[Soasiastudents] Madhu Kishwar Apr. 23

[Keith Snodgrass]

Madhu Kishwar visits UW
Wednesday, April 23
3:30 PM
Communications 120

Laws, Liberty and Livelihood
Need for a Bottom Up Agenda of Economic Reforms

"While political scientists and theorists in India have engaged extensively
with the need for greater political rights and freedom, there has been far
less attention paid to issues of economic freedom. Political freedom has
thus been understood in a very narrow sense of free and fair elections,
right to representation in political institutions and decentralization of
decision-making in civic affairs. The issue of economic rights and freedoms
has predominantly been viewed through the prism of class struggle, with the
state being projected as the sole 'protector' of the weak and vulnerable
sections of society from the greed and exploitation of the rich and
powerful. The bureaucracy avidly imbibed this Nehruvian bias because it
facilitated the concentration of vast, arbitrary powers in its own hands.
Neither our economists nor our political theorists have tried to come to
grips with the often predatory role of the State and how it works hard to
wreck people's livelihoods and their self-confidence. Without economic
freedom, whatever political freedom we have becomes an empty ritual. That is
a major reason why, despite such an actively involved electorate, Indian
political democracy remains deeply flawed and has become hostage to
anti-social elements. Since our intellectuals and media remain obsessed
mainly with the political and electoral dimensions of democracy, they have
more or less ignored the systematic and routine loot, extortion, violence,
and indignities suffered by our people as they go about perfectly legitimate
economic pursuits.

The livelihood concerns of the vast majority of our people remain
marginalized even in the minds of those pushing for economic reforms because
the agenda of economic reforms has remained obsessively focused on the entry
of transnational corporations, the concerns of the Indian corporate sector,
and the fate of government-run public enterprises, as they prepare to deal
with a market open to competition. We cannot afford to overlook the fact
that Indian and foreign corporations and the PSUs together provide
employment to no more than 3% per cent of our population. As against about
10% who are self-employed in Europe and America, the vast majority of people
in India (more than 90 %) work in the unorganized sector and the vast
majority is still self-employed.
My presentation will focus on the absurd laws and regulations governing the
livelihoods of two of the most visible and numerically large group of self
employed poor in urban areas—namely street vendors and cycle rickshaw
pullers—as illustrative examples of how needless bureaucratic controls trap
the hard working poor in a web of illegality and make them victims of
massive extortion rackets."
------------------------------------------------------------------------


-- 
Keith Snodgrass
Associate Director and Outreach Coordinator
South Asia Center
Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
University of Washington
w: http://jsis.washington.edu/soasia/
p:206.543.4800
f: 206.685.0668
e: snodgras at u.washington.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/soasiastudents/attachments/20080418/d9935d3f/attachment.html