People's Democracy

Reform The Reformer  

15 Years Of Reforms  

By our Commentator  

SEVEN hundred CEOs of India Inc are reportedly celebrating 15 years of economic reform on October 6 with M/s Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram, Montek Singh Ahluwalia etc at the centre stage. For them it is celebration time. Interestingly, another reformists brigade M/s Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie, Chandrababu Naidu, S M Krishna are left out. Obviously, because they are not in power as people have rejected them for their brand of reforms.  

CEOs are not elected by the people and therefore are not accountable to the people. But the political executives are elected and accountable. M/s Singh and Chidambaram (if not Ahluwalia) should know that their political outfit had also faced the same fate when they initiated the so-called ‘reforms’ for the corporates, of the corporates and by the corporates. Not surprisingly profits of the corporates during this period ballooned to an all time high. So they have reason to rejoice.  

But what about the Aam Admi? What about the farmers, what would they celebrate? Suicide of more than a lakh of their community? They could have celebrated if some one would have talked about “land-reforms” on the lines of what has been done in West Bengal, Kerala or Tripura. But instead they, during the last 15 years, see huge rise in input costs like power, fertilizers and seeds. Add to it the cost of diesel and the farmer’s products are not getting the cost because the reformer, in the second stage, has thrown them to the mercy of private traders, instead of increasing the minimum support price.  

Is it matter of rejoice for the peasants? Why peasant, for the nation as a whole? From a food surplus country we are now back to square one and importing wheat. Fifteen years of reform has led to the dismantling of the public distribution system (PDS) and rations for poor and lower middle class are on the verge of collapse. An export-oriented and import-friendly reform process has led to closure/sickness of more than 1.5 million small scale industries and 5,500 medium/heavy industries. The period saw about 60 crore people earn less than 2 dollars a day and 30 crore people less than a dollar a day with 15 crore unemployed. 

Reform for whom? When this question is being treated as an epithet against the initiator of such reform, or when through corporate media cacophony a hallucination is created that “there is a consensus on reform”, then the main task before the people is to reform the self-styled World Bank-IMF trained reformers.