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30 Years of Economic Reforms – A Saga of Growing Inequalities -Prabhat Patnaik

-Newsclick.in

The votaries of economic reforms miss the point that while it may have increased GDP growth rate, it has worsened the conditions of the working people.

It is 30 years since India adopted neoliberal policies in 1991, though some would date their introduction even earlier to 1985. Newspapers are full of assessments of the impact of these policies on the economy, and liberalisers from Manmohan Singh downward, have suddenly become visible, lauding their handiwork, while lamenting at best that the benefits of liberalisation have been unevenly distributed. Manmohan Singh has recently said that “a healthy and dignified life for every Indian must be prioritised”. One wonders what prevented him from doing so when he was at the helm of affairs.

Such an assessment, that liberalisation greatly boosted India’s GDP growth rate and thereby improved the lives of almost every Indian, lifting vast masses of them from the clutches of absolute poverty, even though it increased income and wealth inequality in the country, would be commonly accepted, not just by the votaries of liberalisation, but even by its critics, including some even on the Left. The difference, it would appear, relates only to what weight one gives to inequality as opposed to growth.

The liberalisers would even argue that the ill-effects of inequality would disappear if the growth rate in the economy is revived and increased, for which the “animal spirits” of the capitalists that determine how much investment they make have to be boosted.

And the Narendra Modi government would claim that boosting the capitalists’ ‘animal spirits’ is precisely what it is doing through its anti-labour and anti-peasant policies, some of which the Congress, while not having a different analysis, is curiously opposing. Thus the Bretton Woods institutions’ claim that there is a broad “consensus” on neoliberal policies among major political parties, would seem also to extend to the evaluation of their effects on the economy over the last three decades.

This entire perception, however, is wrong for at least two reasons. First, it sees the capitalist sector of the economy as being a more or less self-contained sector, detached from the rest of the economy, whose main effect on its surrounding environment is simply to pull more and more labour from it. And the lament is that it has not done so sufficiently.

In reality, however, accumulation within the capitalist sector invariably impinges on the world existing outside of it in multiple ways. It draws not only labour from the world outside of it, which in an economy with massive labour reserves, is a good thing, but also land, and other resources including fiscal resources (for instance, subsidies to capitalists for boosting their “animal spirits” come at the expense of subsidies to peasant agriculture that have traditionally contributed to its viability); and the growth of the capitalist sector also pulls demand away from the traditional sectors.

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