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Poverty/Inequality

Poverty/Inequality

Demonetisation is a permanent transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich

1st December 2016

Shankar Gopalakrishnan writes: Demonetisation’s biggest impact will be on the distribution of resources within the economy, whatever happens to the economy as a whole. Demonetisation’s a giant vacuum, sucking up the resources of the weak and delivering them to the powerful, while acting like it’s doing the opposite. More importantly, this transfer will be permanent….

The richest 1% of Indians now own 58.4% of the country’s wealth

24th November 2016

Live Mint reports: The richest 1% of Indians now own 58.4% of the country’s wealth, according to the latest data on global wealth from Switzerland based Credit Suisse Group AG. In the last two years, the share of the top 1% has increased at a cracking pace, from 49% in 2014 to 58.4% in 2016….

The Anthropocene myth: Blaming all of humanity for climate change lets capitalism off the hook

23rd November 2016

Andreas Malm writes: Mainstream climate discourse is positively drenched in references to humanity as such, human nature, the human enterprise, humankind as one big villain driving the train. Enter Naomi Klein, who in ‘This Changes Everything’ lays bare the myriad ways in which capital accumulation pour fuel on the fire now consuming the earth system….

Representative pic

Heart of rural India has suffered a stroke: P. Sainath on the note ban

20th November 2016

Acclaimed journalist P. Sainath reports from rural Maharashtra: The “Modi masterstroke”, a term contrived by assorted anchors and other clowns on television to hail an unbelievably stupid action, is spreading agony and misery in its wake across the countryside. If there’s been any stroke, it’s the one the heart of the rural economy has suffered….

Nandini Sundar: Militarization of the imagination

17th November 2016

In her new book, The Burning Forest: India’s War In Bastar, anthropologist Nandini Sundar provides a harrowing narrative of the toll this ongoing conflict has taken on the lives of Bastar’s Adivasis. Sundar demonstrates how the institutions of democracy have failed to address the human tragedy in what has become one of India’s most militarized regions….

The hidden casteism of climate change reporting in India

3rd November 2016

Pranav Prakash quotes a journalist from The Hindu: “What passes for environmental journalism in India is often bourgeoisie environmentalism, unfortunately. Air pollution in cities matter, while 300 million Indians who cook in crammed, dark, smoke-filled kitchens don’t matter. Ultimately, it’s a question of representation. Whose concerns are addressed or aired depends on who is speaking.”…

Why the Left should embrace degrowth

6th October 2016

Giorgos Kallis writes: Degrowth is a frontal attack on the ideology of economic growth. No Left party might dare to openly question growth, but I find it hard to see how in the long-term they can avoid it. Growth is not only ecologically unsustainable but, as economists like Piketty admit, increasingly unlikely, especially for advanced economies….

www.constructionweekonline.in

Creating “urban-rural bioregions” in India: a self-sustaining regional planning alternative

4th October 2016

Didier Prost writes: Development impacts on the climate, the way fertile land is used and on ecosystems are catastrophic for the environment. A “return to (the notion of) land as a common good” requires us to raise “awareness or consciousness of place” in order to rebuild relationships of co-evolution between human settlements and the environment….

Bookshelf: Business Interests and the Environmental Crisis

22nd September 2016

Book excerpt: Both corporations and governments alike, who seek to consolidate their land ownership, often push for clearly defined tenurial rights rather than have to deal with messy overlapping custodianships. Many scholars have highlighted the limits of tenurial security in achieving conservation and that a tenure creates willing stakeholders in large scale land use change….

Are we working harder to make India’s farmers suffer?

20th September 2016

Suraj Kumar Thube writes: Much of the naturalisation of the suicides has also got to do with the urban perception of rural areas and rural lifestyles. The oriental imagination still does not cease to colonise our minds in terms of perceiving the rural as a stagnant and unchanging space characterised by divisive notions of caste-consciousness….

Artists impression of Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT)

Smart cities: Too smart for their own good?

12th September 2016

G. Sampath writes: The smart city paradigm signals a momentous shift that takes the agenda of privatisation beyond the takeover of public utilities, and inaugurates the formal privatisation of governance itself. An exclusive focus on technology in discussions of the smart city paradigm can blind one to its real driver—the global crisis of capital accumulation….

Watch: Immanuel Ness on the ‘super-exploitation’ of contractual workers in India

31st August 2016

Professor Immanuel Ness, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class which has India, China and South Africa as case studies, spoke to The Wire on trade unions and labour laws in India, social relations between labour and capital in the global south, merits of spontaneity in workers’ agitations and much more….

Archival photo of a boat rally in protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam

Flashback: Arundhati Roy’s classic essay on the Narmada resistance

25th August 2016

The Narmada Bachao Andolan began 31 years ago as a protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, and went on to raise questions about the very development model India has embraced. Today, with the NBA reviving their landmark struggle for justice, we are re-publishing author Arundhati Roy’s landmark 1999 essay on the topic….

Dongria Kondh boy Kalia stands in front of the Niyamgiri hill range

Lewis Davids/Survival

Spotlight: India’s adivasis and the web of indifference

15th August 2016

India is home to about 700 tribal groups with a population of 104 million, as per 2011 census, constituting the second largest tribal population in the world after Africa. Down to Earth magazine examines the many grave threats they face from government, corporations and phenomena like climate change, and our continuing indifference to their plight….

25 years of ‘economic reforms’: The myth of growth

30th July 2016

C.P. Chandrasekhar writes: Even the kind of economic growth that liberalisation actually delivered is proving unsustainable. So, the belief that growth would remain high for years to come, delivering benefits even to those at the bottom of the income pyramid and those steeped in poverty and deprivation, has now revealed itself to be a myth….

All pics by P. Sainath/People's Archive of Rural India

P. Sainath: The sacred waters of a tanker

24th July 2016

From Ruralindiaonline.org: Rampant deforestation, extensive damming of the rivers, huge diversions of water for industrial projects and even elite resorts can be seen across the state. All these underlie Maharashtra’s terrible water crisis. They won’t get washed away by the monsoon, even if the media coverage of it dries up with onset of the rains….

Can India afford an economy obsessed with GDP growth rate?

14th July 2016

Conventional economic analysts argue that achieving adequate human development indicators require a country’s economy has to grow continuously at an appreciable rate; but, a densely populated and resource-constrained society such as ours cannot afford to ignore the implications of high energy and material consumption (which will be a consequence of high growth of the economy)….

Digital story of drought and death

9th July 2016

Osama Manzar writes: As part of a digital literacy project in Maharashtra, rural students identified the following major consequences of drought— lack of water for basic needs, irregular supply of drinking water by government authorities, supply of unhygienic water, shortage of fodder for cattle, unemployment, health issues and lack of awareness about water conservation schemes….

The stark divide between rich and poor, from above

2nd July 2016

Photographer Johnny Miller wanted to capture South Africa’s dramatic rich-poor divide from a new perspective, and decided to shoot many areas from several hundred feet in the air. The result, as seen in the series titled ‘Unequal Scenes’ , are startling. They also make us us wonder; what if Miller had attempted the same in today’s India?…

India’s heat waves spell doom for the working poor

25th June 2016

Deaths due to heat waves in India have been in the thousands–in the years 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2015 in particular. Numbers, which are how the deaths are usually reported, are class- and gender-neutral. It’s one of the grave ironies of global warming that those least responsible for it are affected the most by it….