MB Lal Book 1
1.
Garbage as our alter ego - The Hindu
2.
Making cities liveable- The Hindu
3.
Savita’s death triggers Irish
backlash against anti-abortion law - The
Hindu
4.
'I will fight till Ireland
5.
New Delhi
6.
SAVITA’S DEATH INEXCUSABLE, SAYS
AIDWA
7.
Digital Democracy - A Celebration of Greed
8.
Go Digital to End Corruption
9.
Home buyers on strike this
Diwali: It’s the prices, stupid – First Post
10.
Clean it like Pune – Indian
11.
Why India
12.
The relevance of Gandhian
Economics to Modern India
13.
Is India
Published: November 3, 2012 01:01 IST | Updated: November 5, 2012 19:07 IST
Garbage as our alter ego
Trash is capitalism’s dark underbelly, the product of the very modernisation that helps create ‘clean’ spaces. But it is treated as a ‘third world’ problem
“That's the whole meaning of life ... trying to find a place for your stuff” — George Carlin
The iconic American comedian, and that brilliant dissector of the human condition, George Carlin, had in a 1986 sketch about “The Stuff” shown us how our tendency to acquire more and more stuff — material commodities — generates great anxieties about how and where to store them. Even your house is not a home, but “a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” What Carlin did not tell us, at least in this sketch, is that much of the stuff does not find a place, it ends up as garbage: as waste, trash and refuse.
If there is one thing that is symptomatic of the modern human condition, but hardly recognised as such, it is garbage. Garbage is capitalism’s dark underbelly, its pathological alter ego. That is why we keep disavowing it, refusing to believe it exists.
Vilappilsala standoff
But the more we deny it, it rears its ugly head, as most recently, in Vilappilsala panchayat in Kerala where the standoff between the local people, who are opposed to the reopening of a waste treatment plant, and the State has left 2 lakh tonnes of solid waste lying unprocessed, threatening an environmental disaster.
It is, therefore, remarkable that the current boisterous debate on foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail in India has completely ignored the question of garbage. By focusing only on the supposed virtues of waste reduction in perishable goods (like fruits and vegetables) brought about by the better storage facilities of retail conglomerates, the issue of the latter’s humongous ecological footprint (for example, in terms of sprawl, increase in driving, and the proliferation of non-biodegradable waste) has been bypassed.
According to a report from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Washington, D. C., in the 20-year period from 1990, the same period in which Walmart grew to be a behemoth, the average number of miles that a U.S. household travelled for shopping increased by around 1000. And from 2005 to 2010, despite Walmart’s initiation of a reduced waste programme, its reported greenhouse gas emissions shot up by 14 per cent.
Big-box stores don’t just improve efficiency in consumption, they also increase consumption manifold, which ultimately results in phenomenal amounts of trash. The garbage generated by Americans annually reportedly amounts to 220 million tonnes, and 80 per cent of U.S. goods are used only once before being trashed.
In the mythologies of modernisation and development, we sing paeans to skyscrapers and nuclear plants. But there is no accompanying dirge about the costs we have had to pay for them. If there was, then we would have heard of Puente Hills — the largest active landfill/waste dump in the United States, which is a 1,365-acre monstrosity — as much as we have about the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building.
It is ironical, Edward Humes tells us in his book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, to call Puente Hills a “landfill,” for the garbage mountain has long ceased to fill a depression in the land and rises now an unbelievable 500 feet above the ground, a space capable of holding 15 million elephants. It takes, of course, a gargantuan effort, as Humes describes, to keep the toxic substance that leaks out of the 130-million tonne waste (which includes 3 million tonnes of soiled disposable diapers — another “important” invention of modern life) from poisoning groundwater sources.
Nevertheless, waste is seen, in popular development discourse as a “third world” problem, the ubiquitous mountains of garbage that blight the face of cities and towns in the poorer parts of the world — one of the first tasks that the newly-elected President in Egypt had was cleaning up the garbage mess in Cairo. And the citizens of the third world have internalised this discourse, seeing themselves as part of the “dirty” developing world blissfully unaware of the cost at which a “clean” developed world is maintained. Thus the story of the Somali pirates plundering the high seas has become a part of global lore but not that of Somalia being a (cheap) dumping ground for some of the most toxic garbage, including nuclear and medical waste, from Europe for the last two decades and more. As long as the streets are clean in Frankfurt and Paris, does it matter that children are born in Somalia without limbs?
‘Waste imperialism’
It is in this context of “waste imperialism” that the question of garbage needs to come out of its subterranean existence and occupy centre stage in any discussion on development, including FDI in retail. It is not accidental that dumping grounds, and waste treatment plants are invariably located in places where the most vulnerable and marginalised sections of the population live, whether in the developed or developing worlds. Not surprisingly, garbage has become an important political tool in the present with garbage strikes and struggles around garbage taking place in various cities in the West and elsewhere. The contestation in Vilappilsala has been going on since 2000 when the waste treatment plant opened with serious ecological impact.
We would be living in a mythical world if we think that the problems of waste can be solved only with better rational planning, management or recycling. In the U.S., even after decades of environmental education, only around 24 per cent of the garbage is recycled with nearly 70 per cent of it going into landfills.
Simply throwing trash into the recycling bin hardly does anything to reduce the production of rubbish; on the contrary it might lull us into a false sense of complacency as Heather Rogers, the author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage argues. This is because household waste constitutes a minuscule percentage of the total waste produced, the vast majority of which is constituted by waste from industrial processes. As she shows, the mantra of recycling and green capitalism has been adopted by corporations and big business because it is the least threatening of the options to profit margins — no wonder, the rate of production of goods and, consequently, trash has only increased. More importantly, in this “greenwashing,” the responsibility of cleaning up the environment is displaced from corporations to people themselves in their own individual, personal capacities.
Economy of ‘zero waste’
To be sure, there are rare examples like Germany, which have nearly eliminated landfills, and recycle up to 70 per cent of the waste. But the fact that the Cröbern Central Waste Treatment Plant in Germany, one of the most sophisticated plants in the world (built at a cost of $ 135 million), has been allegedly involved in criminal garbage profiteering by illegally securing solid waste from Italy (to sustain the operations of the plant) shows how tenuous and fragile the economy of “zero waste” is.
Ultimately, the problem of waste cannot be fathomed without recognising the order of capitalism, which is built on the relentless production of commodities and the philosophy of planned obsolescence, in which goods are built to have short shelf life. As Sarah Moore of the University of Arizona has pithily pointed out the contradiction: “Modern citizens have come to expect the places they live, work, play, and go to school to be free of garbage — to be ordered and clean. These expectations can never be fully met, however, precisely because the same processes of modernization that have produced them have also produced a situation in which garbage proliferates.”
The “golden age of capitalism” is thus also the “golden age of garbage.” Just between 1960 and 1980, solid waste in the U.S. increased by four times. This is the exponential growth in garbage the world over, which has rendered the Pacific Ocean awash with plastic particles thus making plastic outnumber zooplankton at a shocking rate of 6:1. And this is the growth that has ironically made garbage and its disposal a multi-billion dollar business, and has made the mafia enter and control it, as in Italy.
Developing countries like India, with almost non-existent waste disposal systems, catastrophically seek to move to the next (superfluous) stage of consumption by imbibing the culture of Walmart. In this scenario, if justice for both human beings and nature has to be ensured, the alter ego of garbage can no longer be hidden under the carpet. It has to be confronted head on.
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Published: November 3, 2012 01:05 IST | Updated: November 3, 2012 15:31 IST
Making cities liveable
When none of the Indian cities figured in the first 200 ranks of the Global Urban Competitiveness Report compiled last year by a group of international experts, debates about the narrow economic focus of the ranking method offered some consolation to policymakers. But if anyone seriously believes Indian metropolises might compare favourably with the good ones in the world if only the scale of measurement were better, here comes a reality check: UN-Habitat recently expanded the definition of a ‘prosperous city’ to include quality of life, equitable development and environmental sustainability parameters along with productivity and infrastructure. Based on this matured framework, it has worked out a new comprehensive measure — City Prosperity Index (CPI) — to gauge cities. Even in this new analysis, Indian cities are yet to reach the top bracket. When a select group of urban centres across the world were calibrated with the new measure, the two alpha cities of India, Mumbai and Delhi, have come out as mediocre places. They are ranked below Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Ankara. Jakarta, which is similar to Mumbai in terms of productivity, has turned out to be a better city in terms of environment quality and equity. Seoul outdoes Delhi on all counts and turns out as a far superior metropolis.
