Workshop: India

1. According to Gangury-Scrase & Scrase (1999) had globalisation in India provided significant improvement of living for lower-income workers by 1999? Justify.

After the ratification of the GATT India's economy has experienced many changes due to globalization, this changes are both economically and cultural. But this liberalization has had a contradictory effect on social structure.

Globalization has defiantly improved the situation of the country, due to the greater access to information, knowledge, credit access and women have more working areas to choose. Changes can also be seen as well in the sexual mores, the dating practices and there's even a growing rejection to arranged marriages.

But the social benefits are not so clear.

Gangury-Scrase & Scrase (1999) findings are very interest but quite disappointing, first of all income levels have risen for the lower middle classes, but their purchasing power has remain flat because of high levels of inflation. Second, the credit access has improve for this class but it comes with "the price" of paying monthly high interest rates and takes them in to a cycle of consumptions and debt. Third, they have aspirational desires of consumptions that can not be real because of debt concerns. Fourth, even though they are happy about the opening in electronic media, some foreign content "attacks" their culture and morality and also increase their consumerism. And finally there's a resilience of Bengali culture.

(Frumin 2009) Despite its annual economic growth of more than 6% since the early 1990s, India is a country that "has barely scratched its potential," Mr. Nilekani writes. It has "enormous advantages in its youngpopulation and its entrepreneurs,"-the country's median age is a shocking 23-"a growing it capability, an English-speaking workforce and strength as a democracy." And yet one-third of the population is illiterate; 90% of students drop out before they reach high school; cities are unplanned, sprawling messes; electricity is spotty; roads are clogged, potholed or nonexistent; laws and governance are arbitrary and stilted; and hundreds of millions of people live in poverty.

2. How is the situation for workers in India today?

(Schuman 2009) In January the Federation of Indian Export Organizations warned that 10 million Indian workers might lose theirs in coming months, amid what A. Sakthivel, the group's president, called "the worst year in history" for exporters.

(Tripathi 2007) Only 8 per cent of India's workforce of 430 million people are in the organised sector where unions may represent them. And within that sector, the proportion who work for companies that supply to multinationals - and hence may come under the gaze of western NGOs - is even smaller. Their campaigns to improve conditions of workers at such factories make the headlines and provide relief to some. But they cannot transform the system.

(Robinson 2009) Indians believe in a kind of demographic destiny: because India will pass China as the most populous country on earth sometime in the next couple decades, many are sure India will become a huge world power as well. To ensure continued success, however, India's government will have to find a way to spread the benefits of the current boom. Hundreds of millions of people remain mired in poverty; the child malnutrition rate is an incredible 45%, higher than in sub-Saharan African countries like Ethiopia; and pockets of rebellion, especially in India's vast rural areas, where two-thirds of the people still live, threaten long-term stability. If India gets it right, though, the 21st century could belong to the world's biggest democratic freemarket just as much as it does to a certain Communist behemoth to the north.

3. How cultural globalisation has affected Indian in the last 2 decades?

(Sen 2007) With a sweeping and ambitious vision for liberalization, privatization and globalization, India threw open the doors to economic reform in the early 1990s – and the staggeringly successful results continue to accumulate. Ironically, only after thousands of years of culture, higher education, innovation and other important contributions to humankind in engineering, science, the arts and philosophy, India is now the world's overnight success story. With 1.1 billion people living peacefully in the world's largest democracy, India is emerging as one of the truly great economic and political nations of the 21st century.

Unlike perhaps any other country, India stands as a shining testament to the power of globalization. India's GDP is growing at an astounding 8 percent, and most industries are facing the pleasant challenge of managing exceptionally high growth rates. As the second most populous country in the world and the seventh largest (by area), India already boasts the world's 12th-largest economy and the third largest in terms of purchasing power. And by most indications, its best days still lie ahead.

4. Describe India's Green Revolution. (http://www.indiaonestop.com/Greenrevolution.htm)

The world's worst recorded food disaster happened in 1943 in British-ruled India. Known as the Bengal Famine, an estimated four million people died of hunger that year alone in eastern India (that included today's Bangladesh). The initial theory put forward to 'explain' that catastrophe was that there as an acute shortfall in food production in the area. However, Indian economist Amartya Sen (recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, 1998) has established that while food shortage was a contributor to the problem, a more potent factor was the result of hysteria related to World War II which made food supply a low priority for the British rulers. The hysteria was further exploited by Indian traders who hoarded food in order to sell at higher prices.

Nevertheless, when the British left India four years later in 1947, India continued to be haunted by memories of the Bengal Famine. It was therefore natural that food security was a paramount item on free India's agenda. This awareness led, on one hand, to the Green Revolution in India and, on the other, legislative measures to ensure that businessmen would never again be able to hoard food for reasons of profit.

