The flip side of India’s economic boom

Re: Universities go to school in India, Opinion June 9

Haroon Siddiqui praises M.S. Swaminatham, father of “the green revolution” as “one of the most influential Asians of our time.” He fails to mention that this very same “green revolution” is directly responsible for the displacement of hundreds of millions of Indian farmers who now live in hellish urban ghettos and who certainly are not part of “pulling the millions out of poverty” but the opposite.

While the top 2 per cent of India’s population is reaping the windfall of the country’s galloping GDP, the other 98 per cent have been forgotten. The “Naxalite” rebellion, comprising more than 40 per cent of India’s tribals and unscheduled castes in the several states, is tearing apart the fabric of India, while the separatist movements of Kashmir and Assam, seen as nationalist movements, are nothing but colonized regions brutally exploited by India.

All this doesn’t include the environmental catastrophe threatening India with desertification, virtually depleted ground water and rampant exploitation of resources to feed the rapacious industrialization of the country. India’s economy today is 90 per cent owned by the private sector with a paltry 10 per cent the responsibility of the government. How does this privatization bode for a country mired in centuries of the “caste system” where there is not a modicum of a social safety net?

Mr. Siddiqui would have done well to mention people like Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva, two women who have been bravely fighting injustice in India and being persecuted by a ruthless, patriarchal, corrupt, “enlightened” and highly educated neo-liberal class busy exporting its expertise worldwide.

Instead of so desperately aping “Western” values and pedagogy, India would do much better cleaning up not only its own backyard, but front yard as well.

Bogos Kalemkiar, Toronto