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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Are we listening to the lessons taught in the first year of Covid-19? -Ashish Kothari

Are we listening to the lessons taught in the first year of Covid-19? -Ashish Kothari

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published Published on Apr 23, 2021   modified Modified on Apr 24, 2021

-The Indian Express

The pandemic revealed the precarious state of India’s informal sector. Localised production, trade and markets offer a better alternative to existing paradigm of development.

Another wave of COVID, another round of lockdowns, another long journey back home for migrant workers. If there is one lesson we are learning after a year of COVID-19, it is that we have not learnt any lessons, at least not the crucial ones.

2020 exposed the abysmal flaws of an economic system that drives tens of millions of people into insecure jobs that they can lose overnight, with no alternative or safety net. This is the fate of a majority of the 90 per cent of India’s workforce that is in the unorganised sector. Over the last few decades of “development”, economic policies have created a massive pool of cheap labour for the state-dominated or capitalist industrial class, adding to the already large numbers of landless agricultural labourers caught in traditional caste, class and gender discrimination. Since 1991, about 15 million farmers have moved out of agriculture, many because the economic system simply does not make farming (including pastoralism, fisheries and forestry) remunerative enough. And 60 million people have been physically displaced by dams, mining, expressways, ports, statues, industries, with mostly poor or no rehabilitation. Meanwhile, exploiting such people desperate for any kind of job, and also nature, a minority becomes wealthier by the second. The richest 5 per cent of Indians now earn as much as the remaining 95 per cent.

As Aseem Shrivastava and I showed in Churning the Earth, the Indian government’s capitulation to global financial forces in 1991 significantly increased the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of people and caused irreversible damage to our environment. Of course, not all of India’s unorganised or informal workforce is necessarily insecure; farmers, fishers, pastoralists, forest-dwellers, craftspersons, entertainers, are relatively secure if their resource base (land, nature, tools, knowledge, clientele) is intact, or if they have guaranteed access to a security net like the MNREGA. But then they are not available as cheap labour, so they or their livelihoods must be displaced in the name of “development”. The three farm laws introduced by the government last year will further hand agricultural control to corporates, creating an even bigger pool of exploitable labour. Farmers realise this, which explains the intensity and resolve of their prolonged agitation.

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The Indian Express, 23 April, 2021, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/cornavirus-pandemic-india-informal-sector-economy-7285193/


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