Multiplying divisions
By Prem Shankar
Jha
Veteran journalist and former editor of
Hindustan Times writes that with growing class
conflict,
economic development is the first casualty. Though finance
minister is going to produce a good annual budget like he
did twice but what about grave political threat looming
over the horizon. This is the threat of overt, violent
class conflict.
The threat is developing out of what
government is not doing. For example when a thousand
Maoists captured Jehanabad in Bihar, held it hostage foe
several hours and freed naxalite prisoners from the local
jail.
Class conflict is being exacerbated in the Indian
polity by three recent developments. The first is the
growing famine in the job market. The second is the
widening gap in incomes. Third is the growing insensitivity
shown to the poor by the state itself and an increasingly
frequent resort to force to quell social unrest.
The
government’s strategy for
employment generation via the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (N.R.E.G.P.)
is a comic muddle of direct assaults on rural poverty and
unemployment.
The plain truth is that because
productivity growth in services always lag behind
productivity growth in industry,
increase in productivity
in the latter force increases in employment in the former.
Instead, this has been declining steadily for years. The
prospects for an increase in planned investment in the
infrastructure are, therefore bleak.
The second reason
for the increase in class conflict is widening gap in
incomes. While the pressure of jobseekers has kept entry-
level salaries constant, and actually made them decline in
trial terms in the unrecognised sector, salaries of acrore
or more a year are no longer uncommon.
The increase is
inextricably linked to the advent of anew level of
conspicuous
consumption. It is also feeding increased
corruption in the bureaucracy. Public sector financial and
other enterprises have become more market oriented, and
state governments more development minded.
The victims
of both have been the poorest of the poor: premia have
risen; the properties of defaulters are attached with
grater celerity; loan melas are a thing of past. Tribal who
protest against the appropriation of forestland for mining
or infrastructure projects are being routinely fired upon.
The statement of a Maoist leader, published in an interview
in the Hindustan Times a few weeks ago, that this
unthinking resort to repression was precisely what had
given them a stream of recruits.
The writer suggests
that the only way to increase the growth of employment is
to boost the industrial growth rate. The only way to do
that, in turn, is to cut subsidies.
Pricing Kerosene at
the same level as diesel and rebating purchases made by the
poor on ration cards could recover the Rs.12000 crores from
those who are mixing Kerosene with diesel. He further
writes; the best way to discourage conspicuous consumption
is to exempt savings from taxation and convert the income
into a consumption tax.
The alternative to making the
poor victims of development is to make them partners in
development by offering them a royalty in perpetuity for
the use of their land or the loss of hereditary rights
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