Indian policymakers should not rush to unwisely dismiss this index as yet another irrelevant ranking. The importance of the CPI lies in its ability to show how and why one city outscores the other and the precise policy corrections it can engender. Though Indian cities do well in terms of productivity, they are environmental nightmares. Delhi, with an environment index of 0.448 (maximum being 1.000) is at the bottom of the pile of the 69 cities studied. Deteriorating air quality, inefficient management of waste, depletion of the ground water table and vanishing water bodies have compromised the advantages offered by Indian urban centres. Insensitive encroachment of open spaces, and depleted green cover have only added to the woes. In contrast, Chongqing in China has increased the amount of public space by 16 times in three decades and Singapore has covered 50 per cent of its surface area with greenery. The second challenge that daunts Indian cities is the issue of equity. Dhaka has a better equity index than Delhi. This is because plans here have paid less attention to the marginalised, resulting in inadequate social housing, eviction of street vendors, and flawed land policies. Achieving economic prosperity along with better quality of life and inclusive growth is imperative not just to climb the rank ladder, but to make our cities desirable places to live.
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Published: November 15, 2012 23:21 IST | Updated: November 16, 2012 02:22 IST
Savita’s death triggers Irish backlash against anti-abortion law
APPeople assemble outside Leinster House in Dublin on Wednesday in protest against the death of Savita Halappanavar, following denial of abortion.
Deputy Prime Minister admits that there is need for “legal clarity” on abortion
The Irish government was on Thursday at the centre of an angry backlash as protests were held to demand relaxation of the country’s strict anti-abortion law following the death of Savita Halappanavar, a young dentist of Indian origin, after she was refused abortion at a government hospital even though her life was in danger.
An estimated 2,000 people demonstrated outside Parliament in Dublin in what was described as the “largest” protest there in recent memory, while hundreds joined candlelit vigils in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, the city where Savita lived and died.
The Irish embassy in London was picketed amid calls for similar protests outside Irish missions in other European Union countries at the weekend to coincide with a mass rally planned in Dublin for Saturday.
C.V.R. Prasad, an orthopaedic surgeon who visited Savita in the hospital before she died, called for a public inquiry into her death. He criticised the conduct of doctors at University Hospital Galway who refused to perform abortion on grounds that “this is a Catholic country.”
“This should never happen to another woman. Religion and medicine should never mix,” he said.
The hospital has already launched an internal investigation, in addition to a separate inquiry ordered by Ireland’s Health Service, but Dr. Prasad said any probe should be public.
The HSE announced that it was appointing an external investigator to join the inquiry.
There were ill-tempered exchanges in Parliament as the government faced criticism for not legislating on a 1992 court ruling that abortion could be permitted if there was a “real and substantive” risk to the life of the mother. Critics accused successive governments of “political cowardice” in not laying down specific guidelines on abortion.
Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore admitted that there was need for “legal clarity” on abortion. “We need to ensure that in this country we do not have a doubt which arises in a hospital in a set of circumstances which puts a mother’s life at risk.” Last year, the European Court of Human Rights upheld claims of three women that the ban on abortion breached their human rights.
Savita (31) died from septicaemia a week after she was admitted to the hospital with severe back pain. Her husband Praveen Halappanavar said he was certain that his wife would have been alive had the termination been allowed.
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Published: November 16, 2012 01:09 IST | Updated: November 16, 2012 11:51 IST
'I will fight till Ireland changes its abortion law'
Dr. Savita and Praveen Halappanavar on their wedding day with her parents Akkamahadevi and Andenappa S. Yalgi and two brothers. Photo: D.B. Patil
No other woman should die like this, says bereaved husband
The Halappanavar and Yalgi families are heartbroken after Savita, wife of Praveen Halappanavar, died at the University Hospital Galway in Ireland on October 28 because abortion is illegal in Ireland, a Catholic country.
They are not contemplating legal action against the hospital or its staff but want to make common cause with all the social activists and organisations that have launched a massive campaign demanding justice and modification of the Irish laws on abortion.
“I am returning to Galway and will continue to keep the pressure on the Irish government with the support of social groups there to modify the law so that no other woman dies because of a religious law,” Praveen Halappanavar said here on Thursday. The Government of India will also be pressured to prevail upon the Irish government to amend the law to legitimise termination of pregnancy if the life of the mother is at risk, he said.
The Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny, has already assured Parliament that he will look into the matter.
Doctors at the University Hospital had refused to terminate the pregnancy even though Savita was miscarrying and the foetus could not be saved, stating that “this is a Catholic country.” The doctors had maintained that the foetus still had a heartbeat and they could not abort it.
Savita (31), a dentist, and the daughter of Akkamahadevi and Andenappa S. Yalgi, a retired Executive Engineer who worked for the Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Ltd., married Praveen, an engineer from Haveri in north Karnataka, on April 19, 2008.
After about two months, she moved to Galway to join her husband, who works at a company named Boston Scientific.
Rejoicing on learning that she was pregnant, Savita and Praveen prayed for a baby girl. However, on October 21, 17 weeks into her pregnancy, Savita was admitted at the University Hospital with severe backache. She was not straightaway informed by the doctors that she was miscarrying.
Mr. Halappanavar said his in-laws were with them in Galway on a three-month holiday and were to return to India as their visa was to expire on October 23. The Yalgis returned to Belgaum on October 23. “I repeatedly requested the doctors to terminate the pregnancy and save my wife as she was miscarrying and there was no chance of saving the foetus, in vain. The doctors, till the last moment, maintained that everything was fine and her condition was normal till she was taken back to the ICU. The doctors said that the foetus had been removed and she was critically ill. Thereafter things never improved,” Praveen said.
He said that though the hospital had ordered an investigation in addition to the one by an external agency, no law should come in the way of saving a life. The attitude of officials at the Indian Embassy in Ireland also baffled him, since they did not to come to his help after Savita’s death, saying that Monday was a government holiday.
The Yalgis, who lost their only daughter, the youngest of their three children, said they were wronged by the unjust laws of Ireland. “Injustice has been done to us, but it should not happen to any other woman hereafter.” Savita’s body was brought to her hometown Belgaum on November 3 and buried the same day at the Sadashivnagar graveyard here.
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Published: November 15, 2012 17:12 IST | Updated: November 16, 2012 01:13 IST
New Delhi awaits Irish enquiry results
India will wait for the results of two enquiries instituted by the Irish authorities into the death of Savita Halappanavar (31) in Dublin before taking up the case.
The woman died after doctors of a hospital refused to perform an abortion because of the country’s strict anti-abortion laws.
Besides the two enquiries — one an internal probe by the hospital and the other by Ireland’s health service, there are demands for a high-level independent probe besides immediate changes to the law that makes abortions illegal in that country.
In a statement, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) regretted Ms. Halappanavar’s death and felt her passing away in such circumstances was a matter of concern.
“Our embassy in Dublin is following the matter closely. Our sympathies have been conveyed to the next of kin with whom our embassy has been in touch. We understand that the Irish authorities have initiated two enquiries. We are awaiting the results of the enquiries,” said MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin.
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SAVITA’S DEATH INEXCUSABLE, SAYS AIDWA
NEWDELHI: The All India Democratic Women’s Association has said that it was dismayed by the refusal of the University Hospital in Galaway, Ireland, to conduct an abortion on 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar, a dentist from India, leading to her death due to septicaemia on November 11.
AIDWA general secretary Sudha Sundararaman said: “Savita had developed severe back pain in her 17 week of pregnancy and suspecting a miscarriage, sought medical termination of the foetus to save her life. Despite her repeated pleas that she was a Hindu, her request was turned down on the grounds that abortion was illegal in Catholic Ireland.” Stating that it was inexcusable that a life had been lost by the implementation of a grossly unjust and unfair law which denied abortion even when the woman’s life was in imminent danger, Ms. Sundararaman added: “This is in violation of both Indian and international laws. It is sad that despite her condition, the necessary medical attention was denied.” AIDWA has urged the Centre to strongly protest the manner in which Dr. Savita was treated by the medical authorities in Ireland
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Mail Today investigation: Arvind Kejriwal's trust receives donations from big business houses
Read more at:http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/iac-arvind-kejriwal-public-cause-research-foundation/1/227585.html
The edifice ofArvind Kejriwal'sguerilla war on politicians and big business has been bankrolled by corporate big wigs who donated to his Public Cause Research Foundation.