However, the term "Green Revolution" is applied to the period from 1967 to 1978. Between 1947 and 1967, efforts at achieving food self-sufficiency were not entirely successful. Efforts until 1967 largely concentrated on expanding the farming areas. But starvation deaths were still being reported in the newspapers. In a perfect case of Malthusian economics, population was growing at a much faster rate than food production. This called for drastic action to increase yield. The action came in the form of the Green Revolution.

There were three basic elements in the method of the Green Revolution:
(1) Continued expansion of farming areas;
(2) Double-cropping existing farmland;
(3) Using seeds with improved genetics.

Results of the Green Revolution: Statistical Results of the Green Revolution The Green Revolution resulted in a record grain output of 131 million tons in 1978-79. This established India as one of the world's biggest agricultural producers. No other country in the world which attempted the Green Revolution recorded such level of success. India also became an exporter of food grains around that time. Yield per unit of farmland improved by more than 30 per cent between 1947 (when India gained political independence) and 1979 when the Green Revolution was considered to have delivered its goods. The crop area under HYV varieties grew from seven per cent to 22 per cent of the total cultivated area during the 10 years of the Green Revolution. More than 70 per cent of the wheat crop area, 35 per cent of the rice crop area and 20 per cent of the millet and corn crop area, used the HYV seeds.

Crop areas under high-yield varieties needed more water, more fertilizer, more pesticides, fungicides and certain other chemicals. This spurred the growth of the local manufacturing sector. Such industrial growth created new jobs and contributed to the country's GDP. The increase in irrigation created need for new dams to harness monsoon water. The water stored was used to create hydro-electric power. This in turn boosted industrial growth, created jobs and improved the quality of life of the people in villages. India paid back all loans it had taken from the World Bank and its affiliates for the purpose of the Green Revolution. This improved India's creditworthiness in the eyes of the lending agencies

The Green Revolution created plenty of jobs not only for agricultural workers but also industrial workers by the creation of lateral facilities such as factories and hydro-electric power stations as explained above. India transformed itself from a starving nation to an exporter of food. This earned admiration for India in the comity of nations, especially in the Third World.

5. Did the British Raj enriched or impoverish India? Justify.

It Impoverished India. (Lal 2008) When Did India's Growth Acceleration Begin? From the earlier account of the partial liberalization in the 1980s, it would appear that there was some acceleration in the growth rate in the 1980s. But the dash for growth, which raised growth rates just before the 1991 crisis, was not sustainable. It was the much fuller liberalization in 1991 that put India on a higher-growth path. So the 1990s should really be taken as the period when India's growth acceleration began.

By the turn of the 20th century, the struggle for complete freedom was growing more intense. Led by the Indian National Congress and the charismatic Mahatma Gandhi, who preached non-violent protest, millions of Indians engaged in campaigns of civil disobedience. At first the English rulers resisted the demands for independence; but change became inevitable, and at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, the nation of India was born.

The break with Britain was far from smooth. States where Muslims were the majority, in the northwest and northeast of the country, were carved off as the separate nation of Pakistan. (East Pakistan would later go to war to secure its own independence as Bangladesh). Partition, as the division of Hindu and Muslim British India was called, led to the migration of some 15 million people as Hindus and Muslims rushed to make sure they were on the right side of the new national boundaries. As many as 2 million people were killed in sectarian fighting during the great reordering.

India is the world's largest democracy. For much of its existence, parliament has been controlled by the Congress party, which has long been dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family (no relation to the Mahatma). The clan has given India three prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, who held power for India's first 17 years; his daughter Indira Gandhi, who ruled in the late 1960s and '70s and again in the early '80s and who was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984; and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who took over after the death of his mother and was himself assassinated in 1991. Rajiv Gandhi's widow Sonia, Italian by birth, led the Congress party to an unexpected return to power in 2004 but turned down the prime minister's post, installing instead the highly regarded technocrat Manmohan Singh. Rajiv and Sonia's son Rahul, now a member of parliament, is often talked about as a future leader.

For many decades, India's economy remained protected and over-regulated, condemning the country, it seemed, to a disastrously slow "Hindu rate of growth." But from the early 1990s successive governments have begun to dismantle the "license Raj," which handed control of key industries to a handful of companies and suffocated competition and progress. Liberalization is credited by many with kick-starting India's economy. New industries such as data processing and software engineering, centered in such southern Indian cities as Bangalore and Chennai, have attracted thousands of jobs from the U.S. and Europe. (Western workers whose jobs have been outsourced complain of being "Bangalored.") By late 2006 growth was more than 9% a year, a rate that had international investors looking at India in the same way they had China in the early 1990s.
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