 We are already seeing green shoots when it comes to economic recovery. I am Joe Apiali. I work with Center for Financial Accountability. Welcome to the fourth and final session of Economy Pecha Cha jointly hosted by NewsClick and Center for Financial Accountability. Over the last few months, we have been hearing songs of magic recovery and record growth for the Indian economy. We at the Center for Financial Accountability along with NewsClick felt the need to interrogate several of these claims with insights from prominent economists, young research practitioners, senior economic commentators and social activists and it has been truly a great learning experience in mid-busting. In the course of the first three sessions of the series, we interrogated several of the numbers, the government steps towards recovery and as recovery actually meant for the people behind the number games. In this fourth and the final session, we will discuss what a genuine people-centric recovery should have looked like. We thank NewsClick for co-hosting this series and giving it the kind of shape and reach that the discussions deserve. Finally, a special thanks to our friend Paranjoy Goharakurtha, who has been such a compelling moderator for the series. It is my pleasure to introduce him. Paranjoy is a senior journalist but alongside he is also a writer, speaker, anchor, interviewer, filmmaker and a teacher. His main areas of interest are the working of political economy and the media in India and the world. He has served as the editor of Economic and Political Weekly. He has been a consultant with NewsClick. Today is also the World Human Rights Day in an increasingly unequal and intolerant world, the world with eroding social securities and particularly in India with its citizens struggling with an economic crisis and an apathic government. It is a remit in an ordinary vision of possibilities with a broader definition of rights. We look forward for this closing session of what has been a wonderful series. We will keep you all posted about the future traditions of this economic picture where in our attempt to demystify and critically evaluate the world of answers that affect each of our pockets and process. Over to you Paranjoy. Thank you Joe. Thank you for giving me the honor, the privilege to moderate this series of panel discussions. As Joe has already pointed out, this series started on the 29th of November with professors Shatukri Roy, Surajith Das and Deepasena and we looked at the tall claims that are made by the government. We dissected the numbers and it was very, very clear that the numbers just didn't gel. There were wild exaggerations. They were very, very selectively looked at. In the second section, in the second discussion in the series on the 3rd of December we had Professor Shatukri Dasgupta and Surajith Majumdar and we also had senior journalist V. Sridhar where we continued the earlier discussion and looked more specifically closely at the industrial sector. We looked at what the government's privatization plans were all about, what the national monetization pipeline was all about. And the general conclusion was that this is a government desperately short of resources and you know sort of digging and digging in the hope of finding a role mind which may never be there. But in the process, sharpening inequalities and that's a subject which we're going to discuss in greater detail today. And in the third in the series on the 6th of December, we had researchers Brinalini Jha and Kinjal Sampath where we looked at the employment numbers and the quality of employment and the quality of jobs that were being created or not created and the job losses. So in this episode, we're going to take this the concluding discussion in the series and we're going to look at what shouldn't be a people centric or a people oriented economic recovery program and why what the government has done so far has very not worked in creating a less unequal or more inclusive and a kind of economic development where the bulk of the people would benefit. So let me welcome the guests who are with me here and we'll be speaking. I'm very happy to have Annie Namala. She's a social activist working for the rights of the oppressed caste. She's been an advocate for people centric equitable development. And she's a director of the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion. And she was appointed as a member of the National Advisory Council for the implementation of the Right to Education Act in 2010. We have with us here Professor Rohit Azad. He teaches economics at the Center for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He's been very critical of the neoliberal turn that has been given to economic policymaking in this country, which has really left large numbers of people without jobs and poorer. He recently co-edited a volume called a Quantum Leap in the Wrong Direction where he's talked about the political economy of the Narendra Modi government. And he also is a proponent of green growth through energy transition that cultivates a more sustainable and a more equitable future. We will be joined shortly, he's not here with us at this particular point of time, but he will be joining us very soon, is V.B. Artvir. Professor Artvir taught economics at the Bharat Dasan University till he retired in 2008. And besides being an economist, he's also a social activist, very active in highlighting issues relating to gender literacy. He's coordinated mass literacy campaigns in Tamil Nadu in the 90s and he's also served as the president of the All India People Science Network. So I thank both of you and we will welcome Professor Artvir soon. We'll divide our conversation into three or four segments. We look at specific issues like we'll start with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or the Act. And we look at how it has become that much more important for a government and for a prime minister that had earlier described this program as epitomizing the failure of the previous governments. Congress Sarkar Ka Asafaltak Pratik to use his words which he used in the Lok Sabha. We're going to look at issues specifically relating to health care. We're going to look at inequality and we're also going to look at what now needs to be done. What's the kind of investment that we need to ensure that in the medium term and in the long term the economic recovery is sustainable and equitable. So let me start with Professor Rohit Azad and I'm going to thereafter move on to Annie Namala and let's focus on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program. At the time the economy was a lockdown the country was locked down on the night of the 24th of March 2020. Then for the next three months we saw what was arguably the biggest internal migration scene in this part of the world and perhaps anywhere in the world. And we've seen there was a second wave of the pandemic. We saw a kind of a reverse migration contrary to past trends moving people moving away from the urban areas to the rural areas and looking for jobs and we saw more and more people seeking support through the Manrega scheme. And the demand for work by households under the rural employment guarantee scheme increased hugely 89% to 2.5, 2.5 crore households in April of 2021. And we see the demand for the scheme going up despite the fact that the government has not been budgeting for it. It's supposed to be a demand within the scheme despite the fact that payments are being delayed and of course the inefficiencies and the corruption in the program. So let me start by asking Rohit Azad to look at why this scheme has become so important and also suggest ways in which this scheme can be better implemented and what the government should be doing. Please over to you Rohit. So thanks Poranjoy if I can call you that. I think the importance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act cannot be made further given the context as you said this reverse migration itself is essentially a forced reverse migration. You know the exact opposite of what we would say in economics that you have migration happening from agriculture to industry the so called Louisian transition. You actually find the exact opposite happening and happening not because of choice but because of the forced lockdown and its effect in the long run in terms of the economic crisis. So I think not only does it need to be carefully you know spent I mean not carefully not only do you require more money to be spent on it. I think there is need to go beyond the rural employment guarantee act. There is also discussion on the urban employment guarantee act. I mean people have been writing about it and I think there could not be a better time to actually think in terms of a universal employment guarantee act for a simple reason. That the unemployment has gone up during this government's time. I mean the data that they have hidden which they tried before the elections. It was at historic high but during the lockdown it obviously worsened even further. Not just that you actually also found that the labor force participation ratio itself fell which means that people were not only not getting employment. They were actually with distress withdrawing from the employment market. So you cannot stress more the importance of employment guarantee act and in the context of that I think you can have. I mean maybe during the discussion we'll have more issues around it but there are very different components of it that one could think of and given the area that I work on. I could probably talk more about that later. Rohit I'll just throw some numbers at you. According to the data of the CMIE the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy. There might be at this juncture 4 crore or 4 million fewer people who are employed than the number who were employed before the pandemic. So that's one set of figures. The other set of figures is you talked about the labor force, the labor participation rate. And we see in February 2021 this was around 40.5% which is less than what it was in January and what it was in of course in February. So we are seeing a decrease in the labor force. We are seeing really a kind of a crisis of the kind which we've never seen before. And many people believe that unemployment is perhaps at a peak which it hasn't for several decades and we don't have government data. The government's own periodic labor force survey has not coming so we are dependent on the CMIE data. Perhaps you'd like to add a little bit more before I ask Annie to comment on what is happening on the ground. No in terms of data if we look at the unemployment rate this is just an open unemployment rate. I mean unemployment rate which is not really measuring the distress driven unemployment it's not measuring disguised unemployment. So these are numbers which tell you and for a developing country such as ours these numbers actually do not mean as much as what if you were to include distress employment or if you were to include disguised unemployment. So obviously these numbers themselves which are very high I mean 8% of the labor force not in employment as open unemployment rate when it was 8.1% it's it's really really high and highest since you've had these surveys. The question is why did that happen I mean what is it of course the obvious thing is the lockdown but I think there's something probably deeper than that. This is perhaps the first time that the that an economy and this is not just true of India but globally that an economy has faced a double shock simultaneously which is a supply side shock because of a lockdown. And resulting from which a demand demand side shock as well so just imagine the kind of it's a double blow to an economy and unlike let's say a first world economy where you have a social security net or you know you have a possibility also of the government spending. So at least the demand side has been taken or to some extent taken control off in our case you because of the absence of any social security net that