'Crisis' for the Poor - Bonanza for the Rich | Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation

Feature 07 April 2010

'Crisis' for the Poor - Bonanza for the Rich

India's poor are being pushed out of the official poverty lists but more and more India's CEOs are making it to the lists of the world's richest people. 23 Indians made it to the Forbes list of the world's billionaires in 2009.

The recession is causing unprecedented inflation; 77% of Indians who live on less than Rs. 20 a day, facing the additional burden of soaring food prices and retrenchment are finding it increasingly difficult to survive; hunger deaths are being reported from all over the country. India's rulers blame this state of affairs on the global recession and call for patient sacrifices from the people. But the sacrifices are all on one side, it seems: the exclusive club of India's richest has, during the same recession, expanded and continued to grow richer.

Worldwide, too, it seems that the crisis has hit the poor and the working class hardest while the billionaires whose greed and unscrupulousness caused the crisis in the first place have grown richer! According to the Forbes list, 200 people were added to the list of the world's billionaires, who grew 50% richer in 2009.

In 2009, the global unemployment rate rose from 7.7 to 10 percent, three million jobs were lost, and wages fell dramatically. Millions of families lost their homes and became dislocated. But productivity rose by 7%. 'Austerity' measures and unemployment for the poor; a bonanza for the corporations this is what government policy in times of recession has meant in the US and most other countries. On the list of billionaires from the US are many hedge fund managers and financiers who benefited directly from the US Government's bank bailout.

Who are the Indians who are among the world's billionaires? A list of the top 23 among them is given below )see table(. A look at this list reveals the structural composition of this class: industrialists like the Ambani brothers who vie with each other to guzzle the country's resources of gas; a collection of CEOs Lakshmi Mittal )ArcelorMittal(, Shashi Ruia )Essar(, Savitri Jindal; Anil Agarwal )of Vedanta notoriety( in the mining and steel industry, earning their wealth at the expense of land grab and eviction of the poorest tribals; media barons like Kalanithi Maran )Sun TV(, Subhash Chandra )Zee(, Indu Jain )Times Group(; real estate sharks like Kushal Pal Singh )DLF(; and others in pharmaceuticals, cement and the construction sectors.

It is these corporate fat cats who got the cream; the statement of revenues foregone in the UPA Government's Budget 2010 revealed that they effectively got tax waivers and other sops to the tune of Rs 57 crore per hour or Re 1 crore per minute!