The island of the elite

The island of the elite
B.K. Karanjia

A burning question agitating entrepreneurs, social thinkers and futurists, and which should concern each one of us, is this: Does the direction India has taken towards globalisation truly express the needs of our people?

Expressions like "human face," "trickle-down," resemble the palliatives religious leaders offer to the poor, that whatever their suffering now, their rewards will be in the afterlife. Associating "liberalisation" with "globalisation" is also unfortunate: one does not find anything very liberal or enlightened in the globalising process so far. Globalisation's basic flaw is that it is neither of the people nor for the people.

Well-known author J.C. Kapur, in a special supplement of World Affairs defines globalisation as "a pliant, elite control system of international exploitation". Its major aim is, by maximising trade, to serve the interests of big corporations. The WTO had the poor sense some time ago to dismiss the ecological concerns of Edwin Goldsmith (author of Case Against the Global Economy) and other environmentalists as "technical barriers to trade".

After India became free and, more specifically, after Nehru died, the grasping new political class started to assume economic and political power. Consequently, a new republic was born -- what Kapur terms ``The Island Republic of the Indian Elite". Encouraged and aided by the heady winds of globalisation, this elite comprising at most a hundred million people became the beneficiary and acquired control of "the vantage points of the economy, political processes, administrative structures, judicial institutions, industrial and commercial organisations, education, research and trade unions." The deprivation of the masses continued and, indeed, worsened.

At the same time, as in all consumerist societies, people are lured by the visible symbols of glitter, even if it is beyond their reach. Globalisation tends to protect and expand the power of multinational corporations to the extent of restricting the jurisdiction of national governments to regulate their conduct. Easy repatriation of profits is extended to them and no obligation to serve environmental or socio-economic needs of the local people is insisted upon. Political sovereignty is further delimited in terms of foreign aid, World Bank and IMF loans acquiring a stranglehold. Educational standardisation creates an elitist international network alienated from the people. Even culture, which should improve the quality of human life, is being converted into an instrument for achieving material goals.

Newspaper reports today speak of a craving for education among the rural poor. Kapur proposes a model school that could become the hub of all essential services in India's villages. A complex of 5,00,000 such schools could be built at the estimated cost of Rs. 28,000 crore, which amount is probably less than the interest we are paying on our heavy international borrowings. Another encouraging factor is that India, backward in some other respects, is blazing a new trail in the development of non-conventional sources of energy, solar, wind and biomass. In this India is considered to be on a par with Germany and US and Denmark, according to international estimations. The ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources is working out a plan whereby 10 per cent of the total power generated by the year 2007 would be "sourced" from renewable energy.

As for the basic need of housing, affordable materials and economically sustainable techniques are available in the vast storehouse of national and international knowledge. Even for a daily necessity like water, we have it in our capacity to build a collection, storage and distribution system from the billions of cubic metres of monsoon water that today go waste. As Dr. Kapur puts it: ``There is no water shortage, it is just a shortage of imagination.''

The promise of globalisation is partnership of all. The reality, however, is annexation by the elite. The pursuit of material wealth has led to a phenomenal multiplication of what Gandhi called "concocted wants". We, as citizens, need to recognise the misplaced priorities of the contemporary development process and then raise our voices against them.

The writer is a senior journalist