Lopsided growth
The corporate financial fiasco of Satyam Computers appears to be only a tip of the iceberg that has spread a cover of skepticism and a grave sense of insecurity over the much- bragged-about economic growth India has achieved since the implementation of the governments ground-breaking policy on liberalization. Relatable is the episode of the feud between the "Reliance" brothers that rattled the government and financial institutions, including the stock markets, a few years ago.
The most recent incident inv
lving the World Banks debarment of Wipro Technologies and Megasoft for having meted out "improper favours" to the bank staff is a dent on the "India Shining" image, which does not rule out the possibility of more skeletons from tumbling out of the nations corporate cupboards. While the increasing fears of the investor publics require being pre-empted on the one hand, the discouraged and anxious youth awaiting jobs in the IT sector demand motivation for opportunities elsewhere on the other.
These unfortunate precursors put on view that Indias celebrated economic growth&'supposedly unnerved China and put a match to the underbelly of the United States of America&'is one of lopsided that has engendered from too much money in too few hands. The information technology, the pied piper of the youth, undoubtedly, was instrumental in bettering the lifestyle of hundreds of thousands in India, it made certain the overnight development of infrastructure in cities, and provided a sophistical comfort to the urban milieu, which eventually widened the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots.
India is the home to nearly seventy percent of a rural population, predominantly dependent on agriculture and spread across more than 638,000 villages. The seemingly rapid growth of the cities attracts even the compulsive rural citizen. Although the uncanny knack of adapting ourselves to new scenarios credits admiration, we tend to reveal a tearing hurry in embracing a change that is particularly an influence of the West.
It was a rather smooth transition for India from the agricultural age to that of the industrial, unlike the hasty shift from the industrial to that of the information age. The resultant neglect of agriculture led to a large-scale exodus of people from the rural to the urban areas. They clung to the hemlines of the cities like infants to their mothers, devoid of any rationale. Today, the cities are bursting at their seams unable to withstand the social and economic pressures. In his book The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra deduces that the core challenge of our time is to create and nurture sustainable communities. Any developing nation ought to admit, with humility, that the realisation of a sustained system itself depends on the concerted cooperation among its diverse parts. Here, Charles Darwins idea of competition, "survival of the fittest", fails to gain consequence.
"Sustainable growth" is an oft-repeated rhetoric of every one of the governments that perch itself on the policy-making platform and fails to ensure its implementation. Successive governments cool off in the deluge of the media blare on higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP), lowering of inflation, sops for SEZs, so on and so forth. The government has managed to rein in the inflation rate below six percent; nonetheless, the prices of the essential commodities remain the same, at least in my town.
Some time last year, I happened to watch a news capsule on a regional television channel in which some farmers in Karnataka vouchsafed the benefits of collective farming, in about one hundred acres, without any governmental support realising profit margins of as high as forty percent. "Rurbanisation"&'the concept of developing the rural areas by way of providing latest communication and transportation facilities and roads to give them easy access to the urban limits, thereby prevent human exodus and creation of concrete jungles&'could be one of the vital answers to the problems. We can almost certainly parry away the despair born out of distress signals such as ecological destruction, social breakdown, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation if we manage, according to author Joanna Macy in World as Lover, World as Self, to overcome our problem of attempting to filter our negative information and lose our capacity to address problems creatively.
P. E. Thomas thomasmediastudies@gmail.com
CV enclosed
แสดงความคิดเห็น