Neoliberal policies led to increased hunger, poverty, economist Utsa Patnaik says

Remembering freedom fighter and former general secretary of the CPI(M) P. Sundarayya, she said it is important to develop research-based alternative policies against neoliberal policies

Eminent economist Utsa Patnaik has said that the governments in the last three decades replicated the main elements of the colonial regime by implementing the neoliberal policies in the last three decades. As a result, malnutrition and poverty has increased in India, she said citing government data.

“First main element is fiscal contraction, reducing public expenditure which benefits the masses through increase in employment,” she said while delivering the second P. Sundarayya Memorial lecture on Wednesday. 

Dr. Patnaik said opening up of free trade is the second main element and it is being done on the one-sided demand of advanced capitalist countries. She said the more India exports from its agriculture produces, the low will be our domestic availability of food grains. “By 2003-04, our availability of cereals had declined to 161 kilograms per capita which is in the same level during the great depression in 1930s,” she said. 

Remembering P. Sundarayya, freedom fighter and former general secretary of the CPI(M), she said it is important to develop research-based alternative policies against the neoliberal policies. She said during the colonial period and during the neoliberal era, there is an increase in hunger. “80% of the population has suffered a decline in their food intake according to government’s own data. Claims about decline in mass poverty is completely wrong,” she said, while delivering the lecture on the topic ‘Agrarian Distress, Worker-Peasant Alliance and Resistance to Corporate and Imperialist Designs in India’.

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Dr. Patnaik said advanced countries want access to Indian agriculture and they were behind the three farm laws brought by the Narendra Modi government in 2020. “Modi Government is clearly a government which is not interested in the welfare of the majority of its population. It is a crony capitalist government,” she said. 

She argued that the entire statistical system of the country has been thoroughly undermined. “For the first time, 2017-18 NSSO survey showed average real expenditure of all goods and services was low compared to 2011. The government quickly withdrew this survey,” she said and added that the impact of the recession on households is not captured yet. 

The former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor also said that the advanced countries want to sell their surplus food grains to India. “They have mountains of food grains. They want us to buy their surplus food grains and devote more and more of our land for producing tropical sub tropical crops which they are unable to produce,” she said. “Since Doha rounds, they have been attacking on the rights of developing countries to engage in procurement and distribution of food grains to protect food security,” she added. 

Published - November 06, 2024 11:23 pm IST