Poverty, mass deprivation rising in Asia: Utsa Patnaik

CHENNAI, January 14, 2012 Neo-liberal policies fine-tuned to global capitalist accumulation are increasing poverty, mass deprivation and unemployment besides undermining food security in India, economist Utsa Patnaik said on Friday.



Delivering the inaugural 'T.G. Narayanan Memorial Lecture on Social Deprivation\' under the auspices of the Media Development Foundation and the Asian College of Journalism here, Prof. Patnaik said contrary to the claims by the Centre about poverty reduction or by the World Bank about declining proportions of the poor that were false, based on wrong classification and failed to reflect the reality, poverty and mass deprivation was rising in India and Asia.



Alluding to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh\'s statement describing the magnitude of child nutrition in India as a national shame, Prof. Patnaik said there was no point in shedding "crocodile tears" as the shameful situation was a self-inflicted one that resulted from flawed policies.



During the course of her lecture on "Capitalism and the Production of Poverty," Prof. Patnaik drew parallels and the contrasts between the past era of globalisation and the very different dynamics of present-day capitalism.



The all-important difference was that unlike during industrialisation, the present phase of what Karl Marx termed the "primitive accumulation of capital" in developing countries was transitional not to capitalist industrialisation, but to the accumulation of riches at one pole of the social structure — the other pole being characterised by rising unemployment, pauperisation and absolute poverty. Besides, the modern capitalist system itself at its very core, had lost the flexibility and the many degrees of freedom it previously enjoyed, she said.



Pointing to the unfettered out-migration of Europeans on a large scale to the lands they seized from indigenous peoples and the creation of a bloated army of reserve labour as the two crucial features of the past era of globalisation, Prof. Patnaik said the modern context provided for a form of 'global imbalance\' where the world\'s poorest economies were made to finance the richest ones.



According to Prof. Patnaik, this dependence continues to be parasitic in nature as it involves grabbing primary resources— oil, minerals and forests — altering cropping patterns in the global south to fill the consumption basket of Europe and exposing peasant producers to high global price shocks, which was the primary reason for farmer suicides.



The effects of the much higher level of labour-displacing technology and of automation today in developing countries is to produce job-less growth; indeed many sectors in India are seeing job-loss growth, Prof. Patnaik said.



N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, said T.G. Narayanan was a remarkable journalist, who had joined The Hindu in 1939 as its Rangoon correspondent and gone on to make significant contributions in reporting on the Great Bengal Famine, as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia and as author of a well-conceived and well-written book Famine Over Bengal.



T.G. Ranga Narayanan, who instituted the lecture as a permanent series in memory of his father, said the ACJ had been chosen for the endowment because it was one of the very few institutions that had a special focus on deprivation journalism.



Bindu Bhaskar, ACJ Dean, and Sreekumar Menon, ACJ Professor, also spoke.


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