NHRC has its own style

Should we be surprised by the National Human Rights Commission’s submission to the Supreme Court regarding Salwa Judum’s atrocities leaked by the Economic Times? The official human rights body “found that many of the allegations [against Salwa Judum] were based on rumours and hearsay, and devoid of facts. Again, many of the villagers whose names figured in the column comprising victims of Salwa Judum or the security forces were actually found to have been killed by Naxalites. FIRs had been registered in most of these cases and the state government had also doled out compensation to relatives of those killed. NHRC teams also discovered many of the villagers whose names figured in the list were actually Naxalites who had been killed in encounters with the security forces. A few other villagers were found to have died of natural causes, while yet another group of villagers whose names figured in the list of dead were actually found to be alive” (2). NHRC’s arguments here are quite clear and very logical –

if Salwa Judum or the security forces killed somebody, (s)he must be a naxalite; if (s)he was not a naxalite, then it’s obvious that (s)he was killed by the naxalites.

McCarthyism in India

Being the only “policeman” who “has ever risen to so much influence in India”, Indian National Security Adviser MK Narayanan seldom minces words in revealing the designs of the Indian State for “national security”. He recently pronounced the focus of the state’s strategy against leftist militancy in the country. In an interview to The Straits Times, he clearly emphasised that it is the intellectual appeal of the Maoists that is letting down the Indian state in its fight against the Maoists. “…[W]e haven’t been able to break their intellectual appeal that they seem to still have”.

Narayanan further adds that “large numbers of the intellectual elite and civil liberties bodies provide a backup to the movement in terms of agitprop and other activities”. The fact that the Maoists “are still able to get support of intellectual classes is disturbing. Unless we can divorce the two … [defeating the Maoists] is not that easy”.

When asked if the Maoists are getting outside support, he said, “we have not seen any kind of infusion of arms or ammunition”. However it is the “educated elite…that gives them a connection to the outside world”. Evidently, it is that “connection” which needs to be broken.

In order to sever this “connection”, the Indian state must find intellectual scapegoats (like the Americans had the Rosenbergs and others) to terrorise the “educated elite”. Hence, we have Binayak Sen, Ajay TG… And the list is daily growing.

India is among “big brothers” of WTO: Pascal Lamy

The WTO Chief seems to know perfectly well what phrases would attract his audience in India today. This way they feel themselves to be in the company of global abusers.

He said the three countries, along with key players like Australia, EU and the US constitute the world of today.

Has “the ghost of an incipient Indian imperialism” grown up?

Writing in 1949 N.V. Sovani in his ECONOMIC RELATIONS OF INDIA WITH SOUTH-EAST ASIA AND THE FAR EAST (OUP and Indian Council of World Affairs) talked about the “ghost of an incipient Indian imperialism”:

Indian migration to Ceylon, Burma and Malaya, as explained above, was largely under the aegis of the British. It could take the form it did only under the circumstances that British imperialism created. The withdrawal of British imperialism from these areas – though only half way through in Malaya – has changed the entire background. Indians abroad are likely to encounter increasing opposition. The Indian trading and commercial interests in these countries have evoked stronger and more bitter resentment, and it is likely that more and more restrictions will be placed on their activities. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Foreign elements all over South-East Asia are experiencing a similar fate. The reaction against the Chinese in Siam and lately in the Philippines are cases in point. Such a development is but natural during the transition from a colonial to a national economy. Realizing the new set-up of things the problem of Indians will have to be continuously handled in such a manner as to lay the ghost of an incipient Indian imperialism./page 68/

Now sixty years after, the Indian neoliberalisers and their western promoters are unabashedly boasting about “reverse imperialism”.

Gainers gain, losers lose

Today (Aug 06) Mint carried an article written by one of its columnists which shows how neoliberalism in India has made the rich richer and the poor poorer at the geo-structural level.

The article concludes on the basis of recently released data on “outstanding loans sanctioned in a particular state/region and utilized in that place” – much has changed since India officially took steps towards liberalisation (according to the author, the economy has overall gained), however, “there are winners and losers…, there are some regions that have gained more than others”. What is most significant in the data (which the author does not explicitly recognise) is that it remarkably demonstrates that the geographical hierarchy that prevailed prior to the 1991 counter-revolution persists with hardly any reshuffling, while the vertical gap has tremendously increased. The data is significant since neoliberalism is mainly about financialisation and capital investment through the instruments of usury, debt and the credit system, which seemingly are, what the data perhaps substantiates, “radical means of accumulation by dispossession”, as David Harvey would put.

