Why there is a shifting discrepancy in the economic development of different sections of the Indian society. For one thing this is quite observational as opposed to a sample study inference. And by observational I also mean something, which is quite intuitive but quite more subjective. And this I call a red shift, as there is a literal shifting or widening of the discrepancies, which are gradually, but steadily occurring across communities and across the successive leap years. (i.e. a human readable time scale)
This might not have any connection to what I read in a local daily of today’s print news but I certainly didn’t go through the editorial. I was just thinking that this is not high time that this be given a prime space in our social and community debates. The high time was actually more than 3 years ago, when such a phenomena of shifting was germinating and actually being debated in quite moderately conscious communities such as where I was three years ago.
It was brought to my notice given my interests were always one of interesting nose poking, wherever I am situated in the economic and communal milieu of India. It was said that the rich and poor difference is tremendously widened over the current trends of actual economic prosperity of concurrent India. To relate it to the other widely discussed and connected economy is to relate it to that of China. But it so happens that the China rich and poor social divisions were something that were thought out to be quite a traditional division in par with the so called casteist divisions of India.
But I think this has to do with how the economists make sense of financial structures and phenomena which do not belong to their own perception, so when a country is better understood its actual denominations and parameters are more clearer than when they are not better understood so social and historical stigmas replace good old economic understanding of others culture and social set ups. When suddenly there are shocks and unpleasant financial quakes the stigmas themselves are given up to accommodate others value system in more respectable ways.
There is economic danger in not doing that, in not reversing wishful stigmatization of external cultures and societies. So with China the economic understanding was swift and clarity came into the Wall Street sports much sooner. But with India some stigmas are still there or will be there forever. But my interests in the beginning of this article were thought out to spot some of the errors in our own ways, in ways in which rather than address such stigmatization we ended up playing into the same economic misunderstanding that our masterful finance Gurus wanted us to believe.
One of it is to believe that by focusing on the financial betterment of the economically downtrodden strata of the Indian nation which by the way comprises of a humongous social cross section and by hoodwinking the world corporate billionaires in various ways we can create a more equitable nation for ourselves. While the spirit of such a economic policy making isn’t something I will be quite unhappy with given the conspicuous lack of the Indian billionaires to philanthrope in truer terms and in truer amounts, this is the basic reason of a red shift of the rich poor spectrum.
One example is to not allow the big business like Reliance to operate their business with their chosen monopoly, with such measures it will becomes a hideous practice for such business to make money. Remember these business organizations are as old as the political fortune makers of our country. So it’s the same people in different suits. Someone wears a Raymond while the other wears a Van Huesen. They even go to the same Country club. They drink the same liquor, they possibly ride the same brand of car, or to share their trade knowledge with each other they ride a little different variant of the similar models.
But when it comes to part ways they do so like a divorced couple. They do not share the same bedroom, but they share the same wavelength when it comes to communication, and they share the same strategies of exploitation. The economically lesser privileged do not have a choice. The Reliance decides to close (rather than foreclose) its gas stations and convenient stores but quite hideously finds other investment avenues to keep their shares floating.
And here the Government does not utter a word when they come up with their dangerously huge towers on the top of residential houses. The residents make money by permitting such dangerous practice of allowing big metal towers on their houses. What if there is a lightning, it creates the spark and distributes in the immediate vicinity of the tower, which is easily a square km of a fatality. God forbidden, big calamities do not occur, but do we need to wait till such dangers wipe out a fraction of our city population because such towers are to be found across the city. But the point was to say how careless our governmental and public consciousness could be.
By scrutinizing our big business makers in ways in which they can stop their profit making altogether but not devise alternative and safe practices we create a widening gap between those that have the shares in wealth and those that depend on the former for their livelihood. Its just one of the result of blindfolded governmental interference into suave manipulative exploitations of the private business houses. Such thoughtless policies are to be seen everywhere.
In the Indian context transparencies of business deals sanctioned by Governments and safety standards of big, small and tiny businesses are to be discussed in public discourses not just for popular consumption through evening tea time gossip centered programs but for serious scrutiny of the learned public. Such a paradigm for India is a little ideal; the city structures are often a haphazard consequence of our misthinking and complacency.
M Dash Foundation: C Cube Learning 