“not more than 2 percent has been allocated for agriculture, where more than 65 percent of the population works…”

corporate and capitalist greed has taken over in India!!..........has the term WEALTH DISTRIBUTION disapeared?

I come from a farming backround…...... and it sickens me to see how disrespectful farmers are being treated these days. And to all you corperate tools, who slave away making some fat cat rich, who look down on such hard working individuals GO WALK ONTO THE ROAD AND GET HIT BY A BUS...........Farming was the backbone of the Canadian economy at one time, and its something that people today are completely out of touch with. It still does provide a living for many.

Are the service/goods farmers supply “not good enough” that they should earn a decent living? What makes these corporations so special that they should recieve a greater slice of the economic pie? With the prices of machinery so high, how are farmers supposed to afford new equipment? What would the world be without farmers?

25,000 is 25,000 too many people, and I hate to sound like an asshole, but that can’t be that many people compared to theover 1 billion Indians as a whole.

What makes these corporations so special that they should recieve a greater slice of the economic pie?

Well, the Indian government recons they’re more important economically than farmers.

Very powerful stuff from Arundhati Roy to add to this, Every single development project – whether it’s an IT Park in Bangalore or a steel plant in Kalinganagar or the Pollavaram dam – the first move is to take land from the poor. People are being displaced at gunpoint. Cities like Delhi and Bombay are become cities of bulldozers and police. The spectre of the shooting of adivasis in Kalinganagar in January – some of whose bodies were returned by the police mutilated, with their arms and breasts chopped off – all this hung over the protest at Jantar Mantar. There is a fury building up across the country

25,000 is 25,000 too many people, and I hate to sound like an asshole, but that can’t be that many people compared to theover 1 billion Indians as a whole.

With respect, this statement could have only been made by someone unfamiliar with India. India is a thin film of the middle-class and very rich floating on a deep ocean of the utterly poor. About 850,000,000 of those 1 billion Indians are no different than those 25,000 that have comitted suicide. To minimize the Indian poor is to minimize most of India.

Snark said:

“With respect, this statement could have only been made by someone unfamiliar with India. India is a thin film of the middle-class and very rich floating on a deep ocean of the utterly poor. About 850,000,000 of those 1 billion Indians are no different than those 25,000 that have comitted suicide. To minimize the Indian poor is to minimize most of India.”

I will agree with you that the great majority of Indians are struggling and are not sharing in the ‘emerging superpower’ experience. But to say that 85% of the population is so crushed by debt that their immediate future looks utterly hopeless seems to me an exageration, so I would like to see what your source is for this. Again, this is not to say that the neoliberal crunch faced by rural India is at all trivial, only that we do not need to overstate a problem that is in reality bad enough in itself. From what I have read, and my own experiences in India, the indebted and poor could range from 40 to 70 percent of the population.

I have seen much of the crisis in Punjab with my own eyes, including the suicides of not only landowning famers, but also landless farmworkers, and I have come to realize that the current agrarian crisis (current in so much as it owes much of its strentgh to the Empire pleasing structural adjustment India undertook from developmental state to neoliberal state) is indeed a deep and widespread one. But I would strongly disagree with you that those affected by the agrarian crisis are no different from one another. There are complex and contradictory class, caste, religious, and gendered power differentials that we risk covering over by making such an assertion. For example, the farmers in Punjab who are leading the rural anti-neoliberal campaign are for the most part voicing their concerns over lost subsidies, minimum support prices, and subsidized imports, but have little to say about the caste, gender, and religious oppressions and class exploitations which they themselves administer and benefit from. And these, from Gandhi’s mobilization of the lower castes under the hegemony of the Indian bourgoisie to the current farmer movements, are the tragic contradictions that constituted first
the independence struggle, and now the post-colonial Indian social fabric.

But this is not to say that the struggle of the more dominant farmers against neoliberalism and empire should be discarded. It is necessary though that any struggle for a new political hegemony in South Asia (and anywhere else for that matter) must be inclusive of, and indeed centralize, the everyday struggle and demands of the most socially excluded.