Impact of neoliberal economics on natural resource management: the case of India

Capitalism : the free lunch?

Nature is the mother and labour is the father of all commodities Capital /vs/ labour Capital /vs/ nature(the free gift) Capital has vampire-like relation to nature- i.e., a kind of living death maintained by sucking the blood from the world

The limit to capital is the capital itself

Climate Change Global economic crisis and Austerity (TAXING THE POOR TO RESCUE THE RICH) Energy Crisis Food Crisis Rolling Rebellions

World History in a nutshell

Old style Colonialism Capitalism Imperialism WW 1-Great Depression(1930)-WW 2 Post-war boom and neo-colonialism 1970 onwards-general stagnation Thatcherism-Reagonomics Word Bank-IMF-WTO Structural Adjustment Disaster Capitalism -Naomi Klein

Neoliberal Economics in India: First Generation reforms

IMF Memorandom on India-1989 WB Report on India Manmohan Singh PC Chidambram-GATT-WTO Structural Adjustment Foreign-Friendly approach Export-led growth Privatisation-disinvestment

Second generation Reforms

>600 SEZs Mining MOUs Real estates India a huge market? Biggest land grab since the days of Columbus Jobless growth

Financial capital is hungry for investments and returns on investments. It must commodify everything on the planet - land and water, plants and genes, microbes and mammals. The commodification of land is fuelling the corporate land grab in India, both through the creation of Special Economic Zones and through foreign direct investment in real estate. Vandana Shiva

How to get land?

Forests-tribals-minerals Forest Conservation Act- a hurdle? Forest Rights Act- the facts and fantasies Land acquisition Act What is the problem? Left Wing Extremism of the maoists or Right Wing Extremist Policies?

Colonisation was based on the violent takeover of land. And now, globalisation as recolonisation is leading to a massive land grab in India, in Africa, in Latin America. Land is being grabbed for speculative investment, for speculative urban sprawl, for mines and factories, for highways and expressways. Land is being grabbed from farmers after trapping them in debt and pushing them to suicide. Jan Myrdal , 12 June, London

The Conflict?
The conflict is rooted in resource grabbing by corporate capital, in the form of large projects, SEZs, mining, etc. Such resource grabbing leads people to take up arms to defend themselves, resulting in the ongoing conflict. The conflict thus consists of a state drive to grab people's homes and resources, with people resisting by taking to arms as self-defence.

In the neo-liberal milieu of deregulation, all these processes are generating inequality on an unprecedented scale. It is not irrelevant that India has the same number of $ billionaires as Germany, although the latter's GDP is four times the former's, and Germany's per capita GDP converted at market exchange rates to US $ is more than 40 times India's. And, in 2004-05, 77% of India's 362 million strong unorganized labour force (which makes up most of India's total labour force) earned less than Rs 20 per day (44 cents at Rs 45 to the $). Spring Thunder Anew by Bernard D'Mello

The War
why are forest areas the main battleground in this war? While the conflict is not coterminous with the forests - most of India's forest areas are not part of this war, and the conflict extends outside the forest areas in some regions - forests are both politically and geographically at its heart. Salwa Judum? Operation Green Hunt?

What are we to make of the fact that just around the time Prime Minister Singh began to call the Maoists the single largest internal security threat (a signal that the government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed ? The mining companies desperately need this war. They will strike it rich, very rich, if the Indian governments counterinsurgency operations successfully evict the tribal people who have so far managed to resist the attempts to drive them from their ancestral lands.

To justify a land grab, Delhi has a new enemy : the Maoists. par Arundhati Roy

(27 janvier 2010)

Neo-robber baron capitalism is based on the exploitation -appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others -- of human beings, the pillage of nature and the expropriation of social property by any and all available means, these in the context of a close nexus between business and politics. As a specific form of monopoly capitalism, business strategy/tactics of the larger enterprises in the more monopolistically structured sectors focus ever more on ways and means of 'snatching' the surplus from relatively smaller enterprises in the more competitive sectors (the latter will be protected in a 'new democratic' regime). Spring Thunder Anew by Bernard D'Mello