In offices that used to house India’s planning commission, Sanjeev Sanyal, an economic adviser to the prime minister, is pursuing what he calls “process reforms”—small tweaks to streamline government as opposed to big structural changes like overhauling the tax code.
Take the process of closing a business. In 2021 it took 499 days on average and involved placing advertisements in newspapers. By last year it took only 90. Applying for patents, too, used to be an ordeal owing to a shortage of qualified staff to review the claims. Hundreds have been hired and the number of patents granted has risen from 6,000 in 2015 to more than 100,000 last year.
Other agencies have been abolished or shrunk. Gone are the Tariff Commission, which was set up in 1951 but never set any tariffs (the commerce and finance ministries did that), the All-India Handloom Board, the All India Handicrafts Board and the Central Organisation for Modernisation of Workshops. Several film-promotion organisations, including the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Children’s Film Society, have become one.
There is much more to do. Despite heavy investment in India’s ports, ships often get stuck waiting for customs and security clearances for their cargo. It can be so hard to claim any money from the Provident Fund, the national pension scheme, that many workers see contributions as a tax rather than a form of savings. But at least there is now a process for process reforms.
Editor:The Economist was the subject of Alexander Zevin’s revelatory Biography:
Editor: Minding the business of the world is the Intellectual/Political/Moral high ground, that this last remaing figure of British Imperialism, The Economist: representative of the Oxbridger Cadre and their fellow travelers. The propaganda value of the reach of this publication began with John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: The Right Nation a convoluted apologetic for Bush The Younger, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld & Karl Rove Mr. 1%!
Editor: Where might The Reader look to for a critical analisis of British Imperialism?
Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.
Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.
How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years
Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.
Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.
This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record. According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.
Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.
Editor: Recall Zanny Minton Beddoes’s appearance on The Daily Show, in leather pants, to shill for the War in Ukraine. Beddoes’s was also part of Jeffrey D. Sachs’ army of Neo-Liberals:
Headline: Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist
By Peter Passell
June 27, 1993
…
And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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