India Against Corruption, which has unfurled the banner of revolt against all-pervasive corruption, actually draws its lineage from Public Cause Research Foundation. And if you were wondering where the movement got sustenance from, strangely it came from a combination of businessmen and bankers.
They provided the ballast to an anti-corruption movement which permeated the national consciousness. Mail Today repeatedly tried to contactArvind Kejriwaland his India Against Corruption colleague Prashant Bhushan through phone and SMS but they were unavailable.
Manish Sisodia, Kejriwal's close associate and Public Cause Research Foundation trustee, said, "Some of the corporate leaders like Narayana Murthy have actively supported us.
He had some good ideas and took active interest besides his financial contribution and was also a jury member on our RTI awards."
Public Cause Research Foundation's balance sheet accessed by Mail Today shows Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and Co gotRs.96.5 lakh from pre-eminent names in the world of business and finance.
For starters, Bangalore-based infotech czar and one of the Infosys founders N.R. Narayana Murthy made a personal contribution ofRs.12 lakh in 2010-11.
Top of the line, Mumbaibased stock broking firm Enam Securities owned by Vallabh Bhansali gave a contribution of `2 lakh while Tata Social Welfare Trust came forward with a cheque ofRs.25 lakh.
Vikram Lal of Eicher gave a cheque ofRs.3 lakh from his Eicher Goodearth Trust and Nimesh Kampani's JM Financial Foundation providedRs.50,000. Other contributions came from IndusInd Bank boss and top banker Romesh Sobti who earlier headed ABN AMRO Bank in India.
He pitched in withRs.25,000 while Religare Enterprises CEO Shachindra Nath gaveRs.20,000. The list is long and it features Sanjiv Bikhchandani of naukri.com who gaveRs.50,000. The Bangalore-based Kasturi Trust provided a corpus ofRs.25 lakh to Kejriwal's foundation.
Jagan Nath Gupta Memorial Education Society that runs several management institutes across the country gave a donation ofRs.13 lakh. The courier company Safe Express gaveRs.1 lakh while top law firm Luthra and Luthra Law office providedRs.50,000.
Circa 2011 was critical for Kejriwal and the Jan Lokpal movement as that was the year when the defining Anna Hazare Ramlila Maidan agitation took place.
Public Cause Research Foundation, which received these donations, is a Delhi-based NGO that was founded on December 19, 2006 by Kejriwal, his IAC associate Manish Sisodia and TV producer and writer Abhinandan Sekhri.
All of them became well known faces in the war that has been waged by civil society against the political class. The website says the the NGO's aim is to 'ensure that our society becomes more inclusive andreal power rests with the common citizens of India.'
In fact, Kejriwal's struggle has evolved from what began as a people's movement to a shoot-and-scoot type of guerrilla war where charges are aggregated and the media is left to ratchet up the information flows thereafter.
Kejriwal donated the prize money of his Magsaysay Award as the main corpus to fund the NGO. Besides Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi are the other trustees of the foundation. The audited report of the NGO says, "During the year, the trust has also taken up a new activity namely IAC."
The funding seeded the Jan Lokpal campaign which was spearheaded by Public Cause Research Foundation besides some of Kejriwal's other NGOs. At the heart of his direct democracy campaign is complete decentralisation.
It goes much further than Panchayati Raj 'areas', each consisting of only 3,000 voters. These voters will constitute the 'area sabha' and will have complete administrative control over all civic services. The area sabha will have the right to demand financial resources from the government.
The area sabhas will have punitive powers over government officials. and will be able to appoint, dismissand withhold salaries. In 2012, the Public Cause Research Foundation receivedRs.31 lakh in donations to its general fund.
Interestingly, while the details of the donors for 2012 are not available in its audit report, Kejriwal's men also acknowledge that not all their donors, who gave them cheques proved to be genuine. They were also saddled with several cheques which bounced.
Read more at:http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/iac-arvind-kejriwal-public-cause-research-foundation/1/227585.html
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Digital DemocracyDigital Electronics holds the key to fighting corruption. Not the great Anna Hazare, nor Kejriwal nor all the giant leaders of the world put together can make a dent in it. They say people sitting in glass houses should not through stones at others. The fact is that we are all sitting in the open and still throwing stones at each other as our glass houses have all been broken in this process.Christ said, “Only he is fit to through a stone at this Woman (an adulteress) who has not committed adultery himself.” We are all sailing in the same boat though we pretend to be different from the others. We all want a good life. We all wish to advance the careers of our children and want to see them prosper. If rules can be bent to get us what we want why not? Anyone who is not actually in jail is respectable till proved jointly. Even those who have been or are in prison claim equal respectability, because they can point to a hundred others who have committed the same offence for which they were convicted. The only difference is that those hundred have not been caught in the act of committing the offence.People who are shouting the loudest today against corruption too have skeletons in their cupboards which they cannot dare to show to the public. However, India has reached a stage where, ironically, one gains respectability only through corruption. The more you indulge is illegal activities the more resources you accumulate to be able to shout loudly against corruption in public life.In Western countries where laws are more rigidly and uniformly enforced even the likes of Rajat Gupta, one of the prima donas of the American corporate world, are not spared. If the law is applied equally rigorously against the owners and CEOs of big companies in India it needs no wizard to guess how many of them would be left out of jail to carry in their business.The measure I am suggesting to end corruption in public life will never be implemented because no one really wants to end this evil. It is better to rule in hell than, serve in heaven. The ‘rakshasas’ will never leave Ravana’s Lanka. This is the only life they know. To make hay while the Sun shines is their life’s motto. To hell with human rights, rule of law, freedom and democracy. Every one is happy in the little miche he holds in the power structure, even if it is illusory. The fact is that we don’t change because we do not want to change. When defeated or depressed, instead of changing our direction or attitudes, we choose the beaten path of taking to religion and seeking refuge in a cult or guru –– all palliatives with no results.If we really wish to transform the social structure we are surrounded with we have to look around keenly and deeply at conditions prevailing all over the world. We Indians, high or low, tend to be insular and isolationist. Centuries of subjugation to a caste-bound religion has sapped our capacity to think independently. We tend to go with the herd. Laying all the blame for our misery on God, we refuse to unite against our common enemy: Greed and its representatives on Earth. A pig must wallow in the mine because that is where it belongs. I am using all these unpleasant epithets to describe our present state because we cannot change our present system of corruption unless there is a real urge from within us to bring about such a change. To some extent we are not different from the rest of the world in accepting new ideas that would mean a change in our way of life. Today the whole world is in the grip of the spectre of climate change. Endless Conferences are held. But nothing happens. No one is really prepared to change. The President of Green Peace Correctly described those attending the recent World Conference on climate change as “Criminals”. In fact, if you ask me t speak the truth, we are all criminals since we are silent spectators of a crime being perpetrated in front of our eyes, the wholesale murder of all life on the planet and doing nothing about it.What holds good for our attitude to fighting climate change also holds good for our attitude to fighting corruption. We, the middle class elite, are happy with things as they are. First the system allows us to get away with any thing we do, even murder, by greasing some body’s palm. The system has a thousand ways of avoiding income-tax. We can forget completely about Sales tax which we never pay for goods we buy. We can freely violate copyright laws and purchase ‘pirated’ goods or duplicates. What is more labour is cheap. We can get any number of people to work for us at a fraction of what the Minimum Wages Act specifies, because the Act is never enforced except in the organized sector which constitutes only six percent of the country’s work force.Last, but not the least, we are ourselves corrupt in whatever profession we might be. Our fight against corruption is a case of pot calling the kettle black. If we look back upon our own lives we will find many skeletons in our own cupboards too. We are simply being jealous that other people have made more money than us by illegal means. So we are resorting to defaming them by calling them corrupt.
Chapter 2Before I dilate on the points I made in the previous chapter on how we are all corrupt and why we refuse not to be corrupt, let me explain my thesis of how simple today’s technology has made it to cut down corruption by at least 75% to 90%, if not eliminate it altogether.The solution is simple: Demonatize paper currency and introduce digital currency instead, using the mobile phone as the medium. Instead of handing over currency note to a person you transfer the money to his mobile, even if he is sitting 5000 miles away. In the West this mode of payment is already very popular, though paper money is equally prevalent, but its transference from one pocket to another is strictly governed by laws which are as good as non-existent in India.