you have this supply side shock is not merely that you know suddenly if you lift the lockdown that shock actually disappears it's not so simple. It actually continues for much longer and that's why you know like demonetization that was again a supply side side shock from the credit side or from the money side of the economy and you can everybody knows that the prolonged effect it has had on employment in our country. Is for everybody to see so that is the kind of shock or even worse because the lockdown was an even bigger shock than that and. All the discussion around the recovery and I'm sure that has been discussed already but you know this whole obsession with the V shaped recovery and it eventually leading to an increase in employment itself is. Is problematic although the numbers would show you that there is a V shaped recovery but if I can give a simple example you know if there is a negative rate of growth which is let's say 10% or 8% in this case you go from 100 to 92 and then you suddenly see which is what the government is now projecting that you have a 9% or 10% rate of growth in the next year. You have not even reached back to the earlier level of your GDP let alone there being a recovery of growth or anything of that sort so you're not even recovered from where you started before the pandemic so it is very very important then to think in terms of what the state can do. And unfortunately the state has entirely relied so far despite all the claims to the contrary essentially on the credit side on the supply side of the economy which actually is not going to solve a problem which is completely different currently which is a demand side problem. Okay thank you Rohit, Annie you just heard what Rohit Azad has to say and he's looked at it from the perspective of an economist from looking at it from a macroeconomic point of view. You are a social activist you've seen the importance of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme what is the situation on the ground and what would you like to add to what Rohit has already talked about. Thank you Paranjoy, thank you to Centre for Finance and CFA and also the news click for this opportunity. I think it's been really a very extremely well crafted series so thank you all for working on it and Paranjoy for the moderation. Adding to what Rohit has mentioned I think we all know that the NREGA program is a centrally critical program for the labour community of our country. So what we see here is the need for employment opportunities and we've seen an uptake or a greater demand for employment opportunities under the NREGA. But what I also would like to bring together is that we do not have the full picture at all because there is one section of population who would take up manual labour under NREGA today. But there are a huge numbers of people who moved into semi-skilled, skilled service sector who are not able to take up the NREGA type kind of work. So I think while we recognise the NREGA's role in providing employment at a critical time and the government's role in need to enhance the budgets on it. Here I just want to bring in, you know, like I've talked to a number of urban women who worked in small service work, small service units where teachers of the budget schools and many of these women have totally lost out in this economic lockdown and they are not the people who are going to go back to NREGA kind of work. And even in the urban migrants who have come back there are skilled and semi-skilled people who may not go back to NREGA kind of work. So I think one is to recognise that we don't have the full story in NREGA. There are lots of population groups who are continued to be unemployed, continued to be facing the economic stress and NREGA is one answer to that. But I think the government and the economic sector will need to look at many other options where people who have moved forward in some way from manual labour are able to also explore opportunities for sustaining their growth and development. So I would say that NREGA numbers shows us some data but NREGA is not the full story that we need to be looking at. Okay. How bad is the employment situation? As you rightly pointed out, NREGA is very unskilled labour, it's manual labour. But how do you see the situation evolving from where we are today? We know that after the lockdown there has been a huge impact on jobs. Rohit has already talked about, we've discussed the reverse migration from cities to the rural areas. Would you like to look ahead and see what now according to you needs to be done? Yeah, I think, I don't think we all have the answers to everything but just looking at a few things, I think the whole lockdown and the migrants coming back was one kind of highlighting of vulnerabilities and social divides that we already had and we were not adequately recognising it. I thought the migrant coming back would make us recognise the large sections of vulnerable people whose data we don't have, whose context we do not recognise. So that would be one eye-opener and a kind of an impact for the government to really recognise these large proportions. Like today, how do we know anything about the PVTG communities? Nobody knows how they live or the NTDNT communities. So while migrants is one section that we could see very visibly during the COVID lockdown, I think it would, I mean the expectation was that if we want to recover from a pandemic of which we have no prior experience, how do we look at who are the people who are marginalised? Who are the vulnerable? What is the nature of their vulnerability? How are they surviving and sustaining and what kind of strategies do we need to build? So in that sense, I feel that the COVID is a big eye-opener for us to look at vulnerable communities across various sections and see their context and what needs to be done. So that is one dimension that I would like to look at. A second dimension I would also say is the need for state support for these communities. State measures, state support, which will ensure that their growth is sustained and they survive. Thank you so much, Ani Namala for your views on this. Professor Venkatesh Atreya, you know, so far what we've discussed is we have tried to look at the Mandrega, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. We have looked at how the whole issue of joblessness and looking at jobs a little bit. We've talked about Rohit Azad earlier said that the time it's now important to have a universal employment guarantee programme and extend the Rural Employment Guarantee Program to urban areas. And what Ani Namala has also added is that the situation on the ground in terms of jobs, in terms of employment, in terms of even unskilled unemployment is indeed very, very, very bad. And the pandemic and what has followed after the pandemic and the government's reaction to it has really sharpened inequalities. We're going to talk about that in greater detail, but let's have your thoughts on jobs and Mandrega. Rohit, can you hear me? Am I on mute? Yes, you are on mute. Good to see you for a long time, but good to see all of you. So I agree that employment is a key and this is even before the pandemic. It's a very serious issue. The pandemic has made much worse, lockdowns have made much worse, but the employment situation pre-COVID was bad enough. We had a government that was completely denial about the collapse of demand about the state economy. All of that we are all familiar with, so we won't go down the gate. But what I also want to add is that if we're going to have, and we should, we should have a much larger universal employment programme, we also need to decentralise that. At the moment, this is so much of obstruction from the union government, even for state governments which are keen to implement the Mandrega programme. The role of the union government has been very negative, unfortunately. And we've seen this in Tamil Nadu, especially, but elsewhere as well. So I think, yes, there's no two opinions. In fact, the unemployment data, that's the other thing about this regime. You don't really get creditable sources of data. And if you rely on CMI, which is the only thing you can rely on these days, but even CMI data as people like Jean-Dresseur pointed out, tend to really miss out or be really declined. So you don't really get a very accurate picture of unemployment, of its quantum and of its nature from available sources of data. So that's, you know, the long term one needs to be looking at how do we concurrently monitor the economy vis-a-vis employment. But as for policy measures now, I think we should all demand through mass movements, like the way reformers demanded through their mass movements. You must have very powerful mass movements demanding universal employment programme across the country, run as far as possible by the stakeholders themselves through decentralized elected local governments. For a start, that's what I would say. Okay. You've touched on a subject which I'd like both Rohit Azad, Annie and you to elaborate on. And this is really how actually in the recent past, we've become less centralized as an economy. We become more centralized and the side part of the story, as in the case of Manrega, the implementation of the Manrega is all depends on states, on the state governments. They have been the flow of funds has been very, very tardy. It's been constrained and the center has been rather tight-fisted and niggardly in releasing funds. Now, I'll give you a set of figures to look at and this is official data. This is government data, which says that in the June 2021 quarter, that means April, May, June 2021, 20 state governments reported an increase in expenditure and increase in expenditure to the tune of over 17%, 17.2%. However, this is the significant part of the story. The government of India, the central government kept its expenditures constant, which in real terms after adjusting for inflation implies close to a 5% fall, 4.9% fall in the expenditure by the union government. So at one level, the government of India is taking pride in its so-called spend thriftness and economists are saying you have to spend more. Why are you being so reluctant to spend more? Because this is hindering long-term and sustainable recovery. And you talk about a recession, I mean the recession that we saw in the first half of the previous financial year, that means the period from April, May, June and July over September of 2020, that the government has not tackled. The government is, why is the government so reluctant to spend? I mean, we have here a situation where everybody is saying you have to spend. The Finance Minister Nirvala Sitaraman in the middle of 2020 announces this grand so-called recovery package, 20 lakh crores, which is supposed to be 10% of India's gross domestic product. When people look at the numbers carefully, the additional amount is barely 2 lakh crores. So it's barely 1%. So yes, Professor Rohitha Azad, your views on how, if we just look at the pattern of spending. Can I just take a minute on this? We have an ultra-neoliberal government which has been centralizing all powers and instead of actually contributing to increase the amount of the economy, it's busy selling, or at least around six big sales in the so-called national asset monetization pipeline, although they would tell us technically we are only leasing, not like all the rest of the lingo we know. So we really sometimes, this is an election-driven regime, which will do something in UP tomorrow maybe, but it's not likely to listen to whatever we are saying. So we basically need to go to the people to make them here. When the people do what they did in the borders of New Delhi, the government listens, it takes a long time. Yeah, sure, I mean, I can add to you, after the ruling party does badly in the by-election, suddenly petrol and diesel prices come down and then you decide to abrogate the three controversial form laws. Yes, Professor Rohit Azad, please unmute yourself. Why they are doing it is obvious and Prof Azade