Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Reforms and resistance

WHERE MONEY TALKS

India's economic programme may be in jeopardy if more labourers are killed building shopping malls and more adivasis are gunned down resisting land acquisition.

Meanwhile, it's surprising that Forbes magazine's disclosure that while the 40 richest Indians are worth $106 billion, China's 40 richest add up to only a paltry $26 billion wasn't played up more. We score in another respect too. Last year, the overseas Chinese sent home $21.3 billion but the NRI remittance was $21.7 billion.

The comparison should have sent politicians into transports of joy. When told on television that Indian businessmen who visit China speak highly of what they had seen, Palaniappan Chidambaram repeated with emphasis, "They can speak!" Of course, there is some basis in the charge that speech is something the Chinese do not "" or are not allowed to "" indulge in. But before we are carried away on a tide of democratic pride, let us pause to consider other points of comparison.

The 12 tragic deaths in Orissa, for instance, suggest that we are taking our place beside China in another field too. China has faced protest riots at Shengyou, Dongzhou, Sanshan island and dozens of other places. Nowhere does someone who lives off the land relish seeing his livelihood disappear into the maws of another civilisation. As an Anthony Trollope character puts it, "It is a comfortable feeling to know you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away." But it can, once development gets going.

History offers two major parallels, British and American. The enclosure of common land following England's Industrial Revolution "" seven million acres during the reign of George III "" caused intense rural hardship. The yeoman class disappeared, sinking to the level of labourers and migrating to factory towns where they contributed to urban squalor. In the US, 200 years of savage warfare against Native Americans ended in 1890 with the Massacre of Wounded Knee. By then, thousands of Native Americans had been butchered and their land taken, leaving them with 56.7 million acres trust land under the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The latest Orissa dispute was about the acquisition of 12,000 acres, of which 2,000 acres have reportedly been sold to Tisco. South Korea's Posco, said to be the biggest foreign direct investment in India, has been promised another 6,500 acres. The Jindal and Vedanta projects have also provoked public protests. Maoist rebels may or may not stir up adivasis who own and work the land but many NGOs run by respectable middle class activists take up the cudgels on their behalf.

It's not mining alone that gobbles up land. Chinese peasants object to new ports, factories and townships. Many leading members of West Bengal's Left Front are unhappy about Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's commitment to Indonesia's Salim conglomerate of about 5,000 acres for an industrial township, a state of the art medical centre, a motorcycle factory and a four-lane 85-km highway. There is also talk of building malls, supermarkets and commercial complexes on 40,000 acres of land now occupied by disused warehouses and factories.

These are points of similarity. One point of contrast is the nature of protests and how they are viewed. Another is the scale of poverty. While China hushes up demonstrations, India's electoral politics demands that the media should play them up. What we don't publicise sufficiently is that India lags behind China in almost all the indicators of progress. The weakening of China's danwei (Communist grassroots organisation) system coincided with higher levels of migration and retrenchment and redundancy as a result of reforms. About 27 million workers were laid off between 1997 and 2003 and the number of pinkun hu (poverty-stricken households) shot up. Yet UN agencies assess that 300 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty in the past 25 years.

Attempts are also being made at providing social welfare. There are pensions, some unemployment insurance, urban living allowances and help for the laid-off to find new jobs. Last August, Guangzhou's municipal labour and social security bureau's director-general, Zhang Jieming, announced an innovative scheme to cover migrant and self-employed workers, corporate employees and civil servants.

True, 88 million Chinese still languish below the poverty line and last year's $1,162 per capita income was on par with the Philippines. But only 13 per cent of Chinese live on less than $1 a day compared to 30 per cent in India with another 30 per cent struggling along on $2. Four decades of supposed socialism produced only state capitalism, bombastic slogans and disruptive trade unionism. Even Chidambaram admits the limited impact of the employment generation law, which was more a political gesture than an economic remedy.

This must be remedied to mitigate the short-term cost of change. The alternative to cushioning the impact of unemployment, sickness and old age would be public resistance to modernisation. India cannot be ruthless like China. Without a social welfare net, reforms may have to be abandoned, leaving the poor as miserable as before. Ultimately, it is how the multitude fares that will decide the success of India's economic revolution.