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http://www.firstpost.com/
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Home buyers on strike this Diwali: It’s the prices, stupid
by Sunainaa Chadha Nov 5, 2012
Hit by an over 24 percent surge in home prices over the last one year, the lack of affordable housing is now stunting growth in home loans, which slumped to a five-month low in September 2012. This is despite the cut in home loan rates and attractive discount schemes being offered by various developers.
Typically, the festival season between October and February generally accounts for about 60 percent of the annual sales of developers. So, many builders either offer discounts on the booking rate or waive off stamp duty and registration charges, which can work out to a saving of as over Rs 1 lakh. But home buyers are still sitting on the fence waiting for prices to drop.
According to the Reserve Bank’s latest housing price index, house prices remained on an uptrend, up 24.1 percent in the first quarter (April-June), compared to an average of 20 percent over the last two years, it said.
Typically, the festival season between October and February generally accounts for about 60 percent of the annual sales of developers. Reuters
The SBI has halved its processing fees on home loans while ICICI Bank reduced rates on housing loans. Many other banks have either slashed interest rates or waived off processing fees on housing loans .
ICICI Bank is offering floating rate home loans at 10.25 percent for ticket sizes under Rs 30 lakh and at 10.50 percent for amounts above Rs 30 lakh and up to Rs 3 crore until the end of the calendar year. The rate is around 0.25-1 percent lower than the normal rate on housing loans.
Several banks such as Axis Bank, Central Bank of India and Corporation Bank are organising property exhibitions to sell more home loans. Axis Bank, which co-organised MCHI-Credai’s 20th Real Estate and Housing Finance Exhibition, is expecting to garner a major portion of the home loan business from the expo.
Yet this festive spirit has failed to lure buyers. And why should it? The average ticket size for 2 BHK flats in the expo ranged from Rs 1 to Rs 2 crore, which is beyond what even the middle class can afford. And if any discounts were being offered, they were on the super built up area rather than the carpet area.
Says Pankaj Kapoor, MD at property consulting form Liasas Foras, “Nearly 80 percent of the demand from home buyers is in the affordable segment where supply is low. So one cannot expect to give any discount in this segment to customers. Whatever discounts are offered are in the luxury segment where the demand is low and supply is high.”
Recently a report by property consulting firm Cushman and Wakefield highlighted the fact that even though developers have launched several new projects this year, most of them have targeted high net worth individuals (HNIs), whereas the maximum demand exists in the affordable and mid-segment categories. This has resulted in a massive demand-supply gap.
An expert committee recently submitted a report to the Union Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Ministry where it noted that as much as 88 percent of the housing shortage pertained to houses for the poor and another 11 percent for low income groups.
According to a report in The Economic Times, “home loans have grown by 11.2 percent year-on-year in September, compared with 15.6 percent in the same month a year ago. The latest growth rate for home loans is the lowest since April.”
This is primarily because for middle-class families interest rates play a limited role in house sales while affordability holds key. Developers are sticking to high prices despite unsold inventory and, wherever required, are able to raise funds through the private equity (PE) option.
However, the share of PE investments in Mumbai and the National Capital Region (NCR) has fallen from 84 percent in the first three quarters of 2011 to 78 percent in the same period this year, said Cushman and Wakefield. This implies that sooner or later builders will have to reduce prices in order to prevent a liquidity crunch.
LIC Housing Finance is already scaling down the share of high-margin developer loans to 4-6 percent of its loan book from an initial target of 8 percent this fiscal, owing to poor support from banks to the commercial realty segment as well as its decision to stop term loans to the industry.
But as Finance Minister P Chidambaram suggested, banks should probably put pressure on builders to sell the inventoried homes to lower their exposure rather than encourage home buyers to purchase houses at such exorbitant prices.
Indian Express
Clean
it like Pune
Isher Judge Ahluwalia : Wed Oct 31 2012 , 00:18 hrs
Pune,
the second-largest city in Maharashtra after
Mumbai, offers a shining example of what a city can do to manage the growing
menace of garbage as it urbanises at a rapid pace. Widely known as the cultural
capital of Maharashtra, Pune is also called Oxford
of the East because of its many fine educational institutions, attracting
migrants and students from all over India Maharashtra ,
but the rapid growth of industry in the Pune district, particularly the
concentration of IT companies and of automotives and auto-components, has added
a modern flavour to its development.
Growing
numbers and rising prosperity has meant that not only is the quantity of solid
waste growing — Pune generates 1,400 metric tonnes of solid waste per day — but
its composition is also changing, with more plastics and non-biodegradable
elements to reflect the changing patterns of consumption of the growing middle
classes.
The
Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has been trying a range of solutions, from the
most traditional and informal to the most modern and scientific, converting
waste to energy with state-of-the-art environment-friendly technology and
developing scientific landfills for depositing the much reduced garbage that
cannot be reused. Rag-pickers’ cooperatives are participating in the clean-up
as much as the corporate sector with the latest technology.
Pune
was no different from other Indian cities in having piles of waste on street
corners and overflowing community bins which were rummaged by rag-pickers to
seek out a living from selling the recyclable bits. Garbage used to slowly find
its way from the bins to transfer stations and was finally transported to the
dumpsite 22 km
away at Urali to rot.
Things
began to change in the 1990s, much before the government of India SNDT
University 1993, a
trade union of waste-pickers. The municipal corporations of Pune and
Pimpri-Chinchwad started issuing photo ID cards to rag-pickers, which allowed
them to scavenge, reducing the scope for police brutality.
When
the PMC set out to develop an integrated strategy to comply with the SWM Rules
of 2000, they found the arrangement with the rag-pickers as well as the habit
of segregating dry waste from wet waste on the part of households very handy.
In 2007, the PMC and the KKPKP jointly promoted the creation of SWaCH, a
cooperative of waste pickers and other urban poor, using their members to
provide door-to-door collection services for households, shops, offices, etc.
Those not covered by door-to-door collection, were required to use containers
and compactor buckets as prescribed by the PMC.
SWaCH
members are authorised to collect service-based user fee. They work in pairs
covering 250-300 households for segregated waste collection, further
segregating the recyclables and dropping the non-recyclable waste at feeder
points. From there, the waste is collected by Ghanta trucks. Altogether, they
collect more than 600 tonnes of solid waste per day; in addition, about 10
tonnes is composted and 150 tonnes is recycled by them in spaces provided by
the housing societies themselves.
The
PMC has agreed to pay Rs 8.6 crore for the administrative and management cost
of operations if the collection coverage is 100 per cent, under a five-year
MoU. So far, 35 per cent of the households have door-to-door coverage, and the
PMC has paid Rs 3 crore towards administration costs and Rs 70 lakh for
uniforms, gloves, badges, wheelbarrows, buckets and sorting sheds, to improve
the working conditions of the rag-pickers. On the other hand, the PMC saves on
handling cost (estimated at Rs 12 crore per annum) and the cost of
transportation of the waste to the landfill.
Another
very important initiative of the PMC is the Zero Garbage project in Katraj, the
largest ward in Pune. Launched in February 2011, this was a collective effort
of Janwani, an NGO, Cummins India
A
pioneering initiative of the PMC has been to set up 14 biomethanation-cum-power
generation (BCPG) plants, mostly of 5 tpd capacity. The technologies were
selected on the basis of competitive bidding and O&M contracts for five
years were granted to the different parties which brought in the technology.
Transporting wet waste to them is the responsibility of the PMC. These plants
treat organic waste in a decentralised and environment-friendly manner. Given
the collection efficiency of 80-90 per cent, of which 45 per cent is segregated
waste, the PMC has allotted separate vehicles for the collection of wet waste,
which comes to about 300-350 tonnes per day. For each BCPG plant, the PMC
provides 600 sq metres of land, 5,000 litres of water and electricity connection
at site (both water and electricity free of cost).
The
waste is treated in two-stage biomethanation process by using closed vessels
where, in the absence of oxygen, micro-organisms break down the organic matter
into a stable residue, and generate a methane- rich biogas in the process. This
gas can then be used as a source of renewable energy to produce electricity
(net surplus after own requirement) of 400 KWh per day, which is being used for
street lights in the surrounding area. The solid residue is used as manure, and
the aqueous liquor is a nutrient-rich fertiliser which can be used to recycle
nutrients back to agricultural land.
