Opinion Nuclear discontent

Karat says that the government has not divulged the real cost of the reactors to be set up in Jaitapur. He claims that protests have erupted in other places too,Chhaya Mithi Virdi in Bhavnagar district in Gujarat,Kovvada in Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh,and Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu. The fifth site — Haripur in West Bengal — has already been abandoned after local opposition. Karat asks the UPA to heed the voice of the people and halt all plans to import nuclear power reactors.

“Along with this,the regulatory authority to be set up to oversee the safety of nuclear plants has to be genuinely independent and autonomous,unlike the bill presented in Parliament… There has to be a safety review of all existing nuclear plants and this must be conducted by an independent committee. Only this will reassure the people,” he says.

Get real

The People’s Democracy editorial rubbishes the Planning Commission’s Human Development Report,which claimed that SC/STs and Muslims are finally catching up with the rest of the country on important human development indices.

It claims that the conditions for these sections,notwithstanding national aggregate statistics,has not improved in any significant sense. “Such hype about India’s ‘success story’ obfuscates the reality presented by the very same report of the Planning Commission,” it says. “The report shows that today (2004-2005,the last year for which data is available),nearly 31 crores of our people live under the officially defined poverty line… Since 1973-74 (when poverty was first measured in India) and 2004-05,the number of officially defined ‘poor’ has come down by a mere 1.9 crores.”

It adds: “The overall per capita intake of calories and pulses (protein) has fallen by 8 per cent between 1983 and 2004-05 in the rural areas and by 3.3 per cent in the urban areas.” Besides,half of India’s children under the age of three are malnourished,which is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa,it says. “This is the reality check,” it concludes.

The end of capital

The CPI predicts that the “deepening crisis of international finance capital” will engulf even countries that had escaped the severity of the 2008 global recession,like India. An editorial in New Age says that even the economist prime minister,Manmohan Singh,has suggested that India may no longer remain an exception,and that the documents adopted at the IBSA summit reflected the concern of developing countries. “The protagonists of economic neoliberalism — the prescription doled out by international finance capital and its tools like the IMF and the World Bank — have been forced to admit that with these policies,there is no escape from price rise,” it says. The editorial questions the prediction that prices will ease after March.

With the Occupy Wall Street protests gaining momentum,it says time is closing for a “concerted attack on the capitalist order itself,particularly its new avatar,economic neoliberalism,that was very proudly presented as the only alternative path of development since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe.”

“This ‘only alternative’ has caused the severest economic crisis in the past one century… Despite all the rhetoric,capitalism is bound to collapse,” it concludes.