Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

170 PLANET OF SLUMS
majority of migrant workers are men who find work on the city's
omnipresent construction sites. They sleep at night in makeshift
barracks on the site, rent cheap accommodation on the city's outskirts,
or grab a slab of pavement if they have not yet found a job. Migrant
women sometimes work as maids for Shanghai families or in decrepit
barbershops in bad parts of town, washing hair for 10 yuan (US $1.20)
a head and, in some cases, providing sexual services for a bit more.
Smudge-faced migrant waifs in rags, with or without their mothers, reg­
ularly beg for spare change outside popular watering holes, particularly
those frequented by foreigners.67
Chinese officials, not unjustifiably, extol the indices of national
economic progress, especially the incredible 10 percent yearly increase
in GDP since 1980; they are less forthcoming about poverty and deprivation.
By official admission, Chinese social indicators are highly
unreliable. In 2002 the leading government think tank, the Development
Research Center of the State Council, warned that urban poverty had
been radically underestimated. It proposed raising the official figure
from 14.7 million to at least 37.1 million, although it acknowledged that
this revision still failed to include tens of millions of laid-off employees
or the 100 million "floating workers" still counted as farmers.68
Urban poverty in India is more honestly acknowledged and publicly
debated than in China, but local social scientists and social-justice
activists trying to focus public attention on the underside of the recent
economic growth have also had to swim against the current of celebratory
official rhetoric As any reader of the business press knows, the
drastic neoliberal restructuring of the Indian economy after 1991
produced a high-tech boom and stock-market bubble whose frenzied
epicenters were a handful of Cinderella cities: Bangalore, Pune,
Hyderabad, and Chennai. GDP grew at 6 percent during the 1990s,
while the capitalization of the Bombay Stock Exchange doubled almost
every year - and one result was one million new millionaires, many of
them Indian engineers and computer scientists returned from Sunnyvale
67 Yatsko, Nelv Shanghai, pp. 120-21.
68 People Daily (English version), 30 October 2002; Athar Hussain, "Urban
Poverty in China: Measurement, Patterns and Policies," ILO working paper, Geneva
2003.
SA PING THE THIRD WORLD 171
and Redmond. Less publicized, however, was the accompanying
growth in poverty: India gained 56 million more paupers in the course
of the "boom." Indeed, as Jeremy Seabrook underlines, the early 1990s
may have been "the worst time for the poor since Independence," as
deregulated food grain prices soared 58 percent between 1991 and
1994.69
Growth has been stupendously lopsided, with enormous speculative
investment in the information technology sector leaving agriculture to
stagnate and infrastructure to decay. Rather than taxing new millionaires,
the neoliberal Janata government financed itself with the massive
privatization of state industry, thanks to which Enron now sells electricity
near Bombay at three times the rate of the public utility.
Neoliberal policies, like those in China, have wreaked havoc in the neglected
Indian countryside, where three quarters of households lack
access to sanitation and unpolluted drinking water, and the poor shout
futilely for "Bijli, Sadaak, Paani" ("Electricity, Roads, and Water"). As
Praful Bidwai reported in the Arian Times in 2000:
Infant mortality rates are rising even in states like Kerala and
Maharashtra, which have relatively good social indicators .... The gov­
ernment is cutting spending on rural development, including agricultural
programs, and rural employment and anti-poverty schemes, as well as on
health, drinking water supply, education and sanitation. Income growth
in the rural areas, where 70 percent of Indians live, averaged 3.1 in the
1980s. It has sharply declined to 1.8 percent. Real wages of rural workers
decreased last year by more than 2 percent.7 0
While the urban middle classes indulge their new tastes for Californiastyle
tract homes and health clubs, the defeated rural poor have been
killing themselves in droves. In Andhra Pradesh alone, wrote journalist
Edward Luce in July 2004, "500 of its farmers have committed suicide
this year alone, often by drinking the pesticide that was purchased with
debts they could not repay."71 Increased despair in the countryside, in
69 Seabrook, In the Cities f the South, p. 63.
70 Praful Bidwai, "India's Bubble Economy Booms as Poverty Grows," Asia
Times, 17 March 2000.
71 Financial Times, 24/25 July 2004.