As
Mahesh Pathak, municipal commissioner of Pune put it, “Besides the income of Rs
1 crore resulting from savings in electricity and from the sale of manure from
the 11 plants, the saving on the cost of transportation and dumping is Rs 80
lakh. The environmental saving because of the reduced transportation of the
waste, is an added bonus.”
From
June 1, 2010 , the
PMC has stopped open dumping, and the total waste generated is processed
scientifically. Hanjer Biotech is operating a processing plant of 1,000 tpd of
mixed waste producing RDF, manure and fuel at the old dumping site at Urali and
Fursungi. The company has constructed a scientific landfill to dispose the
inert waste (about 20 per cent).
At
the high end of the technology spectrum is the “non-incineration based thermal
waste to energy” plant set up in a PPP model in the Ramtekdi Industrial Area.
The investment of Rs 140 crore was made by the private company, Rochem
Separation Systems India Pvt Ltd, based on the patented Concord Blue
gasification technology on the 2.5
acre land provided by the PMC on a lease-rental basis.
This state-of-the-art technology, for which the patent is held by Prayas Goel,
Managing Director of Concord Blue, processes unsegregated waste to produce
energy, fulfilling the requirements of the EPA and European standards with
regard to emissions.
The
syngas (synthesised gas) is produced from unsegregated waste, which is a
combination of biodegradable and non-biodegradable components by a thermal
process of heating in complete absence of oxygen followed by reformation of the
produced gas, which leads to a clean hydrogen rich gas that can be utilised for
power generation (currently operational in the said facility). Unlike biogas
which is produced from a biological activity of bacteria breaking down only the
biodegradable component of the waste, syngas is produced from a thermal process
and hence is a solution for the complete spectrum of solid waste sans inerts.
Also, syngas is rich in hydrogen, making it one of the cleanest fuels, unlike
biogas which constitutes about 50 per cent methane.
With
the increment in the quantum of plastics in our lifestyle, we need an
environmentally friendly solution for its disposal. Owing to its
non-biodegradable nature, plastics cannot be landfilled. Incinerating plastics
without expensive control equipment gives rise to dioxins and furans from the
PVC component of plastics which are carcinogenic in nature and hence extremely
harmful to all living beings. The Concord Blue technology, owing to its
non-incineration platform, converts solid waste into gas without production of
dioxin and furans over the permissible limit.
The
PMC is committed to transporting 700 tonnes of unsegregated waste for 30 years,
and the company has to process the waste on the same day. The PMC has to pay a
processing fee of Rs 300 per tonne of waste, and the company is free to sell
the power to appropriate third-party buyers. The carbon credits when realised
will be shared equally by the two.
With
28 surrounding villages added to its jurisdiction only last week, Pune’s
population has increased from 39 lakh to 50 lakh and the area under the
jurisdiction of the PMC has expanded from 244 sq km to 430 sq km. The challenge
of solid waste management and disposal is that much greater. The vision shown
by the PMC in garnering the support of important stakeholders from among city
residents is the key to preparing for the future.
The writer is chairperson of ICRIER and former chairperson of the
high-powered expert committee on urban infrastructure services
____________________
Why India’s
Newspaper Industry Is Thriving
In “Citizens Jain”
(p. 52), Ken Auletta travels to India to talk to executives of Bennett,
Coleman & Company, Ltd., India’s dominant media conglomerate, about why
their newspapers are thriving while newspapers in the West are shrinking.
B.C.C.L. owns and operates the Times of
India, the largest English-language
newspaper in the world, and the Economic
Times, the world’s most widely read
English-language business newspaper, after the Wall Street Journal, along with eleven other newspapers, eighteen
magazines, two satellite news channels, an English-language movie channel, a
Bollywood news-and-life-style channel, a radio network, Internet sites, and
outdoor billboards. In contrast with the U.S., where the average newspaper net
profit margin is five per cent, the profit margin of B.C.C.L.’s newspapers is
twenty-five to thirty per cent. Also contrary to most Western counterparts,
Samir Jain, the vice-chairman, and his brother, Vineet Jain, the managing
director, proclaim, “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the
advertising business.” Rather than “worry about editorial independence and the
wall between the newsroom and the sales department, they believe that one secret
to a thriving newspaper business lies in dismantling that
wall,”
Auletta writes.
“If you are editorially minded, you will make all the wrong decisions,” Vineet
Jain tells Auletta, and his company chooses some of the content for its
newspapers by holding focus groups to determine what its audience wants to read.
“Samir Jain pressed his executives to create a more youthful paper,” Auletta
writes. “Articles would be shorter, sentences snappier; there would be more
sports, less politics, more Bollywood, more color, lower necklines, and few book
reviews.” Much of the colorful celebrity news that readers find in the
Times comes through Medianet, a venture that Vineet Jain
helped launch in 2003 to induce celebrities and brands to pay to have news
written about them. “It says ‘advertorial’ clearly,” Vineet tells Auletta. “All
newspapers in the world do advertorials.” But “in the Jains’ newspapers the
advertorials are written by staff reporters, and a reader needs a magnifying
glass to be alerted,” Auletta writes. Jain “contends that it is more honest than
what existed before, when reporters were slipped envelopes with cash or accepted
favors in exchange for positive coverage,” Auletta writes. “They are promoting a
brand,” Jain tells Auletta. “Pay me for it.”
Another B.C.C.L.
innovation is referred to as “private treaties” or “brand capital.” Under this
program, “the newspaper offers a deal to smaller companies: it accepts ads in
exchange for equity in a company,” Auletta writes. “B.C.C.L. insists on
one-third cash as a down payment and accepts real-estate ownership in lieu of
equity; the resulting ads appear throughout the paper. The company has a stake
in more than three hundred and fifty companies, and this accounts for up to
fifteen per cent of its ad revenues.” Want to buy the entire front page for an
ad? For four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you can.
Although “blurring
business and editorial has clearly worked well for the business side of the
Jains’ enterprises, critics are quick to point out what has been lost,” Auletta
writes. They “claim that the company’s paid news and private treaties skew its
coverage and shield its newspaper advertisers from scrutiny.” But the
“strategies pioneered by Samir Jain at the Times of India—setting aggressive pricing, employing focus groups to
learn what readers crave, and, above all, treating advertisers as the primary
customer—have since become standard in the industry,” Auletta writes. Aroon
Purie, the C.E.O. of the India Today Group, tells Auletta that B.C.C.L. has “set
standards where advertisers can ask for anything.”
Darryl D’Monte, a
Cambridge-educated editor and writer who once served in a senior editorial
capacity at the Times, tells Auletta that “the Times has
corrupted the entire face of Indian journalism, including television. It’s like
a cancer that has spread. It is the most serious threat to journalism not only
in this country but in the entire developing world.”
Every competitor
“at first agitates over it, gets angry about it, and then quietly apes it,”
Krishna Prasad, the editor-in-chief of Outlook magazine
and the founder of Sans Serif, a media blog, tells Auletta. “Each player in the
Indian market, whatever the language, is left with very few options. And
newspapers who say they are not doing it are basically lying. The toothpaste is
out of the tube, and it can’t be put back
in.”
The relevance of Gandhian Economics to Modern
India
|
|
Prologue
The economic philosophy of Gandhi
is written about, discussed and talked about. However, when it comes to
implementation, it is criticized for being impractical and imaginary. For
instance, the concept of trusteeship as enunciated by Gandhi demands
non-possession. It seeks individual to dispossess his wealth and income beyond
his requirements so that the economic welfare of the less capable is realized.
The principle of non-possession and trusteeship is not realized practically
because individuals are immensely attached to their wealth in the ordinary
course of life. Gandhi and even later day Gandhians have not been able to find
the root cause of attachment to wealth and its accumulation overtime.
The family according to me the
basic unit of a capitalist system in which wealth and property is personally
owned by individuals and families. The family not only owns and accumulates
material wealth but also owns progeny. The ownership of progeny is established
through sexual relations between husband and wife (the union of sperm and the
egg). It is in fact the ownership of the sperm and the egg that leads to the
ownership of progeny. However, sperms and eggs are autonomously produced inside
the body of human beings irrespective of the desire or command of the person.