Excerpts:

1. “Comparing the data for end-March 1991 with the recently released numbers for end-March 2007, the northern and western regions have been the biggest gainers in terms of credit growth. In March 1991, the northern region accounted for 18.3% of the total credit outstanding—that percentage rose to 21.9% in March 2007. The western region, which accounted for 27.5% of total credit outstanding in the country in 1991, saw its share rising to 31.5%. The southern region’s share increased modestly from 28.1% to 28.5%. The losers were: the east, with the region’s share down from 12.3% to 8.9%, the central region (which includes Uttar Pradesh), whose share fell from 12% in 1991 to 8.1% in 2007, and the North-East, for which it declined from 1.7% to 1%”.

2. However, the gain in the northern region is virtually sham as “it’s Delhi that gained the most, with its share of credit going up from 7.1% in 1991 to 12% in 2007. The shares of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir all declined over the period, while that of Rajasthan was flat”.

3. “In the east, West Bengal’s share fell from 7.7% in 1991 to 5.3% in 2007, Bihar’s share (including Jharkhand) decreased from 3% to 2% while Orissa’s share remained flat at 1.6%. In the central region, the share of Uttar Pradesh, or UP (including Uttarakhand) fell from 7.9% to 5.2%, while that of Madhya Pradesh, or MP (including Chhattisgarh) declined from 4.2% to 2.9%”.

4. “In the south, the big beneficiary has been Karnataka—its share went up from 6.4% to 8.8%. Kerala’s share went down from 3.7% to 3.1%, Andhra Pradesh’s from 7.2% to 6.6% and Tamil Nadu’s from 10.6% to 9.9%.

5. “The data also corresponds to the increasing metropolitan focus of credit delivery. The numbers show that 66.1% of credit was utilized in the metropolitan centres in 2007, compared with 46% in 1991. Naturally, this will mean more credit growth in places such as Delhi and Mumbai. That’s probably the result both of the decay of rural India as well as the more rapid growth of these centres”.

6. Comparing the recent data with the distribution of national credit pie during 1981-91, Delhi’s share actually fell “from 10.2% in December 1981 to 7.2% in March 1991. Growth in that period was more uniform, with all the southern states except Kerala gaining modestly during the decade, as did MP, UP, Orissa and Assam”.

7. As for the political conclusion of the above economic phenomenon, the author shivers at the prospect of increasing “demands for redistribution” along with migration. “These will create immense political strains between Indian states and the potential for serious differences.”

…………………………

“They have exemplified the saying: To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not the little that he hath shall be taken away — The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty”. (Shelley, ‘The Defence of Poetry’)

Gandhian subversion and parliamentary deviation

Gandhi advised his colleagues and subordinates on 7 August 1937 when the then Congress contested the elections and were ready to accept office under the Government of India Act 1935:

These offices have to be held lightly, not tightly. They are or should be crowns of thorns, never of renown. Offices have been taken in order to see if they enable us to quicken the pace at which we are moving towards our goal.

(The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol.72, pp 99-100)

Again on 21 August 1937, Gandhi said,

Indeed the triumph of the congress will be measured by the success it achieves in rendering the police and the military practically idle. And it will fail utterly if it has to face crises that render the use of the police and the military inevitable. The best and the only effective way to wreck the existing Constitution is for the Congress to prove conclusively that it can rule without the aid of the military and with the least possible assistance of the police.

(The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol.72, pp 148-49)

On 17 July, 1937:

The Government of India Act is universally regarded as wholly unsatisfactory for achieving India’s freedom. But it is possible to construe it as an attempt, however limited and feeble, to replace the rule of the sword by the rule of the majority. The creation of the big electorate of three crores of men and women and the placing of wide powers in their hands cannot be described by any other name. Underlying it is the hope that what has been imposed upon us we shall get to like, i.e., we shall really regard our exploitation as a blessing in the end. The hope may be frustrated if the representatives of the thirty million voters have a faith of their own and are intelligent enough to use the powers (including the holding of offices) placed in their hands for the purpose of thwarting the assumed intention of the framers of the Act. And this can be easily done by lawfully using the Act in a manner not expected by them and by refraining from using it in the way intended by them.

(The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol.72, pp 35)

It is known that Marx’s and Lenin’s words (against officialdom) don’t attract the offici-al revolutionaries in India today, except when they could be used to justify their “two steps backward”. Hope they could learn something from Gandhi. Our leaders do recognise exactly 70 years later,

[T]he Constitution we have adopted reflects some of the ambiguities of the ruling classes. The Constitution declares India as a socialist republic. In reality, the State power rests with the bourgeois-landlord class led by the big bourgeoisie.

(Jyoti Basu, “60 Years Of Our Independence And The Left: Some Thoughts”, People’s Democracy, August 19, 2007)

But then have they tried to judge if their act of “accepting and running office” stands at least the Gandhian test of subversion? Have they devised “the best and … effective way to wreck the existing Constitution”? What happened recently in West Bengal – SEZ, Singur, Nandigram…- at least shows that they will definitely not succeed in passing the Gandhian test as defined here.

Indian Outsourcing Business Outsourced?

Growing pains dim India’s outsourcing edge

Tue Sep 18, 2007 11:45am IST

By Sumeet Chatterjee

BANGALORE (Reuters) – Indian outsourcing companies are shifting some of their operations to China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Kenya in a bid to stay competitive as higher wages, expensive property prices and a rising rupee eat into profits.

Back-office services companies thrive on doing jobs such as taking customer calls, payroll management and accounting at a fraction of the cost for big multinational firms or governments.

But costs in India are climbing on the back of a robust economy that has lured skilled workers to other sectors, forcing companies to look elsewhere to stay in business.

“If I was only in India, probably I would have been worried to death,” said Partha Sarkar, chief executive of HTMT Global Solutions Ltd.

The Bangalore-based back-office services provider used to generate all its revenue from India by providing services to its clients in the United States. But India now accounts for little over half the total, and rapid expansion in the Philippines and Mauritius has helped it offset the impact of a stronger rupee. It plans to enter China and Vietnam soon.

The company sees its 2008 revenue jumping to $150 million from $97 million in the last fiscal year.

“Three years back, I was completely exposed to rupee-dollar,” Sarkar said. “Now it doesn’t worry me. I have diversified my currency and country risk.”

In July, Infosys Technologies, India’s second-largest software services exporter, said it would buy three of Royal Philips Electronics’ back-office services units in Thailand, Poland and India to expand market presence.

The back-office services unit of the third-largest software exporter Wipro Ltd plans to set up two facilities in China to tap growing business opportunities there, its chief executive T.K. Kurien said.

India’s English-speaking workforce, a big factor in winning call-centre jobs, faces competition from countries like Kenya.

“When compared to India, we are better off in terms of salary and cost per seat, and we have a large pool of Kenyans with clear accents,” said Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in Kenya’s Information Ministry.

India’s share in the global back-office services pie will drop to 50 percent in the next 3-5 years from about 60 percent now, according to U.S.-based Tholons Inc, which offers management consultancy for offshoring.

SKILLS SHORTAGE

India produces about 2.5 million graduates every year, versus 400,000 in the Philippines, but only about 15 percent are suitable for employment in the outsourcing sector.

U.S.-based outsourcer 24/7 Customer, which has multiple facilities in Asia’s third-largest economy, interviews 5,000 candidates a month in India, but is able to recruit only about 250, Chief Marketing Officer V. Bharathwaj said.

This is pushing up wages rapidly as financial firms from Citigroup and HSBC to Standard Chartered Bank employ thousands at their back-office hubs in India.

Starting wages at 15,000 rupees ($366) a month are still about one-fifth of what their U.S. counterparts earn, but they are rising 10-15 percent a year.

Cost per employee for a back-office firm in Bangalore is almost similar to Manila, but is 20 percent lower in Guangzhou in China and 35 percent cheaper in Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, said Avinash Vashistha, chief executive of Tholons.

Analysts say that while Vietnam does not have a vast pool of English-speaking manpower, it is a prime destination for non-voice back-office services such as legal and medical transcription, claims processing, and finance and accounting.

Adding to the squeeze is the rupee, Asia’s best performing currency this year, which climbed to a nine-year high of 40.20 against the dollar, up 10 percent since end-2006, while the Philippine peso has gained more than 5 percent.

First Global Securities last month downgraded India’s IT services sector to “underperform”, citing the rupee and wage inflation. Every 1 percent rise in the rupee impacts the services firms’ margins by 30-50 basis points, analysts say.

“Everything is hitting us adversely,” said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies. “Wages are going up, real estate costs are escalating and on top of that you have the dollar exchange rate going bad.”

India’s back-office services industry, which earned $8.4 billion in exports in the year to March, is also being lured by tax breaks, infrastructure improvements and investment perks offered by China and the Philippines, he said.

The industry is also anxiously watching for any ripple effect from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis, with some smaller firms feeling the pinch as U.S. companies trim spending on services.

However, Infosys’ outsourcing unit sees an opportunity here, reckoning that the need to cut costs would be even more prevalent in an economic downturn, potentially boosting business.

(Additional reporting by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura in NAIROBI and Rosemarie Francisco in MANILA)

© Reuters 2006.

Untouchability and Indian capitalism

Below is an interesting story published by The Observer. It shows how stratification specific to a society is reproduced and even intensified under capitalism, with competition being generalised. Caste, race and all other hierarchical identities of yesteryears are transformed into competitive identities, as well as inducing market segmentation – the upper caste/race seeks to maintain its supremacy utilising every brutal means, while the lower caste/race tries to assert itself. A schematic radical would call this situation semi-feudal, as it seems to him/her an aberration to “pure” idealised capitalism. Is there anything like that? But who can argue with the convinced ones – ever afraid of dropping the coloured glasses that their fathers lent them? This forces him/her to go in all kinds of ‘bourgeois democratic’ alliances – in order to sweep away the “vestiges” of “pre-capitalism”, before removing capitalism and the capitalists. So much for his/her utopianism and idea-lism.

India’s untouchable millionaire

Entrepreneur who escaped the rigid caste system warns that it is becoming more divisive as India grows richer

Amelia Gentleman in Agra
Sunday May 6, 2007
The Observer

As a child, Hari Pippal slept alongside his six sisters and eight brothers on a stretch of pavement. As a teenager, he pedalled a bicycle rickshaw to help feed the family. Now the owner of a large, profitable private hospital, a shoe factory, a motorbike dealership and a successful restaurant, Hari Pippal has become a symbol of the enormous possibilities available in new India to anyone with entrepreneurial flair.

The fact that this self-made millionaire has risen to the top despite being a Dalit (an untouchable) has prompted some to promote his achievements as proof that, as India races towards economic transformation, a more egalitarian society is emerging. Magazines feature him as a Dalit success story. Pippal, however, is uneasy with his status as poster boy for a casteless modern India. He believes his triumphs have come in spite of his caste and warns that, as India becomes richer, caste divisions are becoming ever more pronounced. At the headquarters of his business empire, he said: ‘As a rule India’s economic boom is only enjoyed by high-caste people. This is a great tragedy for India, because so much talent is being excluded. I feel real despair.’

The Hindu concept of untouchability was abolished in 1950, but the challenge of eradicating prejudices dating back thousands of years has defeated successive governments. Last week in Delhi the issue of caste-related inequalities divided politicians as they argued over the merits of extending affirmative action programmes in universities for backward castes. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has compared the caste system to apartheid South Africa. ‘Untouchability is not just social discrimination; it is a blot on humanity,’ he said.

Pippal believes that the government needs to force the blossoming corporate sector to introduce positive discrimination schemes of the kind which have existed in the public sector for decades.

‘The government believes the scheduled caste [the official term for Dalits] is coming up, that the caste system is disappearing. That is wrong. The gap between the scheduled castes and the higher castes is increasing,’ Pippal said. ‘Lower castes are still very poor. Without money it’s hard to take advantage of the new opportunities, so they stay poor and everyone else gets richer.’

Pippal became conscious of his status on the first day at school. His teachers would mutter in his direction: ‘You people are ill-educated, badly dressed and don’t know how to behave’. Consigned to do the jobs no one else wants – latrine-cleaners and roadsweepers – Dalits have traditionally been forbidden from touching the food or water of upper castes. Pippal, 56, remembers how teachers would never ask him to bring them water or invite him to eat with them, as they did other higher-caste pupils.

‘I responded by deciding I had to be better than the others – cleverer, better dressed, better behaved, more successful,’ he said. But the snubs and subtle insults have lasted a lifetime. His surname identifies him as a Dalit, so when he opened his first company he called it ‘People’s Export’ – which sounded about the same, but did not have the same negative connotations.

