> >From an interview with Günter Grass: [Globalisation =] A fusion of
> >large corporations driven by profit only, layoffs and unemployment,
> >concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a world of luxury
> >for some slender layers of society which we can all see. In short, a
> >rampant increase of poverty and misery for the vast sections. Of
> >course, politicians are uttering the right pious words but they have
> >not been able to reverse the trend. Yes, we all have an expression for
> >this trend of neo-liberalism whose impact can be traced everywhere,
> >even in India.
>
> Has he bothered to learn anything about the effects of "neoliberalism"
> on India?
>From Noam Chomsky, *Propaganda and the Public Mind* (South End Press,
2001), pp. 174f.:
India is carrying out what are called reforms, so it's now moving itself into the U.S.-dominated system, which it hadn't done before, with interesting effects on the country. Here it's regarded by good economists, and not totally falsely, as a great success.
Reforms were instituted in 1990 and 1991. "Reforms" means liberalization and opening the country up to foreign investment, subordinating the country to the corporate-dominated globalization system. So naturally we're in favor of that. India's macroeconomic statistics are not bad, so there's been growth and great praise for India, despite objections that it is moving too slowly. It didn't liberalize finance, as South Korea did under U.S. pressure. This is part of the reason, it is widely assumed, that South Korea was hit so hard by the Asian financial crisis while India, like China, stayed more or less immune. There's a fair amount of U.S. and other foreign investment coming in, a lot of buying up of the country. But there's more to it, as usual.
India, unlike the United States and like practically every other industrial country outside the U.S., keeps regular social statistics. The U.S. is maybe the only industrial country that doesn't do this. India has a regular publication of social indicators. The central statistical office does sample studies every year and big studies every five years. Those are interesting. India is mostly a rural country, so the interesting question is, What's happening to the rural population? They study poverty, per capita consumption, and per capita production in the rural areas. Pre-reform, up until 1990, rural poverty wag-) sharply decreasing. Both per capita consumption and per capita production were going up in the rural areas, including non-agricultural production, because they were putting money into non-agricultural production.
In 1990, all those figures reverse. Rural poverty stagnates or gets worse. Consumption again stagnates or declines, and production decreases in 1991, not by accident. That's when the reforms were instituted, and the reforms have a lot of effects. For one thing, they opened the country up to subsidized foreign agricultural imports, which undercut poor farmers. Public spending declines under "reforms," which also require reducing resources for rural development. And it shows. That's the other side, not the side you read about unless you're reading the Indian press. And that's very typical, incidentally.