has already explained it. It's not just a neoliberal government, it's literally ultra-neoliberal. GST is a good example of that as an attack on federalism. But it will not fall short in terms of announcements. So as you correctly said, this Atnirbhar package, which is 10% of the GDP, we just imagine if actually 10% of the GDP were to be spent, the recovery, I mean all the recession, every talk about recession would actually have disappeared into thin air. But what do you actually find? You find that these are all most of it and as you correctly said, a large part of it is in terms of loan guarantees, it is in terms of giving loans to not giving loans, but enabling loans for let's say street vendors when that program was launched in so many tranches, five tranches in which one of which was that the street vendors, the radiwalas, they'll get loan from bank if they were to go and take the loan. It's ridiculous, people don't have income, they are not able to sell what they already have, where and how are they going to go to the banks and take loans? Economy doesn't recover based on loans. Banks are sitting with excess reserves, there are not enough loan takers, whether from the, to some extent there is a household sector, the loans have increased, but mostly the loans have not and the people in the precarious conditions in the economy are anyway not going to go and take loans. So most of this so-called package with so much fanfare was actually not a package, it was essentially just to show that they are spending. Now, if you were to ask me what could have been done or the discussion on what could you do with this money? I think that if the same money and we say that every crisis and the crisis of this kind actually also opens up an opportunity to try something new, where you go in the reverse direction, I mean instead of privileging profit over people, you do the opposite and it's possible. For example, if I can, we think that there is a possibility if you were to spend the same thing, same amount of money on and what we call an Indian Green Deal, you would be able to actually solve three problems simultaneously. The economy is going through a triple crisis, health, economic and a climate crisis, which is in the background but actually happens to be the biggest of and the most long term effect that it is going to have on the economy. Through an Indian Green Deal, you would actually be able to solve all these crisis while making the process of recovery itself more just, more redistributive by its design. So the problem is not in terms of possibilities. I think in terms of ideas, in terms of possibilities, there are many. It's the political will of the government which is lacking and hence I totally agree with Professor Atreya that if the will is lacking on part of the government, then it needs to be forced by the people of this country to move it in a direction where redistribution becomes the center of any such recovery. I can elaborate on the program but maybe later. Yeah, sure. Okay, let me ask Annie Namala to add to what we have been discussing so far. We see the economy of this country getting more centralized. We are seeing whereas the responsibility for implementing social welfare programs are vesting with the state government, they don't have enough money. They start the funds and the government of India takes pride in actually keeping its expenditure down so that the so-called fiscal deficit doesn't go quote unquote out of control. Yes. Yes, please. Annie Namala. Thank you. I fully agree with what Professor Atreya and Rohit has said but I would like, I have an added take on this. The added take for me is that our government, whether it is this government or the earlier governments are very comfortable and convinced that the poor of this country will survive somehow. They've already done that when they said 28 rupees and 32 rupees is enough to survive and there is no data on how the poor survive. So my take is that whatever government that we've had, it may be a change in degree. But the main point about them is that the vulnerable communities, the socially excluded communities, they will somehow survive and the state accountability to them is really not there. So whether you would sort of, you know, I mean, you have no accountability to ensure whether they have education, whether they have health, whether they have water. I mean, there's really no citizens accountability to that large section which may be around 50% of our population. So when you're not really answerable to the 50% of the population, you are really not going to make provisions of plans in their favor. You would sort of make provisions and plans as per your concerns or maybe when there is a demand from a public movement like the farmers movement. But beyond that, I really don't see our governments being concerned about 50% of the marginalized populations in this country and so it does not come as a surprise that the government expenditure does not increase. To me, that added dimension of the marginalized communities, their caste, their ethnicity, their religious background that go also to the reason why our governments don't spend money on them. Professor Atreya, the government claims that it is doing a lot for the poor. The Ujwala scheme, at least one free cooking gas cylinder. The second cylinder has become too expensive but at least one cylinder has been given. Six thousand rupees to those who own even a little land into their back account. Food, free food, five kilograms of either rice or wheat, two and a half kilograms of chickpeas, chana kadal. Then we have various other welfare schemes, including the Pradhan Mantri, Avasi Yojana to build housing, the Pradhan Mantri, Gran Sarak Yojana. We have the Jandhan Yojana for opening bank accounts and giving money. So this government would like us to believe that it's doing a lot for the poor, for the welfare of the poor and the underprivileged. What is the reality of the ground? There are a lot of unannounceable Hindi schemes the government has been unleashing on us for, some of us don't follow Hindi very well. That's really a joke, I mean it's cruel actually because you look at the numbers and each of these items they're talking about. They're quite dismal and I don't want to spend a lot of time on statistics but if you, we talk about this 20 lakh crore for example. I know this is one part of it was meant for the so-called MSME, right? Now, you know what is the crisis in the MSME sector today? In fact, I redefined the MSME sector to include some big guys in the one end of it. But if you take the lower end of it, the MSME sector is absolutely in very bad shape and you talked about this 1000 rupees. What was the demand from all the opposition parties and the economists? We said for all those households which did not come into the income tax bracket, give them 7500 rupees a month for a period of 6 months and extend free grain for 6 months. This is said way back in April, May of 2020 when these unknowns were being made. That was never done despite there being a consensus across all the opposition parties and among economists. So you know to say that we gave one time 6000 rupees here, we had a one cylinder thing, meaningless. We talked about a context where there's been repeated lockdowns. I want to go back to the lockdown business. Remember the first lockdown, country-wide, undifferentiated lockdown came in March, March 22nd or 24th, if I remember. 24th of March. 24th of March? 24th of March. 24th of March. I think it took its own time because you had to settle the government in manipulation. You have to take care of Trump's visit. So one of those two items the agenda was sorted out then you had this and what was the scheme? Completely undifferentiated country-wide lockdown. How can it get more irrational than that? You don't have a differentiated lockdown. You don't look at conditions on the ground. You don't try to collect information on the nature of the pandemic. You could say okay in the beginning we didn't know about and so on but subsequently also the government's response has been invariably knee-juck and conditioned by more immediate political needs as they perceive it. So I don't want to appear super critical but I really do not see looking at the numbers on the ground and looking at the reality of the ground in terms of unemployment and what is happening in most of these small trades and industries. They are in very bad shape. Friends who have been in the MSME sector they are saying nothing is coming to us. You may say something banks say we don't have circulates. Nothing has come to us. So a lot of announcements are being made. But real spending on the ground we will know soon enough when the first is coming. One more budget will offer more concerns to the direct tax payers and to the corporates. But we will know what it is worth, how cooked up those figures are I can't say. But because credibility of government data is not so low. But we will definitely know how much spending has been on all these accounts. No matter how you add them up they will not come to even more than 2% of the GDP. The inventory is probably less than that. I am going to come to the social sector and I am going to ask I need to comment on that. But Professor Rohit Azad let me just throw a few figures at you and this will corroborate and reinforce all that has been said so far. Even if you look at the government's own figures, second quarter that is July, August, September. You look at government's own final consumption expenditure is down by 8.3% if you compare it to the corresponding period of the previous year. If you look at the private final consumption expenditure that's too down by about 7.7%. And when you look at investments in terms of the gross fixed capital formation that too is down by more than 8%, 8.2%. So even the government's own data is showing how there's been this terrible squeeze on expenditure at a time when the government should be spending more now. Yes, and it's not unexpected. I mean this is what basic macroeconomics would tell you that this is what would happen if you have a crisis and a recession of this kind. So if we were to take these three figures that you've just quoted starting with let's say investment, then it's obvious that investment depends on whether talking from perspective of those who are making the investment. Investment is going to be determined by whether I can sell goods in the market that I'm going to produce with that investment. So that is the demand side of it. The other is basically availability of credit. Now obviously availability of credit currently is not a problem. It's the demand which is the problem. Now you could say that it's a chicken and egg problem and it is indeed the case in a recession that it's a chicken and egg problem which came first. And hence it's not surprising again that the consumption expenditure also has been lagging behind. For a simple reason that if the jobs are not picking up, if the investment is not going up, where is the income which feeds into consumption going to come from? Now what do we do? Are we going to be stuck in this chicken and egg thing or can we come out of it? And coming out of it requires something which is like an economic lever which moves the economy in the opposite direction, what is called a counter cyclical policy, which is where fiscal policy becomes so important and so critical. And the government has been shying away from it. I would say that there is also this additional component of trying to keep the sensex happy. I mean whenever there is a question, when you raise a question about recovery not being good enough, everybody, not everybody, those who are pro government would throw these figures at you that globally situation is bad and hence India is also doing bad. But look at how the sensex is looking ahead and it's saying that you're going to eventually have a boom and if you're eventually going to have a boom which the sensex represents, then why should the government intervene? Because then