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Poverty/Inequality

Draft National Forest Policy sets up another battle over Forest Rights Act

22nd June 2016

Nitin Sethi reports: The government has made public its draft National Forest Policy, to replace the existing one crafted in 1988. Incorporating consequences of climate change but entirely ignoring one of the three forest related laws, the Forest Rights Act, the policy brings new focus to plantations, growing trees outside forest lands and wood industry….

P.Sainath, People's Archive of Rural India

Consume more, pollute more, pay less, ask for more dams: The average Indian city’s water policy

14th June 2016

A resident of Pune, Maharashtra’s second-most developed city, uses five times as much water as her counterpart in Latur, the district most ravaged by drought in south-central Marathwada region. That’s the extent of water inequality in Maharashtra, according to a new analysis, characterised by disproportionate availability and consumption of water across regions, crops and consumers….

Spotlight: The secretive Bilderberg meeting of global elites

12th June 2016

Martin Parker writes: We live in an age of conspiracies about a world shaped by shadowy plots, secret organisations and deals behind closed doors. Since at least the mid-1960s, the Bilderberg meetings have been seen by commentators on the right and left as one of the places where the New World Order does its business….

Sea level rise has washed away more than 50% of Ghoramara island, Sunderbans

Daesung Lee

India’s perfect storm: Environmental and demographic stresses building up

21st May 2016

Kanti Bajpai writes: India’s water crisis is a clear sign that a storm of epic proportions is on its way. India’s per capita water availability is now below the threshold level of 1,400 cubic metres per person. If so, India is heading from ‘water stress’ to ‘water scarcity’ and the possibility of internal water wars….

Morvarid Fernandez

With cultivable land shrinking steadily, food surplus India stares at food deficient future

19th May 2016

Maninder Dabas writes: With 35% of agricultural households having less than 1 acre of land, the shrinking of agricultural land holdings in India is a worrying trend. Since 1995-96, the average size land holding has decreased from 1.41 hectares to 1.15 hectares which accounts for the decrease of 30,000 hectares of cultivable land each year….

How our economic system is designed to promote greed, fear and selfishness

16th May 2016

Rob O’Grady writes in ‘150-strong’: Aldous Huxley suggested that “Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness,” and, on the evidence, it appears that he was right. Our current system, governed by the reconciling force of profit motive, is dominated by greed and fear – certainly not love! …

Failure of reforms: 5% of India’s farmers own a third of the land

15th May 2016

Sumit Chaturvedi reports: The 2011-’12 agricultural census and caste census, summarises the failure of India’s land reforms: No more than 4.9% of farmers control 32% of India’s farmland. A “large” farmer in India has 45 times more land than the “marginal” farmer. 101.4 million – or 56.4% – of rural households own no agricultural land….

A Banquet of Consequences: A compelling critique of all that is wrong with the world economy

14th May 2016

The essential argument of Satyajit Das’ new book is: “The 2008 crisis showed that perpetual growth is an illusion. It exposed the high debt levels, credit-driven consumption, global imbalances and excessive financialisation that underpinned an unsustainable economic model, coinciding with an emerging scarcity of energy, food and water, and increasing evidence of climate change impact.”…

Rebecca Hendin

Spotlight: Millennials who’re broke, hungry, but on trend

11th May 2016

Gayatri Jayaraman writes on India’s new ‘urban poor’, “the metro-dwelling twenty somethings who’ve internalised the pressures surrounding them, and spend a majority of their salaries on keeping up the lifestyles that they believe are essential to earning those salaries.” We present the original BuzzFeed article which went viral recently, and some of the responses it provoked….

Amita Baviskar: The drought is no longer a natural disaster

10th May 2016

In the past, water scarcity was a constraint that inspired communities to conserve water, devising locally appropriate technologies to share resources. Rajasthan’s baolis and Tamil Nadu’s eris are just two of the many traditional water harvesting systems that survive to this day. However, they have been sidelined by spectacular state projects such as large dams….

Satyajit Das: Eight triggers for a new financial crisis

9th May 2016

Investment banker turned author Satyajit Das writes: There are a number of potential triggers to a new crisis, but it will not be a single factor but an unexpected concatenation of events that result in a financial crisis. With existing political elites seen as captured by the wealthy elite, electorates are turning to political extremes….

Special: The shocking predicament of the Marathwada farmer, up close

1st May 2016

Marathwada region has seen a rise in farmer suicides due to a combination of shrinking agricultural income and an inability to repay loans. Reported suicides in the eight districts comprising Marathwada jumped by 570 per cent between 2012 and 2015. In this probing multi-part series, Tushar Dhara takes a closer look at the never-ending crisis of Marathwada’s farmers….

Charterforcompassion.org

Reform is not enough to stem the rising tide of inequality worldwide

21st April 2016

William Robinson writes: The celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has argued for a global tax on capital and redistribution through tax reform. This reformist approach to global inequality is entirely inadequate because it bypasses the questions of power and of corporate control over the planet’s productive resources that are at the very heart of global capitalism and its crisis….

Amit Verma/Forbes India

Famines and Public Distribution System in India

18th April 2016

Debarshi Das writes: The neoliberal State seeks to cut down welfare expenditure, hence it is against PDS. It also relies on the market. Although contemporary advocates of free market are not motivated by extraction of colonial revenue, in terms of policy prescription they do not differ from the advocates of free market of colonial era….

Riber Hansson

Study: Climate change takes from the poor, gives to the rich

17th April 2016

A new study finds that climate change is triggering a massive reallocation of resources to the world’s wealthiest countries. Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth’s poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities….

Cars, Capitalism and India

12th April 2016

Vidhyadhar Date writes: A developed country is not one where the poor drive cars, but one where the rich use public transport. Building more roads to reduce congestion is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. India has failed to learn from developed countries’ mistakes and is on a disastrous path of motorization….

The Hindu

India’s looming water wars can destroy everything, from Make in India to smart cities

8th April 2016

Nikhil Inamdar writes: India has the world’s largest number of people without access to clean water. The financial burden of this has fallen on its poorest agrarian communities, but the crisis is now spilling over to industries too. In Marathwada, the tanker business is the only one booming. The rest of the economy has collapsed….

The Panama Papers: Consequences of centralised money and power

7th April 2016

Charles Hugh Smith writes: If we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, we will never change anything. The Panama Papers offer damning proof of this: increasing concentrations of wealth and power free of constraint (like taxes) is not just the consequence of centralized money and state power, but its only possible output….

Global capitalism is facing three tipping points

5th April 2016

In this article, Sagar Dhara examines Capitalism’s crucial tipping points: The first, the impending energy and natural resource crisis, related to the sourcing of raw materials. The second, inequality, related to the production of goods and services. The third, global warming, which is related to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in excess of the earth’s sink capacity….

Famouseconomists.net

Bookshelf: Failed – What the “experts” got wrong about the global economy

21st March 2016

Author Mark Weisbrot says: “Behind almost every prolonged economic malfeasance there is some combination of outworn bad ideas, incompetence and the malign influence of powerful special interests”. Unfortunately, such nightmares are repeated in other places because even if the lessons are learned, they are not taken to heart, by “the people who call the shots”….