drawn from the “free” use of water or air and other “commons.” But it’s also the value derived from their commodification, from so-called “externalities” in waste flows and mountains; in complex socioecological processes like industrial agriculture where not only are soils exhausted but output is dependent on massive fossil fuel, unsustainable pesticide and chemical-fertilizer inputs, or with the “free” exploitation of flora and fauna, from simple use as with logging to the patenting of DNA strands...
Financialized supply chains are structured to allow firms to ignore or skirt local, national, international legal.or even physical attempts to restrict the flow of extraction.
Neoliberalism’s matryoshka doll of financialization, international economic governance, risk shifting, state policies, and adjustments in cultural logic helped nurse profitability out of its 1970s doldrums. It did so through the redistribution of labor income to capital; through creating historically unprecedented speed and mobility for transnational capital flows, business-to-business commerce, and firm-level debt/currency creation; and through transforming the social functions of states into profit generating enterprises, diminishing democratic sovereignty, inhibiting decolonization, and quite a lot more.
The one-day or one-hour delivery, the expedited shipping, the synthesis of business and “leisure” hours: all of this is a lifesaver to the single parent, the double-shift employee in a food-desert, the downwardly mobile twelve-hours-a-day professional, the hustling informal or aspirational employee, hoping to claw their way out of generalized precarity.
“services” provided for consumers.,.. instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers but rather to the needs of an “always-on” capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. Such services are dependent on the speed and ungovernability of GVCs which can, to a degree not possible before, dice up a production process into its most minute parts, spread them as far a global distance as comparative advantage dictates, limited, in strictly economic terms, by the current state of communications technology and the price of oil.
At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.”
At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.”
the extractive circuit is not a metaphor. It works through real people, specific geographies, economically strategic areas organizing, linking, and connecting our global human ecological niche. The granular level I began with in my paradigmatic example is the very real, material workings of this system. Imperialism does not vanish in such a system, but it is now a layer beneath. Colonization is more generalized. States (in a wide variety of forms) still play a crucial if dramatically changed role even when considered over the course of the last fifty years.