YSR rAjyam - sApamA varamA -part 3

In this part 3 of the article, I want to digress a bit about the Vision 2020 and its demeaning effects that luckily (and hopefully) the people of AP as well as India might have escaped. During CBN's CMship we heard and saw so many ads and advices in regards to what is probably the most touted document during those years.. VISION 2020.

Though this document has always been in the visibility of us, the people, I doubt if anyone has had the time and patience to go thru this document. This was earlier accessible by the AP Gov website (this link has been removed after the present govt came into power). It was supposed to be the blue print for "Swarnandhra Pradesh".. but if that Vision was indeed achieved, we would have been forever as "Vishadandhra Pradesh". A few of the points of this document are quoted here. I took the liberty of quoting from George Monbiot's website. I have asked for republishing permission and if he objects i will take them out of this blog.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/05/18/this-is-what-we-paid-for/

Posted May 18, 2004
Britain’s foreign aid has been used to bankroll a programme for mass starvation

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th May 2004

Tony Blair has lost the election. It’s true he wasn’t standing, but we won’t split hairs. His policies have just been put to the test by an electorate blessed with a viable opposition, and crushed. In throwing him out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic experiment.

Chandrababu Naidu, the state’s chief minister, was the West’s favourite Indian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad, the state capital. Time magazine named him South Asian of the Year; the governor of Illinois created a Naidu Day in his honour, and the British government and the World Bank flooded his state with money. They loved him because he did what he was told.

Naidu realised that to sustain power he must surrender it. He knew that as long as he gave the global powers what they wanted, he would receive the money and stature which count for so much in Indian politics. So instead of devising his own programme, he handed the job to the US consultancy company McKinsey.

McKinsey’s scheme, “Vision 2020”, is one of those documents whose summary says one thing and whose contents quite another.(1) It begins, for example, by insisting that education and health care must be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state’s hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by “user charges”.(2) It extols small businesses but, way beyond the point at which most people stop reading, reveals that it intends to “eliminate” the laws which defend them,(3) and replace small investors, who “lack motivation”, with “large corporations”.(4) It claims it will “generate employment” in the countryside, and goes on to insist that over 20 million people should be thrown off the land.(5)

Put all these – and the other proposals for privatisation, deregulation and the shrinking of the state – together, and you see that McKinsey has unwittingly developed a blueprint for mass starvation. You dispossess 20 million farmers from the land just as the state is reducing the number of its employees and foreign corporations are “rationalising” the rest of the workforce, and you end up with millions without work or state support. “The State’s people,” McKinsey warns, “will need to be enlightened about the benefits of change.”(6)

McKinsey’s vision was not confined to Naidu’s government. Once he had implemented these policies, Andhra Pradesh “should seize opportunities to lead other states in such reform, becoming, in the process, the benchmark state.”(7) Foreign donors would pay for the experiment, then seek to persuade other parts of the developing world to follow Naidu’s example.

There is something familiar about all this, and McKinsey have been kind enough to jog our memories. Vision 2020 contains 11 glowing references to Chile’s experiment in the 1980s. General Pinochet handed the economic management of his country to a group of neoliberal economists known as the Chicago Boys. They privatised social provision, tore up the laws protecting workers and the environment and handed the economy to multinational companies. The result was a bonanza for big business, and a staggering growth in debt, unemployment, homelessness and malnutrition.(8) The plan was funded by the United States in the hope that it could be rolled out around the world.

Pinochet’s understudy was bankrolled by Britain. In July 2001 Clare Short, then secretary of state for development, finally admitted to parliament that, despite numerous official denials, Britain was funding Vision 2020.(9) Blair’s government has financed the state’s economic reform programme, its privatisation of the power sector and its “centre for good governance” (which means as little governance as possible).(10) Our taxes also fund the “implementation secretariat” for the state’s privatisation programme. The secretariat is run, at Britain’s insistence, by the far-right business lobby group the Adam Smith Institute.(11) The money for all this comes out of Britain’s foreign aid budget.

The results of the programme we have been funding are plain to see. During the hungry season, hundreds of thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh are now kept alive on gruel supplied by charities.(17) Last year hundreds of children died in an encephalitis outbreak because of the shortage of state-run hospitals.(18) The state government’s own figures suggest that 77% of the population has fallen below the poverty line.(19) The measurement criteria are not consistent, but this appears to be a massive rise. In 1993 there was one bus a week taking migrant workers from a depot in Andhra Pradesh to Mumbai. Today there are 34. (20) The dispossessed must reduce themselves to the transplanted coolies of Blair’s new empire.

Luckily, democracy still functions in India. In 1999, Naidu’s party won 29 seats, leaving Congress with five. Last week those results were precisely reversed. We can’t yet vote Tony Blair out of office in Britain, but in Andhra Pradesh they have done the job on our behalf.

www.monbiot.com

References:

These can be found at the above said website.

As you can see from the above article, the vision of 2020 would have reduced us all to beggars by the time 2020 ushers in. If this is not enough evidence, read on for some more "documented" facts and figures...

http://www.indiaresource.org/issues/agbiotech/2003/blindedbydevelopment.html

The crux of the Vision 20/20 strategy for development is the modernisation of the food systems of Andhra Pradesh through consolidating farms, mechanising agriculture, increasing fertiliser and pesticide use, building roads and transport systems and introducing genetically modified crops such as vitamin A enriched rice and BT cotton. The government officials and corporations have managed to convince large development agencies (with their outdated belief that corporate agriculture can alleviate poverty through a trickle-down effect) that the poor will benefit. A DFID(Department for International Development, British Govt) spokesman was quoted by Straits Times as saying, "Vision 20/20 is going ahead. Our aim is to take farmers out of the poverty they and their families have been in for centuries. The only way to do so is by modernisation, commercial consolidation of farms and the introduction of up to date farming methods, including the use of pesticides and machines and GM crops".

What DIFD forgot to do is to discuss it with the people who will be affected. The majority of the 70 million population of Andhra Pradesh is engaged in small scale farming, primarily for subsistence and local markets. 80 percent of these farmers are women who work small 2-5 acres plots using organic, traditional methods, a wide diversity of seed and few external inputs.

Recently, the International Institute for Environment and Development, along with the University of Hyderabad and other bodies, organised a grassroots consultative process called a 'citizens jury', in which the Vision 20/20 programme was analysed and unanimously rejected by small farmers.

The jury's main objection to Vision 20/20 is that the proposed reduction of farmers making their living from the land would fall from 70 to 40 percent of the population. This would result in 20 million farmers losing their land and livelihoods. The farmers of Andhra Pradesh are very skilled and knowledgeable about their traditional methods of farming, but they are not trained in any other occupations and are mostly low-caste and illiterate. Some will be able to find work as contract labourers, factory workers, or servants, but many more will end up migrating to urban slums to join in the desperate scramble for employment and survival.

Andhra Pradesh farmers traditionally save their seed from year to year. The crops they grow vary according to the types of land, the seasons and rainfall. Many require no irrigation. GM seed would put money in the hands of the corporations. Not only would farmers have to buy the seed, the crops would require inputs that farmers would have to buy. If GM did increase the yield of a crop, it would only be for export and not for the needs of the people.

To say that we have been saved from the imminent poverty and destruction of life as we see it by the people of AP is an understatement. Whatever might have been the reasons that they choose to over throw the previous regime, they need to be hailed. And that this govt is at least trying to return the semblance of respect which our beloved 'rAitanna' deserves, makes me applaud YSR.

(to be concluded in the next part)