reform....not by stealth

In Nandigram the police was not dealing with killers but with ordinary people demanding the right to hang on to the tiny plot of land that in most cases would have been their only means of livelihood. Even if the protesters turned violent, they could have been controlled without killing them. You do not need a CBI inquiry to establish this. Governments notoriously order inquiries when they want to evade answering questions and that is what this inquiry seems like. But Nandigram throws up issues that are more important. To me the most important is that I believe there is something fundamentally immoral about the state “acquiring” land from our poorest citizens only to hand it over to the richest men in the land. As someone who also believes India will only prosper when the majority of Indians find means of livelihood that go beyond subsistence farming, I totally support industrialising rural India. Our villages provide a standard of living that is squalid and primitive and this will only change when the children of subsistence farmers have better opportunities available to them than eking an existence out of marginal farming. What I do not understand is why those who build the factories cannot buy the land themselves. Why should they need the help of a chief minister to find them the land? What is wrong with negotiating directly with farmers and making them an offer they will find hard to refuse? This should not be hard since they are dealing with some of the poorest people in the world. Without any pretensions to economic wisdom, may I say that the other thing that does not make sense to me is the idea of a special economic zone. As usual, we are copying someone else’s idea and making a hash of it. When China moved from Marxism to capitalism after the death of Mao Tse Tung, it needed special economic zones. After allowing millions of people to die of hunger because of the supposed virtues of Marxist economics, Chinese leaders would have found it hard to admit openly that they took the wrong road. So cloistered enclaves were needed where Marxist economic ideas could be quietly dumped in the garbage bin. Luckily, in our own case we did not make the mistake, even at the height of our socialist days, of abolishing private enterprise altogether. So all it needed was the license raj to end and India’s suppressed entrepreneurial spirit soared. If we are getting close to a 10 per cent GDP growth rate, it is almost entirely due to the heights that Indian businessmen have scaled. Forbes magazine recently confirmed that India is producing billionaires faster than any other country in Asia. This has happened despite no help from the government by way of reliable infrastructure, so why do Indian businessmen need government help to buy land from people so desperately poor they may be more than willing to sell at the right price? Why should government have any role to play unless they are reluctant to relinquish control over the lives of rural Indians? Market forces may have been allowed in industry, but agriculture remains largely controlled. Farmers are told where to sell their produce, at what price and when. The benefit is that government acts as a saviour when times are hard, but the price it has extracted is to keep farmers permanently on the edge of dire poverty by denying them the tools of empowerment. They need roads to have access to markets, they need a cold-storage chain to have access to exports, they need investment in irrigation to go up from the less than one per cent that it is today and they need a fair price for their land. Had the process of economic reform not happened by stealth it would have been easy to convince farmers that private investment in rural India would benefit them. It is the truth. After Nandigram, can we at least hope that leftist politicians will stop lying to the people by telling them that economic reform benefits only the rich?