it leads to crowding out so on and so forth. It can't get more ridiculous than that but that is exactly what the government actually is doing, believes in, genuinely or otherwise. But it's something that is determining their stand on this and informing its policy choices. Now in terms, as I said, that is wrong economics. Wrong economics for obvious reasons that if you do not do a counter cyclical policy currently, you're basically going to make the economy go further down to Abyss. And that's why it is important to go beyond your current usual supply side responses that the government is throwing at us. How do you convince them? I don't think it's a matter of convincing the government. The only way this government listens is through movements. The economists in the government, whether it's the finance minister or the economic advisor, I don't think that they are looking at what the other economies are doing. Even if you were to be a believer in let's say the neoliberal economics that you have, the same people are currently saying the only way you can recover. The World Bank, look at the IMF. They are recommending that the government should be spending more if you want to recover. And yet you find the government here shying away from it. I don't think there is a problem in terms of the ideas of what can be done or what needs to be done. It's the limitation in terms of or perhaps overconfidence. I mean, not just a limitation. They think that the economy has recovered and the stock market is already showing that it has recovered or it is in the process of recovery. So we should just wait and watch. I mean, that's what the government essentially seems to be doing. Additionally, also making it as pro-corporate as it can be the whole monetization plan that has been proposed of effectively selling our assets away. So this government is not, I won't say it's clueless. It is, has clues about the economy. It's just that those are wrong clues. They are not the correct. We in an earlier discussion discussed in some detail about the ideological motivation behind having the kind of privatization or the national monetization pipeline that we have where we are looking at assets that are supposed to belong to the people of this country which are being sold and leased for the benefit of a few oligarchs or crony capitalists if you like. And we've also also to some extent discussed some of these problems that you've talked about. And let me come to another subject. And I'm going to start with Annie, Annie Namala. We look at the social sector. Let's look at health. Let's look at health care. The pandemic has highlighted the terrible state of India's public health care system. We don't see any action on the ground. We don't see any attempt to do anything as I've used this biblical expression before there are none so blind as those who will not see. So when you look at the economic survey of 2021 and the finance minister's budget speech in Parliament, there were some hopes raised that you know some lessons would be learned after the pandemic. That there would be some allocation to public health care and public health care services. And the economic service in fact argues there is need to increase public spending of health care to two and a half to 3% of GDP, whereas it's about one and a half percent at present. And it underlines that you know public services, health care services are important, take the weight out of the out-of-pocket expenditures on the medical services or out-of-pocket expenditure on medical services of the back of ordinary people. But we see none of this has happened. Health services have got 2.21% of the total central budget which has actually come down from 2.7% in the 2021 budget. If you adjust the number for inflation, you don't have actually any increase in health services. And then what the government did actually becomes negative and what instead the government is doing and this is what our fund finance minister Nirmala Sita Raman is doing, it's clubbed figures. It's clubbed health care services with drinking water sanitation because to show look, this is what we are doing. Ani, can we have your thoughts on this subject? Yeah, thank you. See, I would like to add the sector of education also into this conversation in addition to health because I think that is extremely important. And I fully agree that despite all the demands and all the data to show that we need health budget at least to 3% of our GDP, I think consistently across governments, even the previous governments, we have not had that kind of a budget. I remember the time when we set up the primary health centers and the sub centers and the district health centers and put people into that whole system. And now if you see even that is totally dilapidated, we don't have except maybe in a few states of South India. I don't see that primary health care system being available to the people. Maybe some states like Delhi has improved upon the situation. So somewhere, I think, despite all the demands for an improved health care, I think that's one where the government has not made any effort and all the little money that has come in now is for COVID relief. Or COVID treatments. And I think this is a huge, huge problem, particularly for the vulnerable people, because there is data to show that the amount of out of pocket expenditure is a huge, huge drain on these families. Not just their income, but also any asset that they have. And any situation really pushes them down. And I think we have enough data, but it is certainly a total colossal neglect and apathy of the government that it doesn't have a better budget for health. I also want to bring in education because health and education are two critical things that people need to sustain themselves and move forward. And here again, education, if you look at the RTE Act or what we have as a state standard education, it's totally something that doesn't really let anyone learn anything and move forward. Its implementation is so bad, its budget is so bad. Despite a demand from 1980s for 6% of the budget, I think we still continue to be 2 to 3%. And I also want to add that two dimensions. See, the marginalized community, particularly the schedule cast, the schedule tribe, the minority communities depend on the government support to them for higher education. The post-metric scholarship, the minority students scholarship. And unfortunately we don't see an investment and we don't see a proper implementation of both these dimensions. So I think the overall opportunity for development and growth is really being curtailed. And what you have, I mean, again, one thing that came out so clearly in the COVID lockdown is this whole online education. And if you look at data, it's very clear that online education has not reached communities at the margins. And here is where I would sort of like to come in the state support to help these communities survive and sustain and grow is so critical. I mean, like online education cannot succeed unless the state intervenes to provide that infrastructure to provide the equipments to make it more accessible to people. Higher education is not possible for vulnerable communities unless there is an environment and a support for it. Similarly, health care that families are today spaying out of their pocket unless the system works in these two, three dimensions. I don't think these communities can go forward. And again, I would just like to add, I mean, this is the elephant in the room. What is our bias against vulnerable communities? I think we need to recognize and acknowledge that we have no data on these vulnerable communities. We were doing a study on the sum of these schemes for communities like Kutia, Kondin, Chattisgarh, Sahariya and Orissa. I have not got even the first cylinder to talk about or the bonded labor that comes from Varanasi. So I would sort of say that our unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge the vulnerabilities of our population, either based on their ethnicity, caste, religion. I think it's a huge elephant in the room that we are not talking about. And many of our policies I would say is also directed by that bias that we have against these communities. Professor Venkatesh Atreya, you know, you've coordinated mass literacy campaigns in Tamil Nadu in the 90s, the Ariboli Ayakams. You also served as the president of the All India People Science Network. How do you view this continuous and continuous neglect of the social sector, education and health care, despite the fact that we saw this pandemic thoroughly expose the vulnerabilities and the limitations of India's health care system? Well, you know, if you go back to the wonderful book by Byron Maynard on child and Satan India, you have a very interesting argument there saying that given you are completely hierarchical caste within society, there is a very large spectrum of opinion dominant opinion in this country which doesn't want people to be educated, doesn't necessarily want to do anything that will weaken hierarchies. Let me come back to this question of social sector spending. And he was talking about the 80s, but remember way back in the Kothari Commission, 6% figure was first mentioned. There's a parliament resolution saying that, you know, the WTO will be to spend 6% of GDP combining the union and state government expenditures. Then in 2004, when the union government was dependent on support of the left parties, we had a commitment in the common minimum program. We said education will spend up to 6% and on health it will be from the then existing 0.7% or so to between 2% and 3%. Now, this is combined union play state government expenditures. Now these are two state subjects, both health and education are primarily state subjects. Unfortunately, education has been surreptitiously brought into the concurrent list in the emergency period and kept there and now increasingly with the new education policy. This is a complete centralization of education policy. And so we are facing states which want to do better on educational reference or facing a challenge of centralization of policy and centralization of resources. Specifically, in the period of the pandemic, apart from this question of online education, what we have seen, even the enormous constraints for online education, even in a relatively better state like Tamil Nadu, this pandemic situation has created a problem where girls are getting married off Machina and some of them are being in fact taken to the flesh trade. Many of the boys become child laborers again. So, you know, to some extent state government candidate where there is a powerful, you know, social mobilization by various political forces as in the southern states, some of the southern states, you have somewhat better outcomes. But by and large, I think in India, universal education and universal healthcare have never been policy priorities. There have always been, you know, concessions made to us in times of stress when the left, you know, picks up these demands and mobilizes people. Then they're always seen in terms of, you know, essentially allowing the market to meet these needs. Never in terms of the state committed to finding the resources and organizing the provision of healthcare and of education. So provisioning is never seen as a chopper mistake, financing, maybe, but even then it's very uncertain that, you know, you almost, we talked about the right to education of 2008, previous speakers talking about it. What are we talking about? We're talking about a new education policy. It's completely centralization, right, from school onwards. So, you know, I think we have to keep federalism in the center of our discussion when we discuss this. We can also say that many state governments have not delivered an education healthcare, but some of the governments have. Governments of Kerala are probably not. To some extent, they've done better in terms of their spending on healthcare and education. They could still do better. So I think we need a differentiated