Economic liberalisation brings more poverty! The Indian government headed by P.V. Narsimha Rao adopted the policy of economic liberalisation in 1991 with the aim of bringing prosperity to the country. Since then foreign investment worth billions of US$ has been made in the country but all this has only resulted into more poverty. The rural poverty has increased from 32 percent to 40 percent, and in States like Bihar, Maharashtra, Karnataka and UP, the poor have become poorer. The economic liberalisation policy has only helped the rich, who already had the infrastructure and resources, to corner huge sums of money without creating more job opportunities. The employment level has, therefore, gone down during all these years of liberalisation. Thousands of industrial units are lying closed, rendering millions of workers jobless. The new ventures are all going for very high tech projects, having a high degree of automation requiring minimal labour requirement. Every entrepreneur wishes to work with least labour component. As a result of all this the overall employment scenario has become very grim. No wonder, then, that the forces of nationalism in India are against those who favour liberalisation. India has an annual GDP of $300 billion, vast natural resources, and as many highly educated, skilled middle-class citizens as the total US population. For almost half a century, India's GDP grew by an average of less than 4 percent a year. Taiwan's GDP grew by an annual 8 percent during the same period, and South Korea's by 9 percent. Foreign direct investment in China, the world's largest Communist country, is now running at $37 billion a year, in India the figure is $2 billion. In India, the share of unemployed within the labour force is gradually on the rise, from 4.3 percent in 1991 to 5.5 percent in 1995. In the last two years, unemployment definitely must have gone up as the labour content of production has been declining. With employment opportunities stagnating and simultaneous growth in population, unemployment would naturally rise steadily. The Planning Commission of India has estimated that the labour force between the ages of 15 and 59 years would rise from 294.6 million in 1992 to 393.02 million in 2007. Creating jobs for them would really be a difficult task. Even in China, where the process of liberalisation is said to be quite successful, the problem of joblessness has emerged as a big social problem, inspite of the fact that around 70 million unemployed are covered by the "unemployment insurance". In China there are 150 to 160 million jobless people in the cities and villages. The high rate of unemployment is a direct consequence of the new path of economic liberalisation, or the so called, economic development. In the process of improving productivity, updating equipment and upgrading technology for modernisation, and ofcourse for profit maximisation, they resort to laying off workforce making industrialisation or the modernisation a curse for these workers. The process of the so called 'economic liberalisation' can never succeed in India if judicious use of resources, including the foreign investment, is not made and, if the labourforce is neglected the way it is presently being done. 
|