What is therefore autonomously produced and the man or the woman has no
contribution in the production of sperm and egg, cannot therefore be owned by
man or woman and hence husband and wife cannot claim ownership over the progeny.
Parenthood (motherhood and fatherhood) is social and not biological. The bodies
of men and women are only apparatuses used by nature to procreate in an endless
series of generations. Once the realization of the non-ownership of progeny is
dawned on human beings, the principle of non-possession and trusteeship as
enunciated by Gandhi will complete its loop and the Idea will assume pragmatism.
Sarvodaya or the rising of one and all will not only become possible but also
become a fact of life once the root cause of possession and accumulation is
exposed to the satisfaction of one and all. Gandhi was perhaps not been able to
look at non-possession of sperms and eggs because of his pre-occupation with
celibacy or brahmacharya.
The towering presence of Gandhi in
Indian society and the world at large need no further emphasis or restatement. A
millennium of democracy in Great Britain, roughly three centuries of democracy
and capitalism (post Adam Smith) in the United States and France and other
countries of Europe, America, Africa, Asia and the continent of Australia is yet
to create a society free from the worries of bread and free from the fears of
penury. Wide income inequalities both within and between the nations of the
world, widespread poverty in Asia and Africa and the countries of Central
America point to the fact that the Western Model of capitalism that was adopted
by the countries of the world (save exceptions) and that which survives along
with its flip side to this day has not really delivered the people to light,
wisdom and happiness. Economic growth without social justice and equity,
destructive technological development and mindless consumerism that has engulfed
the spirit of modern men and women is creating a dysfunctional society that is
on the brink of disaster and destruction.
The synthesis of the ideas of
Mahatma Gandhi with the ideas of the modern world will create a more holistic
and integrated society. It will deliver more happiness, generate more altruistic
economic surplus and bring about a more egalitarian society than what is now
available to us.
Mahatma Gandhi never created a
body of literature known by the name ‘Gandhian Economics’. He neither claimed to
be an economist nor was trained in Economics. He was not a voracious reader of
economic literature. Nevertheless, he expressed his views on economics at
various points of time in his life. His reflections on Economics found
expression in his writings and thoughts. Students of Gandhian thought and
writings collated his reflections on economics and created a body of literature
known as ‘Gandhian Economics’. The literature thus created is known to be
enormous enough to be unparalleled in the history of modern Indian economic
thought.
Synthesis
of Economics and Ethics
Thomas Weber says that Gandhi was
deeply influenced by Ruskin’s book ‘Unto This Last’ and that it would not
be out of place to say that Ruskin was the father of Gandhian economic thought.
Gandhi summarized the teachings of ‘Unto This Last’ under three basic
truths:
1.
The good of the
individual is contained in the good of all (Sarvodaya).
2.
Each person has the
right to earn livelihood from his work and there is dignity of labor, meaning
thereby that there is nothing called high and low labor (Bread
labor).
3.
The life of the
tiller of the soil and the handicraftsmen is the life worth living (Village
industries and Swadeshi).
Gandhi admitted that he was
clearly aware of the first truth with little awareness about the second and
clearly he was unaware about the third truth. However, Gandhi realized that the
second and third truths contained in the first. Gandhi revealed that Ruskin’s
book transformed him overnight from a lawyer and city dweller into a rustic
living away from Durban on a farm called the Phoenix Settlement (ashram).
Another writer who deeply influenced Gandhi was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s work
‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ left an indelible impression on
Gandhi. Gandhi admitted that the profound morality, independent thinking and
truthfulness of Tolstoy’s work had overwhelmed him and everything else paled
into insignificance. Gandhi realized that the best way to help the poor was to
get off their backs and practice ‘bread labor’ – that man must earn his bread by
laboring with his own hands. The principle of ‘bread labor’ is central to the
economic philosophy of Gandhi.
Gandhi claimed that “True
economics never militates against the highest ethical standard just as all true
ethics must also be good economics…. True economics stands for social justice;
it promotes the good of all including the weakest and is indispensable for
decent life”. Subhash Mehta writing on Gandhi’s economic philosophy says that,
Khaddar economics was based on ethics and self sufficiency. That the ideal of
man is spiritual progress first and last and no economic progress can violate
this principle. Gandhian economics lay emphasis on spiritual satisfaction.
Spiritualism holds sway over consumerism. Gandhi emphasized on minimizing wants
and keeping away from luxuries. (A handbook of Sarvodaya, Part-2, compiled by
Subhash Mehta, pp 69-72).
Gandhi never advocated the
destruction of factories and machines but sought regulation of their excesses.
He felt that production and consumption must be decentralized and both these
functions must take place near the source of production. Gandhi had explained
that his small scale rural based economic system was not based on the rejection
of machinery but on objection to the craze for machinery. “The craze is for
what they call labor-saving machinery. Men go on ‘saving labor’ till thousands
are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to
save time and labor not for a fraction of mankind but for all. I want the
concentration of wealth not in the hands of few but in the hands of all. Today
machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus
behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labor but greed”.
Gandhi says that greed leads to
parasitism. Both greed and parasitism are unsustainable. He says that “earth
provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed”.
Gandhian economics was thus normative and highly ethical.
Diwan and Lutz while pointing out
the essentials of Gandhian economics says that Gandhian economics boils down to
a simple injunction that “never advocate actions or policies that lead to
material advancement at the cost of social, moral or spiritual impoverishment”.
(Diwan & Lutz, ‘Essays in Gandhian Economics’, p-13). The seven social
sins of Gandhi constituted the key elements of Gandhi’s political and economic
thought. They are: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure
without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality,
science without humanity and worship without sacrifice.
Swadeshi
and Bread Labor
During his Salt March to Dandi in
1930, in his speech at village Bhatgam, Gandhi said, “to live above the means
befitting a poor country is to live on stolen food”. Bread labor became
central to the economic philosophy of Gandhi. Bread labor means, each person
should labor to earn his bread. Gandhi quotes Gita to emphasize bread labor,
“one who eats without labor eats stolen food”. Gandhi saw humility
inherent in labor. If you labor for others, it becomes Yajna or sacrifice. If
you labor in a spirit of service, it will lead to self realization (talks with
ashram women, 1926 CWMG Vol.32, p-491).
Gandhi wanted people to consume
locally produced goods and particularly village industry produced goods instead
of imported or factory goods. Diwan and Lutz point out that Swadeshi demands the
sacrifice of utility for the sake of loyalty. The trade-off between utility and
loyalty is exemplified in Gandhi’s explanation of the principle of
neighborliness. He said, “I refuse to buy from anybody anything however nice
or beautiful if it interferes with my growth or injures those whom nature has
made my first care” (Swadeshi and Nationalism, Young India, 12 March, 1925).
At a women’s meeting in 1919, he pointed out that “Swadeshi is that spirit in
them which required them to serve their immediate neighbors before others and to
use things produced in their neighborhoods in preference to those more remote.
So doing they served humanity to the best of their capacity. They could not
serve humanity neglecting their neighbors” (Diwan and Lutz, “Essays in Gandhian
Economics”, p-14).
Trusteeship
and Non-possession
Gandhi believed that when we take
more than what we need, it amounts to stealing. He says, “We are not always
aware of our needs and most of us improperly multiply our wants and thus
unconsciously make thieves of ourselves. Today we only desire possession of a
thing; tomorrow we shall begin to adopt measures, straight if possible, crooked
when thought necessary, to acquire its possession” (Gandhi from Yeravada
Mandir, pp 14-15). Gandhi thus believed that ownership was a form of violence.
He felt that there is enough in nature for everyone and therefore there is no
need for exploitation. Accumulation of wealth is a sin and non-possession will
end inequalities of wealth.
According to Gandhi’s theory of
trusteeship, the rich will be free to possess their wealth but will use only
that part of their wealth which is required to satisfy their needs and hold the
rest in trust for the use of the society. Non-violence was subsumed in the
principle of trusteeship and if the rich did not come forward to help the poor
by holding their surplus wealth in trust, Gandhi had the weapon of
non-cooperation for he believed that the rich cannot accumulate wealth without
the cooperation of the poor. Gandhi wanted to delegitimize gross accumulation of
wealth and follow trusteeship as a principle of economic conscience. Gandhi felt
that the rich could be persuaded through moral pressure to become trustees. And
if the capitalists still refuse to act as trustees, ownership of wealth can be
regulated through legislation (Practical trusteeship formula, Harijan,
25th October, 1952). The legislative measure quoted here was approved
by Gandhi during his lifetime. Gandhi’s belief in trusteeship came from his
belief in non-violence and non-possession (aparigraha). Possession
necessarily implies storage of wealth and violence is inevitable in defending
the stored wealth. Hence, non-possession or trusteeship becomes complementary to
non-violence.