approach to dealing with the question on the ground. We must demand far greater devolution of resources to the state governments. Overall, as well as the sectors of education healthcare, we must demand the reversal of decentralization tendencies in both education healthcare. You know, you saw the scandal of the 75,000 crore rupees being set apart for dealing with vaccines. And then you don't tell the state about the bio-vaccines. You saw that. We must struggle to get the government of India to honor at least a part of its bugging. So we are dealing with, as I already said, we're dealing with a state that has no credibility in terms of its relations with the states of the union. So we have a union government which is, you know, health-bent for centralizing powers and financial and resources. And then using it politically to blame these state governments for not doing what they're supposed to do. So apart from the class angle and the social hierarchy angle, we must also keep federalism in the forefront in this discussion. To some extent, we must demand greater devolution of resources to the states. And then all more directed local bodies are strongly arguing. Kerala has given us a very good model in terms of how both in education healthcare, decentralized democratic actions can be very powerful. What is the price? Professor Rohit Azad, what Professor Venkatesh Bhatriya and also Andy Namala have done is look at the expenditure of the social sector in this bigger context where the economy has become less decentralized, less central, more centralized. And we are also looking at this continuing neglect of the social sector. I mean, no country in the world has ever been able to move ahead and develop by spending what we do, what we in this country do on healthcare and education. No country in the world. And then yet when some international data comes out and any comparative data comes out, which says that, look, Bangladesh is doing better than India. We sort of feel very, very, our sort of patriotism takes a beating and then we feel very, very hurt about the whole thing. So how do you explain not only this continuing neglect of the social sector, but the fact that it has actually become worse in the recent past? Post pandemic. No, actually, the reflection of it was very clear in the pandemic itself. I mean, look at Delhi, for example, the second wave. What happened in Delhi is something that you cannot imagine in 21st century people dying because of lack of oxygen. And it was not merely mismanagement of oxygen. It was something more than that. And that is exactly what Annie was saying is in terms of health expenditure. If you give up entirely on public health and you depend on insurance based government intervention, then this is what you get. The number of deaths per population being so low is not something that was unexpected. The fact that a crisis made you show the effect of how you've treated the social sector is what should have made the government rethink what has happened in the past. And I agree that it is not only about this government. I mean, health and education, despite all the promises about, you know, 10% of the budget, the slogans when we were students, we used to give that slogan, that slogan has been there for ages and none of the governments have ever delivered on that promise. And the point is this crisis actually literally showed the effect of that, the neglect that you gave to public health is what resulted in the second wave in particular in a city like Delhi, I mean, the capital of this country. So, you cannot stress more on the social sector spending and hence I think what we need to do now is to think of a blueprint of what can be done. And I think that there is a lot that can be done which may not even need fiscal deficit. I mean, you can actually think of, as I said, of an alternative which makes health as the center at the core of a recovery program, education as the core, the care economy as the core of that recovery program. And this Atmir Bharat package that one is talking about, if you were to spend the same amount, you know, and finance by taxes, I don't mind it being financed by taxes. In fact, you finance entirely by taxes in which case you don't run any fiscal deficit. And there are many sources through which you can do this. You could actually turn the economy around. You would simultaneously also address the, as I said, the triple crises that the economy is faced with. So, it's not impossible. How do we do it? If you want, I can elaborate on that. I mean, we have worked on such a plan. This is your area, Professor Rohit Azad. You've been talking, I mean, I want you to link these and I'm going to then go back to the other panelists. You're clear. You cannot talk greens and you continue to invest in fossil fuels. You talk about energy transition. You're not talking about issues related to equity. You talk about sustainability. I mean, our financial institutions are banks. They continue to invest in projects that are degrading, destroying the environment and livelihoods. And you have the Ministry itself, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change itself enabling this data process by various ways in which you're diluting the safeguards including the environmental impact assessments. So, we are using the same policy prescriptions which have brought us to where we are today. So, maybe you can elaborate a little bit. Yeah, it is not just more of the same. It's worse of the same. I mean, let's say that the announcement which was made in COP26, about 2070, we'll have net zero. Now, one would have expected that if you have such an announcement to make, you would back it up with a plan. What do you find instead is that the coal ministry is auctioning more minds. It's actually thinking in terms of opening, I mean, the government in terms of more thermal plants and you're moving in the exact opposite direction of what the world is moving on. We are essentially going back in time as far as the sustainability is concerned. You can't go green or you can't achieve the net zero target by burning more coal or by investing more in it. What can you do? You can actually think of a green energy program in which you actually spend in terms of both moving away from fossil fuel dependent economy by investing in renewables in a big way, which will help you actually achieve the target that you have set while trying to make the economy more energy efficient. Our energy efficiency of this economy is one of the lowest in the world. You can by minimal expenditure, you can actually improve that. You will save money, you will save emissions, you will actually be saving energy as well. All of this can be done by what could be called a green energy program, which is one component of, let's say, such a recovery package. The other could focus on infrastructure in our economy. So an infrastructural program, which can be partly spent on, not something which is again very difficult. We've worked on some numbers. If you want, I can share them, is that if you were to spend the amount, this at Nirbhar package, and I'm insisting on this amount because the government actually promised to do so. If you were to spend that money on such what we call the Indian Green Deal, then infrastructure alone will generate an employment of about 17.5 million, which is about 3.7% of the total labor force. This is based on the PLFS data. If you were to spend on care economy, a part of this package, then you would be generating about 13 million jobs. In green energy program, which actually is going to employ more people than, let's say, the fossil fuel industry, almost three times. The data itself shows that if you were to spend a rupee on the fossil fuel industry, the amount of jobs that it generates, the same rupee will generate actually three times the job if you were to spend it in green energy program. It solves the problem of the health crisis because you would actually be spending on health, you would be spending on the other social sectors, as I said, of education, as well as the care sector. Then in terms of the infrastructure which we keep talking about, whether it is transportation, whether it is water infrastructure, all of this in terms of an economic policy can actually be thought about. In the United States, they are talking about the Green New Deal. It is quite possible to do something far more interesting, something which is more inclusive, something which is more employment generating in India as well. As I said, every crisis, one option in a crisis is you go down the same path, we start spending more. It is not merely that actually we can restructure the economy and put people at the center of that recovery. That is a possibility. That is something which can be done. As I said, you can do it if you are obsessed with fiscal deficit without going for deficit financing, you can finance it through taxes on wealth. I would say there are possibilities. No, it is fine. I would like both Annie Namala as well as Professor Venkatesh. We are to react to what you have said. I want their remarks. I want their observations. After that, we can move to the final topic on which we are going to really talk about. That is inequality. These are all interlinked and overlap. Annie Namala, your comments on what Professor Rohit Azad has said about the way forward towards the more kind of a sustainable recovery of the economy, which would be not just green but also generate jobs and handle a number of issues. He believes it can be done without increasing the deficit of the economy. Yes, by taxing the rich also. We will talk about that in greater detail. But can we have your observations of what has been said so far? I think what Professor Rohit has said is very, very logical and very relevant and is something that we should be doing. I mean, like what Professor Atreya and Rohit said, it's not that there are solutions are not available or solutions are not there in the public space. Solutions are there, strategies are there but somewhere there is a design or a unwillingness to move into these solutions but only take up certain strategies which may be benefit or will give certain... What he said gives you a mirage of some kind of development without actually having to go in detail. So I would sort of say that there is enough experiences, enough strategies, enough knowledge that is all around us that the government can use and there is no dirt of such solutions. So two things I think I would like to bring in here. One is I think there is a conscious effort to keep the voices out of a large section of people. You don't want to really have any of their voices heard and you would make all kinds of strategies so that those voices are curved. I mean, I also look at the whole dimension of the civil society, the restrictions on civil society organizations, the new for FCRA laws which talks that you cannot really sub grant to smaller organizations that are working on these communities and from my own work of two decades, I know how much civil society organizations are on the ground, connected to the last mile communities and most of all what I see is an agency of these communities moving forward to look at their own problems. Like you have LGBTQI communities, the disabled communities, the Dalit communities, they've been there for some time but even these extremely vulnerable communities, NTDT communities, leadership from these communities coming forward and say that we want a better deal and civil society has been one of the links of many of these communities to voice out, articulate and so I would sort of see not only are we neglecting but we are also actively prohibiting and curbing any additional democratic spaces, any participation of these communities through active means including curbs on the civil society and I think that's one area that we need to really look at as we move forward to any kind of, you know, solutions that we are looking at and another dimension I also want to bring up is see like this is a time, the COVID was a