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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Cautionary tales -Rakesh Kalshian

Cautionary tales -Rakesh Kalshian

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published Published on Nov 27, 2017   modified Modified on Nov 27, 2017
-Down to Earth

Jean Dreze argues that we should not leave the making of an equitable society to experts alone

What does one make of the shameful statistic that over 200 million Indians still subsist below the poverty line? How does one square it with the equally obscene distinction that we have the world’s fourth largest number of billionaires, thus making India the second most unequal nation after Russia? Indeed, how does one keep sane when one hears of farmers committing suicides or Dalits perishing in the gas chambers of others’ muck or Adivasis being bulldozed off their lands?

Ain’t this dystopia? But wait, practitioners of the dismal science called economics inform us that capitalism is complex and unpredictable, implying we cannot but live with risks. Things, we are told, will get worse first but the rising tide will eventually lift all boats as wealth accumulating at the top trickles down to the bottom. But how long will this take? Aren’t we all dead fish in the long run, as one wised-up economist tipped us off? Admittedly, economics with its forbidding gobbledegook is beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. Why, even top-notch economists couldn’t see the 2008 financial crisis coming! So how does one make sense of this depressingly messy world just so that we can stand in solidarity with the dignity and freedom of all humans?

If most economists are sorcerers who conjure up the black magic of modern economics, then there are a few renegades among them who are versed in the art of calling their bluff. Jean Dreze is one among them.

In his latest book Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone, an anthology of popular essays penned over the last 17 years, Dreze offers a sombre but insightful window into the failure and promise of social and economic policy in tackling tenacious problems of hunger, poverty, illiteracy, corruption and violence, concerns that for the “suitcase-wala” economists, if they can be contrasted thus with the “jholawala” economists (a caricature of the economic worldview of activists), pale beside their obsession with GDP and stock markets.

For instance, in his sardonically illuminating essay “Starving the Poor” written in 2001, Dreze punches big holes in the official food subsidy of R10,000 crore for the poor. For one, half of this subsidy is spent on maintaining ever-mounting stocks of foodgrains in FCI godowns. For another, the quality of subsidised foodgrains is so bad that the poor often have to buy it from the open market even as good quality grains from the subsidised kitty are siphoned off into the open market. For Dreze, hoarding food when millions are undernourished “tantamounts to mass murder”. He also shows how, contrary to common sense, keeping food prices high, presumably to benefit farmers, doesn’t benefit millions of small farmers as they sell very little grain in the open market anyway. The way out, he suggests, is increasing productivity through diverse cropping.

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Down to Earth, 30 November, 2017, http://www.downtoearth.org.in/reviews/cautionary-tales-59179


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