Gandhi was against capitalism but
not the capitalists. He was against the destruction of the capitalist class and
wanted to use them as managers of industries. He said, “In reality, the
toiler is the owner of what he produces. If the toilers intelligently combine,
they will become an irresistible power. That is how I do not see the necessity
of class conflict. If I thought it inevitable, I shall not hesitate
to preach it and teach it”. (A Handbook of Sarvodaya, Part-2
by Subhash Mehta, pp 69-72, Ch.10 Economic Philosophy).
While answering a question at a
Round Table Conference in England on the mechanism to bring about trusteeship,
Gandhi replied, “…..My means are non-cooperation. No person can amass wealth
without the co-operation, willing or forced of the people concerned”.
Further, he advised the workers to unite for a non-violent struggle and aimed at
a stateless society through non-violent revolution because anything secured
through violence will fail in the end.
The problem of economic inequality
and equitable distribution of income and wealth was sought to be addressed
through the principle of trusteeship. The principle of non-violence was at the
center of Gandhian thought. The modern world sought to address the problem of
economic inequality through violent means. For instance, Marx prescribed class
conflict and the annihilation of the capitalist class and the modern welfare
State sought to achieve equitable distribution of income by imposing heavy
income and corporate taxes on the rich and redistributing it in favor of the
poor. While class conflict was essentially and actively violent and inhuman, the
policy of heavy taxation created a feeling of grudge amongst the tax payers
against the poor and perpetrated the classes of haves and have-nots. By
propagating the principle of trusteeship, Gandhi also sought to create a single
class of workers with the class of entrepreneurs as specialized workers who
would hold capital in trust and function as the trustees of the society. A
trustee is a person who holds public wealth in trust. He or she manages wealth
to bring about economic welfare of the people. In order to ensure equity, Gandhi
said that a person should only use that part of his wealth which is required for
his personal well being and give away or use the rest for the economic welfare
of the society. In this way, every person should become a trustee.
Gandhi wanted capitalism to be
replaced by trusteeship where in no person will accumulate wealth beyond his
needs and part the balance of his wealth to the trust and production will not be
guided by desire but by need. Mr. Jamnalal Bajaj was greatly inspired by the
Gandhian idea of trusteeship and went on to set up the Jamnalal Seva Trust at
Wardha in Maharashtra.
Sarvodaya
or the rising of all
Sarvodaya means the rising of all
in the society. In the economic context, it means the economic welfare of all.
Gandhi believed that the followers of non-violence will not stop at the
utilitarian principle ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ but move ahead and
achieve the greatest good of all. The rich could uplift their moral statue and
walk the ethical path by giving up their privileges and become trustees by
dispossessing their wealth for the welfare of all. Gandhi paraphrased John
Ruskin’s book ‘Unto This Last’ into Gujarati with the title ‘Sarvodaya’.
Literally, sarvodaya means the rise of all human beings. The society should
function as an organic whole rather than being disjointed into economic classes
or social castes. In order to maintain purity in personal life, Gandhi wanted
the people to follow vegetarianism and be teetotalers. The practice of
non-violence, respect for others religion, serving neighbors and eradicating
untouchability were at the core of the principle of Sarvodaya. Gandhi felt, if
justice and right wages were given to all, no person will be able to accumulate
wealth beyond his requirements. According to Gandhi, women epitomized
non-violence. She must enjoy equal rights with men. There should be no
illiteracy and disease in the society. Poverty and cowardice shall be banished
from the society following Sarvodaya. A Sarvodaya State shall be a secular
State. The Sarvodaya program as charted out by Gandhi and supplemented by Dr.
Rajendra Prasad, the first President of independent India has the following
features:
1.
Farmers and workers
will be at the center of a Sarvodaya State. There will be no exploitation of the
farmers and the workers. To this end, the farmers and the workers should
organize themselves.
2.
Children will be
given basic education and adults will be given basic as well as technical
education.
3.
Village industries,
health and hygiene will be emphasized.
4.
The villages to
become self sufficient republics.
5.
Every household will
spin yarn in the village.
6.
There shall be social
justice and communal harmony.
Industrialization or Khadi and
Village Industries
Reflecting on the problems of
industrialization, Gandhi observed that “any machinery which does not deprive
masses of men of the opportunity to labor but which helps the individual and
adds to his efficiency and which a man can handle at will without being its
slave was a good thing” (A discussion, Harijan, 22nd June, 1935).
In fact, he would prize every invention of science made for the benefit of
all…the heavy machinery for work of public utility which cannot be undertaken by
human labor has its inevitable place but all that would be owned by the State
and used entirely for the welfare of the people. I can have no consideration for
machinery which is meant either to enrich the few at the expense of the many or
without cause to displace the useful labor of many. Gandhi was therefore against
labor displacing machinery and conceded the use of labor displacing machinery
only when enterprises using such machinery were State owned because the profits
made by State enterprises were used for the welfare of all. Any private use of
such machinery would lead to concentration of economic power and wealth.
Further, the workers working for the State enterprises will be working under
ideal conditions unlike private enterprises where there is little concern for
the working conditions of the laborers.
Gandhi believed that human beings
cannot become the slave of the machines and in fact the machine must help the
man in his work. The workers must have the freedom and control over the
machines. Gandhi wanted the decentralization of all economic functions and
industries. In 1928, Gandhi said, “According to me, the economic constitution
of India and for that matter the world should be such that no one under it
should suffer from wants of food and clothing. In other words, everybody should
be able to get sufficient work to enable him to make the two ends meet. And this
ideal can be universally realized only if the means of production of the
elementary necessaries of life remain the control of the masses. These should be
freely available to all as God’s air and water are or ought to be, they should
not be made a vehicle of traffic for the exploitation of others. This
monopolization by any country, nation or group of persons would be unjust. The
neglect of this simple principle is the cause of destitution that we witness
today not only in this unhappy land but other parts of the world too”. (A Hand Book of Sarvodaya,
Part-2, compiled by Subhash Mehta, P.No.70, Ch.10: Economic
philosophy).
India lives in her villages and
hence the village economy must be revived. In order to create village swaraj,
Khadi and village industries must be established. Gandhi considered the spinning
wheel as a symbol of non-violence and akin to the sun in the solar system with
the village industries as the planets within it. A person wearing khadi will
abjure violence and hypocrisy. In 1920, Gandhi estimated that each person would
require 13 vars (measure of cloth) of cloth. The textile mills in India are
incapable of taking care of the clothing requirements of Indian people. Hence,
Khadi industries should be promoted to make villages self-sufficient. Khadi
industry was sought to be promoted to make value addition to make the final
product within the villages so that the villagers become the beneficiaries of
the value addition/final product. Gandhi proposed that every villager must have
one spinning wheel/charkha and every village must have one or more looms to make
Indian villages self sufficient in terms of khadi. When each villager produces
his own cloth/khadi, the economic and moral life of the people will be
revived.
The khadi industry needs less
capital and only elementary training is required to be given to the people. It
ensures certainty of employment income to the villagers because Gandhi felt that
there is a ready and unlimited market for khadi. Khadi unlike agriculture is not
a seasonal industry but a yearly industry. In order to promote Khadi and village
industry, Gandhi suggested the following measures:
1.
Spinning yarn be made
an essential and compulsory subject in all primary and secondary schools in the
country and cotton may be cultivated in non-cotton growing areas also. The
weaving industry may be organized through cooperative institutions.
2.
Employees from the
departments of education, cooperation, municipality, zilla parishads and gram
panchayats must pass the spinning yarn examination.
3.
Cloth produced by
mechanized looms be banned in areas where hand spun cotton clothe is abundantly
available.
4.
Government employees
must use handloom clothes.
5.
Old textile mills
should not be permitted to expand capacity and new mills should not be set up
and textile imports should be banned.