time when new things need to be explored, strategized and here you really need the confidence of the people, the collaboration of people across communities and what do we see? We see a total discounting of communities, a total division created in communities and a violence and increased violence between communities and that's not what you're looking at if you're looking at a solution. So I would say that there are higher designs of keeping democracy in a certain curbed manner of preventing communities from really participating and moving forward to their own solutions and I think those are part of the larger things which we are really not talking about. We may talk about unemployment, we may talk about investment not being there but I think we need to also look at these deeper dimensions of our civil society and community participation in the solutions that we are looking at so I think there are solutions available, strategies available, it's how do we get them on board, you know, with the government and with society as a whole. Thank you very much Annie Namala for that important intervention. I think you highlighted how civil society organizations are being systematically downgraded even demonized as anti-national by the manner in which the government has been implementing among other things the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act and you also sort of highlighted the point that Professor Rohit Azad made. There are solutions, there are strategies but you have to have the determination, the political will, Professor Venkatesh Atreya to use a language which you are not very familiar with, political will, Rajnethik, Inshashakasi. This seems to be what is a key failure. This is what has been lacking. So I'd like you to add to what has been already said and then we'll move on to the final topic of discussion which is looking at how Indian society has become more unequal. Yes. Before I respond let me also draw your attention to a comment by Bhupesh Bhadday in the comment section. This is quite sensible saying that what's the point of the discussion when the government is not interested in what you call distinct. I'm cynical but I think he has a point. Although I must tell him that we have all been publishing our work in papers and journals. So don't worry Bhupesh, we are trying our best. This is not the only form of communication we have. But having said that, Paranjeeva, you know, some extent he's right. He's almost pointless to discuss options under this government. But don't forget this is the government, union government that you know, tried to change the whole conditions concerning project science in the middle of the pandemic. It wanted the whole environment procedures for, you know, clearance, environmental clearance procedures to be diluted. So obviously this government is not committed to taking care of the environment or anything of that sort. But I do agree with Rohit that clearly significant expenditures in health and education will also create positive demand affecting the economy and will help the economy to revive. And it will also provide employment in all kinds of related services. So I think, you know, the case for spending, especially spending productively with health and education is very strong. I mean, it's so obvious that one shouldn't have to belabor it. And in fact, if we did that, it will directly contribute to higher levels of productivity as well. And so, you know, I don't think we should even be discussing this. And, you know, I listened to what I may have to say, but apart from the specifically, you know, deprived sections for the general economy, this is necessary. Core of the economy for everybody in the economy is necessary to revive it through such interventions. You know, how many government do it? Here's a government which is completely uninterested. They're interested in selling the assets to the country. I mean, you talk about political will. Yes, they have very strong political will in trying to sell the Hindutva ideology. And that's what they will do in UPIT. That's all they will do in subsequent elections. Although they had to bend to the farmers regularly for once. Their agenda is very clear. So I, you know, to some extent we need to go to the people on these issues. And I think we can start by saying that if we can get decentralization going again and again, I come back to that. Because at least the level of the state, we can mobilize better, fight better. And we can get state governments to move. They're more responsive to popular demand. This union government is, you know, completely impervious and insensitive to demand for the population. And this is a particularly, you know, current regime is a particularly obnoxious example of what decentralization does to those in power. I really don't want to add much about what's been said on the issue. Okay. I'll briefly make a few observations on some of the comments. Mubashirul Islam has pointed out how there are 94,000 vacancies for teachers. And sorry, there are approximately 3,000 vacancies for teachers and about 38,000 teachers were selected but they haven't received joining letters. Then we are also looking for Rahman, this whole issue of disinvestment, selling the assets of public sector enterprises. We've discussed this in some length in one of the earlier discussions. I would urge you to have a look at those discussions. We've talked about in some detail, all of them are available on YouTube. You can get everything and hear them again. They've been long and very detailed discussions. And Himanshu Damle, your question for Rohit, you talk about price to earnings premium, I think he's already answered that question. When you're looking at just stock market indices and claiming that these are indicators of a recovery, then you are actually just concerned about a municipal section of the population of this country who are actually investing in stock markets and share markets. And Arun Vasu, I think that's exactly the point that has been driven over and over again on this whole issue of over-centralization that is happening. And yes, Rupesh, you can say that we're not getting anywhere by this discussion. We still have to speak our mind. We still have to continue saying what we have to say. And Vishal Bhatnagar, thank you so much for your positive comments and the Centre for Financial Accountability are hopeful we'll be able to publish some of the proceedings of these discussions in the form of articles and papers and let's hope that happens. Okay. It's like... Yes, please. I've just finished a piece of three decades of new liberal reforms. It's impact on workers in terms of India, available at Indiaresearcher.in. They can take a look at that. Okay. So we are almost a lot of one and a half hours into our discussions and there's one theme on which I'd like all the three panelists to talk about. And maybe we can go in the reverse direction and ask Professor Venkatesh Aathriya to speak and then Annie Namala and to come to you to talk with Pazad later. India was always an unequal country in terms of income and wealth. There is a lot of evidence to indicate that India has become even more unequal, especially over the last year and a half after the pandemic. I'll give you some statistics. The income share of the top 10% in India grew by 30% in the 80s to over 56% in 2019. And the bottom 10% earned only 3.5%. The share of the top 10% grew from in fact 30% in the 80s to over 56%. But the richest 10% of Indians today are estimated to own over 80% of the wealth. This is 2019 figures. One example, Mr. Mukesh Ambani is supposed to be, sometimes he's the richest man, sometimes he's the second richest man, not just in India, also in Asia. And he's supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the country. So sorry, I'm not in the country, in the world, I stand corrected. One estimate says that Mr. Mukesh Ambani was getting 90 crore rupees every hour. During the pandemic. And this is a time when about a quarter of the country's population are earning not even 3,000 rupees a month. So when we talk about universal rights, healthcare, jobs, education, compensation for families who died because of COVID, lower fuel prices. We said we are outlandish, we are utopian in our pain practical in what we are looking at. The corporate sector gets these tax cuts before the pandemic. Now, what is supposed to be outlandish if the wealth amassed by the 100 richest people in this country just during the pandemic period alone can give the poor. And one estimate says that if the 100 richest Indians during the pandemic year, they can give the poorest 14, 13.8 crore and 38 million people that would come to their wealth would come to about 94,000 rupees to each person close to a lack of rupees. So I want you to reflect on how and why we have become increasingly unequal as a country and what needs to be done. Whenever you talk about taxing the rich we have this huge you and cry. They are the wealth creators of this country. We are told over and over again. To some extent this is an international problem, a global problem and the United Nations Secretary General. He talked about the rising inequality during the pandemic and he says the myth that we are all in the same boat that we are floating in the same sea it's clear that someone in super York's while others are clinging on to our clinging to the drifting temporary. So what is in some respects true for many, many countries and many parts of the world is particularly acute in India more than one study has shown that we have become one of the most unequal countries in the world. So I'm going to start with you Professor Venkatesh Aathriya. What are your thoughts? Yeah, as you said the beginning India has always been a very unequal country and post independence we have not ordered through the most basic promises of the state of movement lands for tiller for example we have not carried out comprehensive land reforms across the country a pocket, you know some states which were left really important as a mass force have had something of a good record in land reforms but by and large in the country as a whole to give you just one single figure when Professor Muharnam is estimated the amount of ceiling surplus land in India at 63 million acres in the early 70s we till now have not even picked up one tenth of that ceiling surplus land and distribution so land ceilings, laws, implementation and redistribution of land has been practically a non-starter except for some historical reasons West Bengal and Kerala even there it's quite small number but something has been done there but the rest of the country this is nothing so right away you have a very strong sense of rural inequality in terms of access to assets a large number of village servers that I have studied and I have been associated with we know that the bottom 50% of rural households immediately account for less than 10% of the area owned in that area so there is huge rural inequality within the rural economy but apart from that the focus is going to be much more on you know gross rural urban inequality but I want to remember that India both in urban and in rural India for starters number two at least the regime that sought to pursue a relatively autonomous path of capitalist development from 1950 to 80 of you know while it didn't contribute to any reduction in inequality it did not represent the kind of gross from most of inequality that we have subsequently in the post-1991 period in the post-1991 neoliberal reforms period increased inequality has been celebrated as being essential for economic growth now of course, now again a lot of breastfeeding with Thomas Piketty's inequality lab telling us that India is one of the most unequal countries and so on but I want to just remain view of a few concrete measures in our memory that we can look at to reinforce this you know when this regime came back again after 2019 elections in the Umbada was a bridge that was built in budget which is basically a you know scrapbook very soon