By Patricia Mukhim
Barring political parties antagonistic to the Congress and some political mavericks like Mamata Banerjee the general feeling is that the country must push for economic reforms or sink. However, the rise in diesel prices will hit the hill states of the North East that are dependent on road transport for carrying essential commodities. Prices will go through the roof if they have not already done so. True the UPA can no longer shirk economic reforms; increased revenues are important to fund its pro-poor programmes like the NREGA and its new avatar the MNREGA (Some people pronounce it Marega. Perhaps they know it is meant to kill, softly). The hike in diesel prices always results in inflation . It’s a scary situation for those whose salaries are not hiked with every surge of inflation for us here. In a state of 3 million people, hardly forty five thousand are employed by the State Government with a few thousands in central government institutions and banks etc. The large majority are daily wage earners whose incomes fluctuate. If they fall sick and cannot work, they get no pay. What is going to happen to this large majority that earns not more than Rs 100 a day (Rs 3000 monthly). How will they pay their house rent, buy food and pay for their children’s schooling? Everything has just got dearer in the last few days.
The UPA is headed by a renowned economist but evidently the country has got into the globalisation mantra without any safeguards for the poor. When you allow the markets to take over social sectors like education, water supply and health and when the country is obsessed with opening up all doors to the private sector the spin-offs are bound to be alarming. We have seen market forces in our own backyards. They have taken control of our minerals at the cost of our environment and they could not care a damn. The environment sustains the lives of many of our rural communities because we largely subsist and derive our nutrition from non-timber forest products. When the forests are destroyed part of our lives are also destroyed. There is loss of bio-diversity in food and we no longer have access to medicinal herbs. These are integral to the lives of the poor. And incidentally for every living species! You cannot eat money can you?
But why should the market care? Economic anthropologist, Karl Polanyi had written that the market economy can exist only in a market society. To quote Polanyi, “A market economy must comprise all elements of industry, including labour, land and money. But labour and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.” But that’s the reality today. We are all pawns of the market and we act out our parts, sometimes consciously and in collusion with market forces and at other times, unwittingly so.
Globalisation has entered our homes. We need to only look at our kitchen shelves to see how much of what we eat today comes from the markets in some obscure part of the globe. The supermarket shelves have a choice of coffee from Brazil to Africa. So you tend to pounce on those attractive bottles and leave out the home grown variety. Look at the range of cornflakes and muesli. And the varieties of biscuits today are mind-boggling. Good old Britannia Marie biscuits are outdated. In the book, ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India’ by Aseem Srivastava and Ashish Kothari there is a quotation by Percy Barvenik, President of the Swiss-Swedish group ABB. He defines globalisation as “freedom for my company to invest where it wants, for as long as it wants, and to produce whatever it wants, by getting its supplies and selling its products wherever it wants, and by having to endure the fewest possible constraints in labour laws and collective agreements.” It’s a hell of a definition, yet it’s spot on. This is globalisation and if we believe that there is some benign quality behind it we must be sleepwalking.
But let’s come closer home. What sort of economic model do we have today? Did we have a hand in deciding the development paradigm we want and did we have even a slim chance in working out how sustainable that development was going to be for us? In Meghalaya we don’t even have a policy for some of the most integral areas of human development – Education and Health. Education is a state subject. It is imperative that the state crafts out its own policy and not be pushed by policies articulated by the Centre. Yet the Government is out of breath trying to implement central schemes and meeting deadlines. Hence our own policies, some of them the outcomes of long, participatory processes are pending legislation. The Education Policy which was put together by the MPA Government in 2008 has neither been accepted nor rejected by the MUA. No reasons are given to us the citizens as to why it can or cannot be implemented. Yet the large number of informed participants in that policy articulation choose to remain silent… dumb. No anger, no reaction that an arduous task they undertook with such sincerity is gathering dust.
Then there is the Health Policy which was formulated after some ground research by a private university. There was a whole lot of polemics about whether the Policy was outsourced to the University or whether the University only acted as a consultant. You begin to wonder why politicians want to score points on such superfluous debates instead of studying the merits of the Policy and weeding out its demerits. Assembly sessions in recent times have become debating competitions about who can speak better than whom and on what. They are no longer about real issues. The NCP turned NPP that was so strident in its critique of the Health Policy has not even come up with a shadow policy of its own. So what are they griping about? If you don’t like something, you should be ready with an alternative. That’s what democracy is about. But in Meghalaya people shoot down projects and schemes and policies without presenting alternative models. So the clever government proceeds without a policy on anything. The good thing about not having a policy is that there is nothing to measure and therefore Government cannot be held accountable.
A policy has clear deliverables and some of the key outcomes can be measured and even critiqued. During the course of implementation of the policy, there is space for course correction if the policy fails to deliver. All this is lost if there are no policy guidelines or a roadmap. So Meghalaya continues mining without a policy. If there was a policy there would be something mentioned about environmental costs and what percentage of the profits have to be ploughed back to reclaiming devastated areas and reforesting the bald spaces. Without a policy, the mining companies or individual mine owners only need to pay the Forest department officials to get their clearances for bringing down vast swathes of forest land without batting an eyelid. That we continue to allow this to go on and that citizens don’t care one way or the other is the reason why the present government with a glib talking chief minister continues to take us for a joyride. There was talk of a Social Audit Policy but this too is in the backburner. So all in all our elected representatives both from the ruling and opposition are determined to block the passage of any far- reaching public policy. No single politician in the present house of 60 can claim to represent the people because not a single legislation of consequence which could have impacted positively on the people, has been passed in the last five years. Of the 60 MLAs, only about five asked questions in four years and got answers but never pursued the issues seriously after the sessions were over.
We have had a Congress-led Government in Meghalaya for three and a half years. At the Centre people are now disillusioned with the UPA-II and its myriad scams. But the alternatives seem far worse unless something viable evolves/emerges by 2013. It seems like democracy has failed us. Democracy has definitely left few choices for the poor. When living becomes too expensive the only other option is suicide.