IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALITY

1. In 1991, agriculture was deprioritized “for lending at low cost interest rates from the banking system” was given up. Denied access to both cheap credit and fertilizers, small and marginal Indian farmers found their out-of-pocket costs rising sharply (Rajalakshmi 2004)

2. The 2nd blow to the farmers came with India signing on to the GATT (later WTO) in 1994 - food security was declared to be a “non-trade concern”. India was obliged to export certain volumes of food/yr, regardless of domestic food security concerns. (In 2002-03 “the worst drought year for two decades”, India exported a record-breaking 1 million tonnes/mo of food-grains for European cattle & Japanese pigs: “The dream of the Indian farmer is to be a European cow!” (Farmer, Vidarbha) (Patnaik 2014)

3. The 3rd blow came in 1996. Between 1991-96, lakhs of small Indian farmers switched from cultivating food-crops to export-crops like cotton and coffee, taking on debt on market predictions. “But ...world prices started crashing from the end of 1996 onwards and by 2001 it was practically at half the level it was in 1995.” (Rajalakshmi 2004)

4. The 4th decisive blow to India's poorest followed close behind in 1997-98, when the government gave in to international “pressure to “target” the food subsidy”. From that year on it was decided to divide the population into APL vs. BPL, and only those families falling 'Below the Poverty Line' would have access to cheap food.

- By 2005, Utsa Patnaik calculated (using the NSS data from 1999-2000) that rural head-count poverty in India stood at 74.5% whereas, “the official Planning Commission figure ... [was] only 27.4 percent! ... about 350 million persons” had been denied their right to access subsidized food. (Patnaik 2014)

- Over 200, 000 farmer suicides were registered btw 2000 and 2010. By 2016 this number crossed 350,000. (Krishnan 2016)

‘The Invisible Handjob’ (Zupancic)

India’s journey to be declared an “emerging” market begins with signing on for an IMF structural adjustment loan in 1991. FDI flows increased more than 6 fold over the first three years. Within a few weeks of taking the loan the government opened up new areas (like power generation) to foreign investor participation. Soon MTv, BBC and CNN entered middle-class homes, and a few million youth began practising their “global English accents” dreaming of BPO & IT jobs. By 1993, the financial industry was partially opened up. Telecommunications and mining followed in ’94—the same year India signed on to the GATT. The country was declared “emerging”, the following year. (UNCTAD)

The ‘Policy Roadmaps’ prepared by the top global management consultants - McKinsey etc - report steadily falling poverty rates, steadily growing GDP. Between ’91 and ’95, the GDP growth rate went up and up and up (from 1% to 7.5%). (World Bank) And poverty dropped (from 33.2% in ’93-’94, to 25.7% in ’04-’05 (All-India Poverty – Patnaik 2008)). Even while the GDP suffered significant dips and spikes for the rest of the decade, poverty was reported as steadily dropping and official exuberance focuses on the Indian IT boom. By 2000, “the Indian IT Industry [is] a ten billion dollar sector.” (Kapur 2002)

As of 2007, India's miracle-sector provided direct employment to only 1.6 million workers, along with “3 million jobs in various support services”, employing only 0.4% of the population. (Sanyal 2015)

In 2009, the entire Indian National Sample Survey was scrapped, and re-conducted, when the Chairman of the Planning Commission (Montek Singh, ex-IMF, McKinsey Advisor) felt the results showed “too much poverty”. In 2015, the BJP led government overhauled the Planning Commission and renamed it: the National Institution for Transforming India. They also shut down the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau.