Indian realities

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Now the jobs we stole 200 years ago are returning to India. Last week the 
Guardian revealed that the National Rail Enquiries service is likely to 
move to Bangalore, in south-west India. Two days later, the HSBC bank 
announced that it was cutting 4,000 customer service jobs in Britain and 
shifting them to Asia. BT, British Airways, Lloyds TSB, Prudential, 
Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, Bupa, Reuters, Abbey National and 
Powergen have already begun to move their call centres to India. The 
British workers at the end of the line are approaching the end of the line.

(George Monbiot, The Guardian, Oct. 21, 2003)

---

LA Times, October 25, 2003

In India, No Job Is Too Small
Amid growing wealth, hundreds of millions of the poor are left behind in a 
curbside economy, scratching out a living any way they can.

By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer

KANTADIH, India ? All day long, Subodh Mahato cools postal workers in this 
West Bengal village by tugging a rope attached to a grass-mat ceiling fan. 
He's been pulling it for 17 years because no one thought to connect the 
post office to the power grid.

In Calcutta, the state capital, Mohammed Jamal and other sidewalk 
entrepreneurs extract clients' earwax with modified tools made from bicycle 
spokes, clean betel juice stains from teeth with a mysterious red fluid, or 
wash street muck from feet in rusty basins ? just like in the days when 
maharajahs ruled.

India is a nuclear power, and a leader in information technology that 
rockets its own satellites into space, but millions of its people live as 
if time had passed them by. The fan, or pankha puller, Mahato, and curbside 
caregivers like Jamal are among millions of 21st century India's working 
poor. They are the bedrock of an economy that is one of the fastest 
growing, yet most unbalanced, in the world.

Most of the benefits of India's rapid economic growth are going to the 
wealthiest 20% of society, said economist Malay Chaudhuri. They have 
swimming pools in a country where millions of people don't have clean 
water, and they stroll through gleaming new air-conditioned shopping malls 
where security guards keep beggars at bay.

India's elite is getting steadily richer from cheap labor that has been one 
of the country's main economic advantages since it began opening up to 
global competition just over a decade ago, Chaudhuri said.

"The gap is growing between the poor in the bottom 80%, and the middle 
class and upper class," said Chaudhuri, founder of the Indian Institute of 
Planning and Management and author of a recent book on India's ills.

"Those at the very bottom, below the poverty line, are seeing hardly any 
increase in their income," he added. "If this growing gap goes on, it will 
be very difficult to govern the country."

India has more than 1 billion people, and by more optimistic estimates, as 
many as 300 million belong to a middle class. Their hunger for consumer 
goods has helped the economy grow at 6% or more a year during the last decade.

But about 350 million others ? more than a third of the population ? live 
in dire poverty, according to the United Nations. In Calcutta alone, an 
estimated 250,000 children sleep on the sidewalks each night.

full: http://www.latimes.com/


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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