When he opened his hospital in 2004, it was difficult to recruit high-caste doctors, many of whom would not contemplate working under him. Because the hospital, a few kilometres from the Taj Mahal, swiftly gained a reputation, attitudes changed and he now employs 25 upper-caste doctors. Even now, several of the Dalit doctors avoid revealing their surname, relying on initials so that they don’t alarm higher-caste patients.

When the oldest of his five sons said that he was engaged to a girl from a higher caste, Pippal was happy that his son had found someone he loved. Her parents, too, made no objection to the match, but a few days later about 100 people from her community arrived at Pippal’s flat, threatening to kill the girl’s parents if the marriage went ahead. ‘I told my son that he would destroy their whole family if he persisted in the marriage, and he understood,’ Pippal said. The son recently married a Dalit doctor from his father’s hospital. ‘Now I believe my children should marry within their caste. It’s better that way.’

India has a number of Dalit role models who have battled their way to the top. This year KG Balakrishnan was sworn in as chief justice of India, the first Dalit to hold the post. Narendra Jadhav, the chief economist of India’s central bank, is a Dalit. Yet the social mobility which usually accompanies rapid economic growth has barely touched this 150 million-strong community, the bulk of whom remain deprived and oppressed. Dalits die sooner and are more likely to be malnourished, unemployed and murdered than others.

Pippal knows how exceptional his life has been when he meets his contemporaries from primary school. ‘All of my school friends of my caste are still sitting on a pavement making shoes,’ he said. ‘They are angry with the system, but what can they do?’

Eroding India’s “competitive advantage”?

Business Standard on May 03 had an interesting article (posted below) about the erosion of India’s comparative advantage in IT – cheap labour seems not so cheap now. Even if labour is still cheaper than the ‘advanced’ countries’, but then productivity is far lower. Solutions are suggested – off to KPO. Also, “Some feel there is nothing to worry as India is rapidly creating huge economies of scale in IT offshoring, which offset the inflationary pressures of salary increases”. This bubbly boom and bust of BPO – how much does it affect the country’s overall economy – the P(roductive) F(orces)/P(roduction) R(elations)?

BPO`s diminishing competitiveness
THE HUMAN FACTOR
Shyamal Majumdar / Mumbai May 03, 2007

The cost-arbitrage benefit may erode if the meagre productivity of IT staff is factored in.

In a survey released yesterday, CLSA Asia Pacific says 40 per cent of India’s information technology employees expect their salaries to rise by 20 per cent annually over the next 10 years. Two-thirds expect at least a 15 per cent growth. While this indicates continued all-round prosperity for IT employees — for example, the IT professionals spend $1 billion annually just on eating out and almost half in the 28-35 age group had an international vacation last year — how does the zooming salary bill impact the competitiveness of India’s outsourcing industry?

The jury is still out on this. Some feel there is nothing to worry as India is rapidly creating huge economies of scale in IT offshoring, which offset the inflationary pressures of salary increases. Many outsourcing companies are implementing large team sizes and long-term projects to help maintain utilisation levels at above 75 per cent.

But there are quite a few other analyst firms which feel by 2010, India may become too costly to provide low-end services at competitive costs. For example, Evalueserve, a leading provider of knowledge process outsourcing services, says Indian salaries have increased at an average of 14 per cent a year. If this trend continues, the cost-arbitrage benefit would get reduced from the present 40 per cent to 25 per cent by 2010.

Or, listen to The Conference Board. The world’s pre-eminent business membership and research organisation has been a longtime supporter of outsourcing and offshoring American jobs to cheap overseas labour markets. It said in a report in 2005 that potentially massive savings in wage and benefit costs will continue to drive the global offshoring movement.

But the same organisation is now questioning the economic benefits of outsourcing. In a study in October last year, the Conference Board said the competitive advantage of low-wage countries is often exaggerated once the meagre productivity of their workers is factored in. The study said the comparative cost advantages of taking your business to low-wage countries such as China or India are often not the bargain they seem when wages are adjusted for low productivity. The manufacturing sector in India and China only pays between 2 per cent and 3 per cent of the US compensation level on average.

But labour productivity in these countries is also far below the US level at 12 per cent to 13 per cent.Though the productivity levels at present exceed compensation levels by a considerable margin — unit labour costs in China and India are on average 20 per cent lower than that in the US — The Conference Board warns that the one critical lesson for businesses that benefit from one-time labour cost benefits when investing in low wage countries is that productivity gains from new technology and innovation have to keep pace with often fast rising wages of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Or the cost advantage begins to erode.