Other village industries such as
jiggery making, handicrafts, rope making, oil pressing, soap making, flour
making, match box making, paper making, leather making, toy making, mat making
and honey extraction be promoted. These industries will provide gainful
employment to the villages and the surplus can be sold to the cities. These
industries need only rudimentary capital and basic skills which can be easily
arranged and cultivated or imparted. The village industries will also play an
important role in providing nutritious food for the villages. He emphasized on
the consumption of hand milled coarse wheat flour which is more nutritious than
the powdered machine milled wheat flour. Similarly, jiggery is more nutritious
than sugar which is artificially manufactured in the sugar mills. The oil
extracted by the village oil presser is again free from adulteration than the
factory made refined oil. Coarse rice is more nutritious than the polished rice
of the rice mills. Thus the village industries will not only provide employment
and alleviate rural poverty but also provide healthy and nutritious food the
rural population.
Epilogue
Six decades down the line, India
today faces all kinds of problems across the segments of the population and
across the length and breadth of the country. In his times, there were seven
lakh plus villages and today we have six lakh plus villages. More than one lakh
villages have got transformed into urban areas. There are overcrowded villages
and overcrowded cities. Unemployment is widespread both in the cities and in the
villages. Poverty is widespread across the country. There is mal-nutrition,
disease and early death amongst a large number of poor. Then organic farming and
organic food was the order of the day. Today, the affluent is willing to pay
double the price for what is called organic food which is sold through the
modern retains food chains. What is what was consumed by the ordinary person
until the early 20th century and even today, in the villages, has
become fashionable amongst the urban-elite.
It is true that India cannot be
isolated from the comity of nation States which are rapidly industrializing and
growing and some of these have already become developed and powerful nation
States. India must compete and run along with other to find her place in the sun
and to do that India has no alternative but to go along with rapid
industrialization and economic growth which means increasing the pace of
urbanization or transformation of villages into cities. However, the problem
confronted by Gandhi during his times continues to confound us to this day. In
the name of modernization, we neither have modern cities nor have we modern
villages. What we have today in the name of cities and villages are both moth
eaten.
The heavy industry city centric
model of development paid lip service to rural development leading to massive
rural to urban migration. Today the so called great metropolises of India do not
provide any comfort to the ordinary man. The village swaraj model of development
could have been implemented in select villages of the country by ensuring
sufficient flexibility in the techniques of production so that these villages
not only attain self sufficiency but also generates sufficient agricultural and
village industry surplus for the growing urban population of the country. More
and more villages could have come under the village swaraj model under various
five year plans and over the years the village swaraj model could have evolved
to be in sync with the changing times without losing sight of the basic
objectives. Industrialization, urbanization and village swaraj could have
simultaneously taken place and perhaps the growth of overgrown villages and
cities with their attendant evils could have been avoided.
References
1. India of My Dreams, M. K. Gandhi, Compiled by R. K. Prabhu,
Navajivan Publishing House, 1947.
2. A Handbook of Sarvodaya, Part One, Compiled by
Subhash Mehta, Geeta Prakashan, 2004.
3. A Handbook of Sarvodaya, Part Two, Compiled by
Subhash Mehta, Geeta Prakashan, 2004.
4. Mahatma Gandhi - His Life and Times, Louis
Fischer, Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 2003.
5. The Story of My Experiments With Truth, M. K. Gandhi,
Translated by Mahadev Desai, NPB, 2008.
6. Gandhi A Life, Krishna Kripalani, NBT,
India.
7. Village Swaraj, M. K. Gandhi, Compiled by H. M. Vyas,
Navajivan Publishing House, 1962.
8. Studies in Gandhism, Nirmal Kumar Bose,
Navajivan Publishing House.
9. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, Judith Brown and Anthony
Parel, Cambridge University Press
*
Krishnan Nandela is working as Associate Professor & Head, Dept of
Economics, Dr. T. K. Tope Arts & Commerce Senior College, Parel, Mumbai –
400 012, MS, India.
Email: krishnannadela34@gmail.com
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October 30, 2012, 1:31 am 22
Comments
Is India’s Rising Billionaire Wealth Bad for the Country?
By VIVEK DEHEJIA
Amit Dave/ReutersMukesh
Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries is the richest Indian according to the
Forbes Billionaires list 2012.
The strength and direction of the Indian economy may be up for debate, but
one remarkable fact is not: There has been massive growth in the number and
wealth of billionaires in India since the economic liberalization measures in
1991.The phenomenon has often been compared to the United States’ experience in the latter part of the 19th century. This was a period evocatively described by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner as America’s “Gilded Age,” a time characterized by industrialists so wealthy and powerful that they came to be pejoratively called “robber barons.”
According to the 2012 list of the world’s billionaires, compiled annually by Forbes, 48 of the 1,153 billionaires are from India, accounting for a little over 4 percent of the total. This compares to India’s share of global output at 2.6 percent when compared using nominal exchange rates, or 5.7 percent when compared using “purchasing power parity” exchange rates.
By this metric, India’s share of billionaires in the global total seems comparable to its overall share of the global economy. But look more closely, and a different picture emerges.
A recent study by the economists Aditi Gandhi, formerly of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, and Michael Walton of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard attempts to parse the sources of the wealth of India’s billionaires as well as placing the Indian experience in comparative perspective. The data reveals a staggering increase in billionaires’ wealth as a percentage of national income in India, from a low point of less than 1 percent in 1996 to a whopping 22 percent in 2008.
That number has dropped off as a result of the global financial crisis and plummeting stock markets in India and elsewhere, but as of 2012 it stands at just under 10 percent.
How does this compare to other countries? India is now on par with the United States and Mexico, where billionaires’ wealth in both countries is about 10 percent of national income. Among the large emerging economies known as the BRICs, (referring to Brazil, Russia, India and China) India is more unequal than China (where the comparable statistic is below 5 percent) and amazingly even with Brazil (a little above 5 percent), historically a country noted for wide disparities in wealth and income.
Among the BRIC countries, only Russia has a higher share of billionaires to national income (pushing 20 percent) – and that in a country famous for its oligarchs, latter-day robber barons who emerged during the heady days of former President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, when Russia held the dubious moniker of being the “Wild East.”
The other important finding emerging from Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Walton’s research is that 43 percent of India’s billionaires came from sectors that the researchers classify as “rent-thick,” that is, those enjoying what economists would consider above-normal profits because the companies possess certain privileges. What is more, these billionaires account for a majority (about 60 percent) of the total wealth of India’s billionaires.
The Forbes list of richest Indians, released last week, is full of businessmen and women from “rent-thick” sectors: real estate, construction, infrastructure, media, cement and mining. These are sectors in which the government continues to play a large role, in the form of licenses and other forms of control, and in which there’s a presumption of a government-business nexus – or collusion, to use a less flattering term, according to Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Walton.
For example, they contend that “the real estate sector is well known for the large number of ‘black’ transactions, and the nexus between politicians and realtors has been documented in recent scams.”
An obvious inference, although one difficult to prove rigorously, is that the above-normal profits earned in industries like real estate or cement accrue because of the cozy relationship between business and government.
There is some heartening news, though, in the study by Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Walton. According to their analysis, the majority of Indian billionaires are “self-made,” and around 40 percent represent wealth that is “inherited and growing,” like the Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil, sons of the late Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of the family business empire.
Not surprisingly, the self-made billionaires are in fields like information technology, which are offspring of the 1991 economic reform measures, and not holdovers from the era of the “license raj.”
Why might this be important? According to research, there is a positive correlation between economic growth and the wealth of self-made billionaires, while there is a negative correlation between growth and inherited wealth. It’s impossible to establish a conclusive cause-and-effect relationship, but the finding is at least suggestive of the fact that economies populated by those whose wealth is self-made are more dynamic than those that rely on the perpetuation of existing economic elites and their descendants.
As Jayant Sinha, an investment adviser, and Ashutosh Varshney, a political science professor at Brown University, have argued in a column in The Financial Times, the current state of the Indian private sector, which they dub “curry capitalism,” requires sweeping reforms, intended to ensure that cronyism and corruption are curbed while India’s entrepreneurial ethos is given a much-needed boost.
What is more, even in the United States, there is an increasingly urgent debate on whether worsening income and wealth inequality, as captured by the importance of billionaires to the economy and other factors, is helpful or harmful for economic growth, the subject of a recent Times “Room for Debate” feature.
In an era of flagging growth rates and a renewed reform impetus from the incumbent government, the possibility that excessive inequality could be bad for the economy may be the most important lesson to come out of the Forbes billionaire list.
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