thereafter and then later this businessman came out in the streets and said they can't sell cars, they can't sell two-wheelers, they can't even sell biscuits and then what does the government do it announces a series of concerns first for foreign private foreign portfolio investors saying that we will remove the capital again search are being imposed in the budget then it says buy 50,000 crores for housing for export subsidies another 25,000 crores for housing in real estate and then it says a whopping 1.45 lakh crore rupees of tax concentration to the corporate sector by reducing the corporate tax rate to the 22% flat now 22% flat is the Donald Trump tax rate and interestingly Biden is saying that I want to go 30% the whatever across the world there is some recognition that tax rates are going up even in neoliberal global capitalism there is some recognition uncertain and unlikely to be sustained but there is some talk of this India nothing other can happen we gave away about roughly 2.25 lakh crores before the budget to the and in the budget we announced further 70,000 crores, 65,000 crores worth of direct taxation concessions about 3 lakh crores we kept away in the 2020 run up to the budget and the budget and then we decided to solve that by selling public sector assets and had the target of 3.1 lakh crores for selling public sector assets of course we didn't succeed in selling it we try to sell them now one by one and might do the if you look at the selling activities of the government of India it's not just Ambali and Adani it's also Tata it's not a very small 2 or 3 B to 11 government of India is very kind to the very large contract and they have had 2 taxation in the meantime indirect taxes have gone up steadily I remember that over this regime 2014-19 as well as subsequent huge amounts of indirect taxes have been levied by way of taxes on fuel but in all of these discussions there are 2 things that need to be understood in terms of inequality one this is of course increasing inequality in the population but second it is also squeezing the states the government of India provides concessions of the corporate sector the states lose a part of the visible pool that would have been higher if it's not been given away secondly whenever government of India chooses to increase indirect taxes not by raising basic excess duty but by increasing surcharges and cesses states get up out so there will be a very significant reduction in resources going to the states and that being appropriated by the union government in the last 5 years that is one dimension of inequality that also needs to be highlighted because I see India states as basically representing nationalities and I see the relative autonomy of the states as being critical to a healthy unity of the country unity in diversity and all that we talk about so that is one dimension of inequality we discuss very often we discuss usually household consumption inequality we know that if you take the 2011 2017-18 data on national sample service monthly per capita transfer expenditure estimates you know that in a period when they were claiming 7-8 9% growth rates of GDP there is an absolute decline absolute mind view of 9% of so in monthly per capita consumption expenditure in the countryside in the urban sector it proved by hardly 2.2% so most of these resales, 5-6 resales at the bottom would have suffered an erosion of per capita consumption expenditure per day so you know whatever indicator you take there has been a reduction in purchasing power, reduction in consuming power and of course a huge increase in wealth inequality as well and you know with the model we have of economic growth through speculative finance capital this is going to continue the taxation policies are gone with India are not likely to change the latest of course is to sell assets for us all which is also of all surrounding the corporate debt don't forget especially we are talking with Senpai here don't forget the enormous right of corporate debt to the public sector banks so there will be huge gifts to the rich and massive taxes on the poor so what do you expect inequality will grow there will be a decline in employment opportunity there will be a decline in returns from cultivation in fact as far as I know roughly about 30-40% of cultivator households do not make net income from crop cultivation they actually survive by supplementary work in animal husbandry in wage labor outside in agriculture so we are now there is one aspect I want to highlight when we discuss inequality it is not just inequality the poor do massive amounts of work they perform massive amounts of labor and still remain very poor so in fact I don't even use the term earned you can say the top 10% receive and the bottom 80% earn the top 10% don't earn they receive by virtue of the ownership property the bottom 80% which works earns whatever it does ends the measly amount it does so I think even in terms of the language we use to reserve earning for the working people and receiving for the surplus appropriators in discussing inequality but yeah I mean this is not I won't say this is not sustainable because the capitalist economy this is going to continue happening we need fundamental change in this country and to start with we can demand greater decentralization in federal fiscalism and then we can also demand of course through class and mass movements policies which redistribute income and wealth away from the super rich to the poorer sections but all of this is not going to happen easily except through sustained class and mass and all dimensions of inequality have to be brought to the argument social inequality because hierarchy the gender question which is of course perhaps the most obscene dimension of inequality in India is what we do to women in this country plus you know the part of the economic inequality which we talk about constantly so I mean even if you will discuss the inequality in the last part of your program let's not stick only to economic inequality we also talk about other dimensions of inequality Thank you so much Professor Venkatesh therefore you know sort of expanding the scope of this discussion and for your very very perceptive observations I'm sure Rohit will have more to add including how our whole tax system is becoming has become more regressive which is the opposite of progressive because of its growing dependence on indirect taxes and this whole issue of corporate tax cuts among other things but before I come to Rohit I want to ask Annie I mean you what are the social I mean the point that Professor Venkatesh pointed out the social dimensions in terms of access to healthcare access to education access to opportunities economic opportunities that the growing inequality in this country equal to income well and equal to opportunities has created I would like your views on what on this particular issue you're just coming on to that I fully agree with what Professor Akhre and you know all the dimensions that you have mentioned and we have talked about but my question is a little deeper what makes the government or the state so comfortable to carry on like this I mean like what is it that we have the numbers we have the strategies we have the data we have the reports but somehow it does it like somebody said doesn't seem to be affecting the government so what really makes the government so unaffected in such a context and I think that's where we need to sort of look at it in a little more way because I think my presumption is the government is I mean so comfortable with the position because one it knows that it is a voiceless community that it is dealing with and it can go ahead with whatever strategies and I'm not making only the I think many state governments also do this I mean there are a few exceptions that we may have but by and large the the majority is something where you know it is a voiceless community that you're talking about so okay 28 rupees is enough for you to survive or 32 rupees is enough for you to survive you can go ahead and say that so I think there is such such an I mean colossal confidence in the voicelessness of those communities and I think that makes the government extremely comfortable when it has to make a statement it is looking for its growth on the back of these vulnerable communities like what Professor Atre was saying when I used to work in the villages we used to calculate you know the minimum wages and how much actually people earn and in a year you have crores of rupees that the daily wage workers are actually contributing to the landlords of that area and this goes on I think at a larger level at the national level and even like what Rohit was saying why is the government thinking that it can sort of make a statement at the COP because it knows that at the back there are certain communities that can be disadvantaged and we can still make some of those progressive statements so I think this whole idea of the government's confidence in the voicelessness of these communities makes it comfortable to go ahead and make these populist statements populist promises and know that nobody will sort of really hold it accountable and there I also want to bring in one dimension of of these communities in the sense you know somewhere I also wonder like okay we do see a political dimension from the from the ruling government but it's also very confident of the larger social quality that when it comes to Anganwadi workers nobody else is going to support them to be asking for more wages when it comes to the minimum wages nobody else is going to support those labor communities for better wages or social you know security of protection so I think there is a deeper divide in our social structure also which we have not been able to come over when these strategies are to be made so I think the government is comfortable in the voicelessness of the marginalized it is comfortable in the divides that is already there and the new divides it can create I mean we've seen some schools being vandalized I mean like rural schools that have been there for ages creating some level of knowledge to those communities so I think both these make the government extremely confident that it doesn't have to invest and I think that's something for us to really struggle and strategize on how we move it forward okay Professor Rohit Azad what Hanuman just said is that this government is particularly cynical it knows that the poor and the voiceless can be duped they can be mean in I mean I mean that the populist promises would convince them that they would be able I mean that they would still look at messiah and in a sense we are instead of progressing we are regressing back to time I mean to feudal times and even before and times like that and she is also arguing that the government has become cynically confident that he can get away with these kinds of policies and programs which widen inequalities and widen every kind of inequality including not just economic inequalities but social inequalities as well so I'd like your thoughts as well as talk a little bit about what already Professor Venkatesh Aathriyas talked about and that includes the regressive nature of our taxation system yes can I just make one observation before Rohit responds which is that you know there has been opposition any should also recognize that there has been large sustained movements of everybody workers of other sections of the working people and what we saw in the farmer's struggle was an increasing alliance between the working people of the workers and peasants so I think it's not all negative I mean there are popular forces in the field fighting facing repression and we should give due credit to that we can't only all be only focusing on the other sections we have to also look at the masses of working people and look at their concrete demands so mobilization has to be at all levels and I think that I mean I feel much more positive about what's ahead of us in terms of the struggle so yeah sorry in other words Professor Rohit Azad