Something good to feel about outsourcing.
India moves to spread wealth
A $9 billion plan guarantees the country’s rural poor 100 days of work per household every year.
By Anuj Chopra | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
PUNE, INDIA – India passed its most ambitious antipoverty program in decades Tuesday in an effort to spread more widely the spoils of the country’s rapid economic growth.
Social welfare spending, it seems, is staging a comeback here, after 15 years of focus on privatization and encouraging the high-tech sector. Presenting the bill in parliament, Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi said, “An economy growing at 7 percent per year, can and must find the resources … to improve the lives of its millions of poor.”
Much of rural India, home to two-thirds of the population, has not felt the benefits of the new high-tech economy, and voters in these areas handed the reins of power to the Congress Party in a stunning election upset last year.
The new National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is widely seen as political payback.
Under the new legislation, rural poor are guaranteed 100 days of work per household every year. One-third of these jobs will be reserved for women. The mammoth program, which will be implemented in the 150 poorest districts over the next four years, comes with a whopping price tag of $9 billion a year.
The new jobs include construction of roads and embankments, cleaning up polluted water supplies, and wasteland restoration for agriculture, among other rural improvement efforts.
Maybe what goes around comes around and those who have lost their jobs to outsourcing and the poor in the United States will one day be given a chance again. And it helps having a WOMAN in power.
At any rate it is nice to see democracy working for the good again.
So we have state welfare to look forward to to impove conditions here. The system is rigged, even more so now with the tax cuts. When will people begin to question the wisdom of a capitalist state?
BTW, I read a column by Roger Neuwirth in the Washington Post that tells of India tearing down a huge shanty town in Mumbia in January. 45,000 dwellings were flattened and 200,000 left homeless. In Zimbabwe, similar operation destroyed tens of thousands of homes and left about the same number, 200,000, homeless. Done in the name of attracting investments to the area, and the ruling class not liking the politics of the poor.
Capitalism’s war on the poor and middle class continues.
Well, cleaning up the polluted water might help, although it’s hard to do when it’s continually being fouled and used up by outsourced companies. And without the help of the companies responsible- I don’t know how they’ll manage without throwing the companies out.
http://www.indiaresource.org/campaigns/coke/
And I’m not sure how much it will help the farmers, those still living-there have been something over 25,000 suicides since 1997.
http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5608
So,not so hopeful from what little I know, but it would be lovely to be wrong! (Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong!) And maybe it’s a step in the right direction?