Opinion PRIVATE PROFITEERING

“Attracting private capital with opportunities for adequate profit to build public assets and infrastructure is necessary for India’s economic development. But to place public assets for private profit maximisation is an entirely different concept. By doing this,the Planning Commission itself is planning the demise of economic planning in India,” it says.

The article alleges that PPP projects in the infrastructure and social services sectors have resulted in the “jacking up” of user charges. It also claims that governments at the Centre and state are willing to pay private educational institutions huge sums to admit students from weaker sections of society,rather than spending a fraction of that amount to start schools and colleges. Citing the Right to Education Act as an example,it says that “while the elite schools may be unhappy,the budget private schools would make a windfall profit… universal Right to Education,international experience shows,can never be achieved without (a) wide network of state-run neighbourhood schools.”

AIRPORT LOOT

In the same issue,CPM Rajya Sabha MP K.N. Balagopal criticises the 345 per cent hike in airport charges at the Delhi airport approved by the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority. Balagopal calls it “loot” and argues that the “primitive accumulation of capital is happening with the strong support of the government.”

He says that the AERC permitted increase in the user development fee despite the fact that the Airports Authority of India (Major Airport Development Fee) Rules,2011 was pending scrutiny of Parliament. “Actually,the rules were framed because the Supreme Court,in a judgment,banned collection of this fee without proper rules and regulations,” he says.

“Unfortunately,the Supreme Court only examined the technicalities of rule-making and the administrative competence of the government to collect the fee,rather than going into whether there was any genuine necessity of charging development fee or whether the contractual obligations and undertakings of the airport developer permitted such collection,” he says.

Balagopal argues that there was no provision to collect a development fee or a commitment to facilitate its collection. “The permission to collect development fee is an illegal administrative decision on the part of the government and this was upheld by the Supreme Court… these rules have been framed to overcome the ‘technicality’ and allow private firms to reap huge sums of money,” he adds.

WATER POLICY

An article in the CPI weekly New Age argues that while there are “some positive clauses” in the draft national water policy,the purpose of the policy announced by the Centre was to “exploit water resources to get financial profits by the multinational and corporate sector.”

It says that the policy has several clauses that treat water resources as a financial resource and clarifies that the Left would oppose the policy in its present form. Demanding changes in the policy,the article says that the utilisation of water resources and the irrigation system should be in the public sector and that the “private sector should not be introduced”.

It claims that ever since India started to liberalise the economy,efforts were made to utilise national resources as financial assets. It says that such initiatives marginalised the public sector. “(The) public sector is being reduced and the major share is given to the private sector. In practice,liberalisation means reduction of the importance of the public sector… in the present context,it means to exploit the people and farmers in India by weakening the self-reliance of the country”,it says.