Tag Archives | World Bank (WB)

The BJP-led government has just got parliament to pass a legislation permitting up to 100 percent foreign equity-ownership in India’s insurance sector.

If an Olympic high jump athlete claimed improved performance by continually lowering the bar, he would be banned for life for cheating; if a school principal claimed that the percentage of failures had fallen sharply to zero from 40 percent, and this was found to arise from lowering the pass mark from 50 out of 100 to 2 out of 100, the principal would be sacked.

The vision of a capitalism that is “stabilised” through a rectification of its “excesses”, and hence pre-empts any social challenge to its existence, has always endured in one form or another among economists.

Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”.

It is not a difficult proposition to substantially reduce poverty through redistributive measures. About one tenth of India’s GDP would need to be devoted to providing adequate food for the population, basic and comprehensive healthcare, compulsory free education, employment guarantee and old age pension; for which additional taxation of 7 per cent of GDP that the rich and super-rich can easily bear, would be needed. Combined with vigorous implementation of the existing National Food Security Act 2013 and the MG National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, genuine large-scale reduction of poverty would result

In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalize’ the agriculture sector. Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatization of farming that sparked the previous protest remain and have not been resolved.

Ajay Banga was anointed World Bank president for promoting financial inclusion. Thanks to its success and interest rate hikes, more poor people are drowning in debt as consumer prices rise.

The World Bank plans to use public funds to subsidize private finance, ostensibly to mobilize much more capital to address the climate crisis. But the new plan is not the solution it purports to be.