The worry is real. For example, according to Deloitte research, the top 10 per cent of the IT workforce in India has been receiving an average salary rise of more than 40 per cent. In contrast, most IT employees in the US received a salary rise of five per cent or less. Though salaries in the US are still, on an average, nearly 10 times higher than those in India, the gap is sure to diminish over time. One reason for the fast-rising wages is the limited “employable” pool.

The Indian education system is not churning out enough computer science and electronics graduates. For instance, though India’s 272 universities and nearly 14,000 colleges churn out over 25 million graduates, only about 300,000 enter the workforce as engineers. And, out of that, maybe just 30 per cent are suitable for the software and IT services industry.

One way out of the diminishing competitiveness could be to go up the value chain — from voice-based services to knowledge process outsourcing. According to an Evalueserve study, the global KPO market is expected to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 per cent. Compare this with the prediction for the low-end outsourcing services market. This is expected to have a CAGR of 26 per cent.The high-end KPO opportunities are immense for Indian firms.

For instance, look at some of the figures pertaining to intellectual property research. Drafting and filing of patent applications in the US is quite expensive. A typical application costs about $10,000 to $15,000 to draft and file with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Cost savings from offshoring even a portion of the patent drafting process can easily save up to 50 per cent of the cost for the end client, according to Evalueserve.

One Millionaire and Millions Poor

The Communist Party of India’s MP and veteran trade union leader Gurudas Dasgupta was at his best in the Lok Sabha on April 26, 2007, where he lambasted his party-supported government on its track record over labour issues. He in fact, asked his comrades to review their support to this “blind-to-facts” government. However, it seems he still views the anti-labour attitude as a problem of the government’s eyes being “blind to facts” or being “closed”, not a systemic symptom related to the ‘class capacity’ of the State and the government.

Following is an excerpt from his speech published in Business Standard:

Madam, we have a unique coinage — facilitator. Government is the facilitator of economic growth. Since it is the facilitator of economic growth, its eyes are blind to facts. In order to open the door for foreign capital, eyes are closed. This is the economic background of your ministry. Madam, it is being understood deliberately — I do not say by the Ministry of Labour but the Ministry of Finance — that the trade union movement is a roadblock and all the labour laws are obstacles.

Madam, what is the situation? Honourable Labour Minister must be confronted with facts. The economic figures are like this. Productivity has increased in the country. Output per unit has increased in the country. Untaxed dividend has increased in the country. You understand untaxed dividends. You never touch the dividend. Mr. Chidambaram had no political will to touch the dividend because he is friendly to investors, I do not say he is friendly to the corporates. Therefore, dividend is untaxed. There has been growth of not only millionaires but billionaires in the country.

Madam, please do not laugh at me if I say that it is easy to become a millionaire in India, but it is difficult to reduce poverty in India.

The Congress party came to power, defeating the BJP on the promise that it will do something better. Are they doing better? May I call Shri Chidambaram, Mr Failure?

Therefore, the point is that the leaders of the government are speaking of production and productivity. On how many occasions did our respected ministers including the prime minister attend the meetings of the CII and speak of production and productivity? Do they speak of violation of labour (laws)? Have we ever heard the prime minister speaking in this House about violation of labour law? Violation of labour law is not the agenda. The agenda is to clear the deck for more investment.

When the price rise is taking place, workers are not being given Dearness Allowance. Is it social justice? I would give two examples how DA is being flouted. There was a strike in West Bengal by 2.5 lakh jute workers. After prolonged two months strike they had been able to get DA up to 200 points when the DA was due to 320 points, and this was despite the attempt of the West Bengal government. The private sector just did not give the DA. What is the remedy?

I am giving a second example. Today, a strike is on at Hindustan Motors of the Birlas. What is their demand? For six years Birlas have not given any DA to the workers. The government of West Bengal is trying to help them. Last night, the meeting broke up and the management bluntly said that it would not give the DA. What is the remedy?

Trade union movement is considered to be a criminal offence. Let me give you a example. Maharashtra is under Congress rule. There was a strike in a transport company. Only a few days back, 30,000 people were retrenched in a single day. Is it a respect for democracy? Is it a respect for trade unionism? Is it a respect for human rights?

(Excerpts from CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta’s speech in the Lok Sabha on April 26 over the Demands for Grants relating to the Ministry of Labour and Employment. Sumitra Mahajan was in the Chair)