Capitalism

In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and handed over to private corporations for ‘public interest’ – for Special Economic Zones (SEZs), infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs, and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) as always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had is actually part of employment generation. After twenty years of ‘growth’, 60 percent of India’s workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India’s labour force works in the unorganised sector.

Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets and ‘scorecards of progress’ as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.

Ever since the Great Depression, the manufacture of weapons and the export of war have been key ways tin which the United States has stimulated its economy. Just recently [written in 2014, I think], under President Obama, the United States made a sixty-billion-dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia. It hopes to sell thousands of bunker busters to the United Arab Emirates. It has sold five billion dollars worth of military aircraft to my country, India – my country, which has more poor people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together. All these wars from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, have claimed millions of lives – all of them fought to secure ‘the American way of life’.