what Professor Venkatesh Aathriyas saying is perhaps Annie Namala is being a little I mean her being a little how to be a little bleaker than it need be and perhaps there's I mean room for some hope some raise of hope some silver linings in the dark cloud that it's not entirely bleak that there are protests there are there is agitation and the most recent example is the abrogation of the farm laws and despite attempts made to brutally suppress the agitation despite describing them as anti-national Khalistanis, Pakistanis confined to a small geographical area of India, Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh whatever may be the reason including the political reasons the government has had to backtrack Mr. Narendra Modi has backtracked he's used to words which he's never used before he's used the word Shama which is like forgiveness of course he's asking for forgiveness because he could not convince a section of the farmers why the gift that he was offering to them they did not want he's also used the word Tapasya which is like a kind of a penance of forgiveness so I'd like you to remark on what has been said so far by both professor Venkatesh Akshaya and Anil Mahanam so I'll come to the first part that you asked me later in terms of where do I see this going but I'll talk a little bit about inequality because that is what you start with and I think that this is for the first time perhaps in the post reform period that we've heard about suffering India shining India and these terms we are Bharat versus India and all that but this is perhaps for the first time in the history that you actually have the shining India happening because the there is a suffering India in other words you actually literally have prosperity at one end and misery at the other look at the number of poor for the first time the absolute poverty has increased and this is pre-pandemic so the slowdown the period of slowdown the Modi one government the data shows that the number of poor people has gone up from 270 to 350 million and this is NSS versus the PLFS survey this is pre-pandemic and just add to that the number of people who would have fallen into poverty as a result of this lockdown while this was happening you actually find on the other side that profits were soaring and you know it's paradox which is very difficult to understand where you find the corporations their sales are going down where you see their incomes going down but surprisingly the profits are actually going up and you know why because actually the expenditure has fallen for them even more than what the sales is which is what that you basically have cut down on your workforce you've removed you've thrown people out which is what your costs down the people you buy stuff from you've decreased their prices you basically forced the crisis on to them who are already vulnerable and cornered higher you know in the language that Prof. Atreya said that a higher and higher surplus value of a smaller cake is what you find that's the kind of inequality never heard of never seen perhaps in in our country so it's really difficult situation both in absolute and relative terms now the issue is this this has happened as I said purely through the automatic you know model of the way you know this whole thing slow down has spanned out and and the crisis after that there's something that the state has played a role in so one is that capitalism itself has resulted in this but state has abetted it in what ways something that you already mentioned and Prof. Atreya also talked about one is through the tax policy you give tax cuts and you know tax cuts to the nature during the pandemic again where in 1920 the corporate tax GDP ratio was 1.42 it came down to 0.95 it's a huge huge fall you know in percentage points it's 0.5 percentage points during the pandemic so it's you know the government is handing over money to the corporates who are already gaining in the process during a crisis then you have the NPA write-offs so both through fiscal and through monetary routes what is the NPA write-off these guys have not paid the money back to the banks they had taken loans the loans are essentially non-performing the state through our taxes the money that the people have paid is what is being used as you know to pay the loans that the corporate sector was supposed to pay so there is an x-gratia transfer that is taking place so state has actively abetted this whole inequality that has come about during the slowdown and particularly so during the pandemic so it's not you know there is a design to it now comes the question if there is a design to it why are people not seeing for what it is I mean why can't a spade be called a spade I think that is a far more complex question and I'm not a political scientist but let me still try and answer that question and for me the the benchmark let's say of that was demonetization you know something for which people had to face what they did and yet people re-elected this government and has to do perhaps and still to some extent because of the faith that you know I mean something good is happening you know even though they themselves face the crisis even though themselves stood in the line they still stood in the same line to vote for the government which inflicted that misery and the reason I think perhaps was that they saw an intention of trying to tackle corruption which which perhaps made them but I think that tide is now turning people have seen them for what they are the repeal did not happen because it was meant to happen or that merely because there is an election around the corner of course that played a role but I think they have really felt the heat this time you know another example Sudha Bhardwaj her release I would say that these are all silver lines there is still no light at the end of the tunnel as yet but I see some glimmer of hope in the context of these struggles which are going on struggles which are winning and I would say that these struggles unfortunately are happening outside the political parties I mean unfortunately I say that is because I think the political parties should also be playing because they are the ones who are going to fight the elections eventually they should have been at the centre of this unfortunately they are not it's the students, it's the people it's the farmers, it's the workers it's the tribals who are essentially fighting this battle and that perhaps may lead to alternatives in the future Thank you so much professor Rohit Azhar we have the elections assembly elections state assembly elections that are scheduled for February and March 2022 in several states in India five states including Punjab and of course India's most popular state which is Uttar Pradesh and we'll have to wait and watch to see if what has happened in the recent past gets reflected in the electoral outcomes and we'll know only after a few months we saw what had happened in the other states like Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and of course Assam and I see Professor Atreya no longer with us I was hopeful he would be able to I'm hopeful he'll be able to rejoin us if there are any closing remarks you want to make Professor Azhar and then if Professor Atreya doesn't join us I'll ask Aninamala to make the closing remarks anything else you'd like to tell us Rohit I think I'll just end with one thing that ideas are there there are alternatives which exist it's the will which is not there and political will as I said in the beginning political will of the government not to deliver ideas are not the problem I think if we can if as people one can force the government to deliver on ideas there is another brighter world possible and hopefully in 2024 we would see that bright world on the other side Aninamala your closing remarks no I see Professor Venkatesh wait hold on hold on Ani I see Professor Venkatesh Venkatesh Atreya has been able to rejoin us we are just sort of taking everybody's closing remarks would you like to make a few closing remarks before we conclude our discussion I think the last couple of years have demonstrated you know in far greater detail than before the nature of the system we are dealing with and the nature of the regime we are fighting that can be ambiguity about this I think although Rohit was mentioning lamenting the fact that political parties are not playing a more important role in these struggles I wouldn't totally underestimate their participation for example in the former struggles in forms that are more acceptable for a mass struggle of this time you may not find explicit political participation but certainly I know for a fact that mass organizations of left political parties played very important role inside these mass movements and that is bound to be a very large heterogeneous mass movement it is good to have that kind of a broad coalition rather than have labeled that way separate people so yeah I see your point I think it's important that all this enter the political process have very specific forms of mobilization so we can go forward but that's a process and it will happen I mean it is really slow for people like us who have been at it for a very long time but that's life and I am confident I mean I keep saying that's kind of a world war we will get there Thank you sir, thank you Professor Arthreya for that optimism that you have shown and we will have the closing remark from Annie Namala yes please Rohit Thank you I fully agree with what Professor Arthreya Rohit has said but I am just reminded of 20 years ago when I started working in rural parts of Andhra the left parties thought we were rewarding a civil society we are eroding their base I have seen a long journey where we have come to understand each other work with each other, collectively work, take up like you know you have the Kulavivakshapurata Samiti and all in Andhra take up common things but I think like what Rohit said the state design is much more complex and much more stronger and I think we need to build our act together in a much more robust and synergized manner you know and I think that call is there and we need to sort of see how these different calls can be brought together in a social space in a public space to look at these designs that are being so I fully agree with what Professor Atreya and Rohit and it's really nice to have someone you know after all the work that we have done still to be so optimistic about things coming forward, thank you That's what life is about Thank you so much I want to thank all three of you I want to thank Anil Mala Professor Venkatesh Atreya, Professor Rohit Azad for your participation in the fourth and the final discussion in this series that we've had starting on the 29th of November then on the 3rd of December and the 6th of December we've had 11 individuals 11 economists social activists analysts, journalists among others researchers who've discussed a wide range of issues from questioning the credibility of the government's numbers and their claims of an economic recovery to looking at what the implications of selling the assets that belong to the people of the country assets of public sector enterprises of the whole national monetization pipeline we've looked at issues concerning employment inequality the social sector and I wouldn't even try and summarize all this I'll request the centre for financial accountability with the transcripts of some of these very very interesting enlightening observations could be sort of put together and published on the web and maybe even in a printed form that is up to the CFA it's up to Joe and Ashish and Priya there are three people at the CFA who have been working very hard to put this together on the other side of the news we have Suranya with us in the past we've had others including Trina who helped put together this series of discussions I thank all of you and thank you very much these discussions would be available for others we share them and I wish you all a very good evening and Mishka all the very best to you Thank you Thank you