Gimmicks for People, Welfare for the Select:

Very often indexes of economic performance are presented as evidence of people's welfare by state orders. The gross domestic product (GDP) has been a favourite concept. The figures were often quoted and used by the officialdom as proof of welfare post 1990s. So when the GDP moved from 7 to 8 to 9, people are supposed to feel good. More specialized indexes like the Baseline Profitability Index, of which I talk about, are available for the present ruling establishment in India. I thought it is worthwhile putting such figures where they really belong and read them for what they really indicate.

Couple this with some of the biggest efforts to manage public relations (PR) one gets the huge scale of manufactured illusion people must live through. APCO worldwide for instance, with a record of multi-billion dollar lobbying in United States, promotion of Zionist conservative networks, with clientele of oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with track record of promoting climate-change denialists, as well as branding of Gujarat post riots; have got involved in the PR activities for Indian central government. There is also tailor made work to promote the present prime minister.

Increasingly the governmental apparatus feels a need to wield shields of PR stunts, to ward off any serious doubt. News and media get overwhelmed by the kudos they churn out for upcoming projects and restructurings. It is also in such contexts that I feel the need to try and put in an effort to understand such gimmicks for what they are.

The following perspective comes in the wake of immense campaigning done for the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) programme for urban infrastructure and the smart cities programme as envisaged by the central government in India. Gamuts of corporate developmental indexes are portrayed as proofs of and logic for the social validity of the aforesaid state programmes. Recently, as per major print news, India, way down at 6th on Baseline Profitability Index is now the topper. I do not have the illusion that people immediately get excited about such number games as much as when the first gimmicks of GDP growth were advertised as greater human success. Even then it is interesting to place such ecstatic news items under lens and enquire into these oft appearing figures.

Before anyone contemplates becoming loyal believers of the make in India lion deities, it will be worthwhile thinking a bit into what many of the parameters of achievements are about. This is a good way of putting them where they belong. This is also a way of preventing imaginations take wings of wax and flying to the sun. Another way is to get to the ground and see what the welfarist translations of such figure games are. The former is what I will try out with the baseline profitability score the state has 'achieved' as per news. What does it mean when a score of the kind created by an economist and Foreign Policy commentator Daniel Altman goes positive? And also how a state hell bent on following a certain trajectory can use such figures, as the GDPs were once used, to manufacture euphoria and hero worships.

Here Daniel Altman who created the index essentially sees how much value an asset has added on once an investment is made, say in India. The index compares how the local policies of the state and the local conditions would affect the same investment in other places. It also asks how the principal and the return on investment will change as a factor of the place where investments are made. This is the gist. 

                                  

Thus, at present, on this comparative scale, "India is the place to start". No doubt that Daniel Altman knows 'his economics' well; he uses the technique for soccer league ratings, global economics, and for the baseline index. For instance one of his favourite ways is to assess the 'worth' of players for billion dollar club markets or assessment of the relative quality of various soccer leagues using average age. He likes his comparative strategy. The same applies for comparing investor scenes. He must also be a good proponent of these perspectives where he teaches.

Let’s congratulate the economist, the holy investors and the promoting state structure in India and go on to see what all of these implies for us, and the much less fortunate millions who inhabit our places.

Few years back, during the term of the last government, what happened were sets of catastrophes as a function of global credit impacts. There were unheard scales of corporate corruption as well. The crisis of debt markets, the packaging and reselling of bad debts incurred by financial institutions, was felt everywhere, in varying scales. The human impact was too much. Millions lost jobs across the world. This is how fictitious capital (trillions) and volatile finance has clear material impacts that can only go from bad to worse

Remittance economies for instance (many in the Americas and a lot more like in Asia where service sector is predominant) suffered in characteristic ways. If this was actual starvations in places like Haiti dependent on US remittances, in places like ours, the worst was still warded a lot off.  This is because the system was yet to be made totally subject to the whims and fancies of investors and investor capital. Even then we managed to set free those responsible for the death of thousands in Bhopal. We even promised the Dow chemicals safe spaces of future investment.

In the last few decades with the neoliberal turn people witness increasing crisis. But the crisis of investors gets subsequently solved off locally at human costs. The Kingfishers can fly their jets and the Monsantos can keep terminating; only the farmers need to commit suicide.

The new dynamics of urbanization for instance is one of the ways in which crisis gets solved like this. Thus land and property markets have to be favourable to investors. Most of the developments like these are debt financed. But that is just fine! It is a well known truism that capitalist system is ridden with crisis. Crisis is necessary for capitalist systems survival. So there are problems all the time and there are solutions that in turn create a new problem- survival through crisis. Sorry, we are not talking about humanitarian crisis. That is a essential component for any kind of capitalist crisis fixation. The political power centres, once people put them in place through democratic elections,  have been taking action to get the system ready more in favour of the upcoming crisis.

The basic requirement of the aforesaid system is that it requires growth, no matter what. Never mistake growth for welfare. This is just the old GDP story; post Manmohanomic-reforms, of profit generation in new garb. So there is a need to have spaces of competitive ease across the world. And a place like India that both becomes conducive and holds perhaps the biggest market of consumers (on or off credit), that means jackpot (for capitalists, for investors...).

The new game makers and planners will now tell us that a certain rate of growth is acceptable and another rate is less so etc. Do not ask who decides these acceptability levels. Not us for sure! Instead this is the puppet show by a class that has to find security for the increasing amount of money that is entrusted in different state spaces. The too much money has to get invested to generate profits. Banks, for instance, over these years have become lenders (there is hardly an interest for your savings. Imagine one of those new generation loan monger banks).

The surplus that does not find its way out is an impending problem in a capitalist order. So games are to be played, new spaces are to be generated. Wars are one of the favourite games of superpowers and a kind with catastrophic human consequences. Another method is the generation of safe spaces for profit generation. The special economic zones and urban reordering became the state methods post 2000. But things were not quite professionally managed resulting in some of the state repressions coming out too much in open. The usual gimmicks of job generation (after depriving generations of natural and social infrastructure) did not quite work. People began to read about the people from Niyamgiri threatened by bauxite miners, the Reddy brothers mining activities, Vedanta, and many others across India. Millions who voted last time thought they voted for change. 

 

And yes, there is a difference now. Things are much more professionally managed. So there is a clamp down on organizations that report on human rights issues. There is a freeze on their funds. Better spaces for the circulation and generation of profit are getting created through smart cities: not one or two but hundreds on them, through private partnerships. If one reads the clauses and provisions, it becomes too clear for whom are these cities getting ready. There are more gimmicks that resonate nationalism like the make in India's which gets coupled with labour law changes. Labour has to be servile and ready to make things cheap. Labour must not stand in the way of profit. Land laws have to be made more favourable to any ambani or adani (and more of the class...) who has a plan! So get rid of the social impact assessments and environmental laws that stand in the way. Restructure the green tribunals. Do all of these and more and then go across the world and market the vibrant spaces. A better way is to put the patriotic tag and ideas like nationalism (Put some desi words in, to act a swadesi drama). Get in a bit more of media coverage and try to make people good about all of this.

Get such an order in and then economists like Altman will score up the country in the index. And if the state manages either to suppress and keep in place all the human costs incurred during growth, or account for them as collateral damages, they keep winning the game over people.