‘Make in India’ spells ‘disaster for workers’

The CPI(M) has alleged that the Narendra Modi Government’s target of making India an industrial hub is an open invitation for foreign investments, particularly US.

The main objective of foreign capitalists is always profit maximisation and never augmenting India’s productive capacities, said CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury in an editorial of his party’s mouthpiece, People’s Democracy.

The Government appears ready to further liberalise the economy by greater opening up of markets, resources and cheap labour for profit maximisation, he said, adding: “This is the surest recipe for imposing further hardships on the Indian people.”

Talking to BusinessLine , the Rajya Sabha MP said Modi’s promise to investors of easing labour will spell disaster to Indian workers.

“The newly launched Shrameva Jayate programme is an attempt to expedite labour reforms to help foreign investors. This is for helping them to maximise their profits, not to protect the interests of Indian workers,” he said.

Yechury also said the Government is imposing a deadly cocktail of greater economic burdens on the one hand and communal polarisation on the other.

Much is being made about a fleeting decline in the Wholesale Price Index (WPI), he remarked.

“The elementary fact is that as far as the common man is concerned, what matters to his daily existence is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which always is exponentially higher than the WPI.

Anybody who has the experience of visiting the markets regularly will confirm the fact that the prices of all essential commodities continue to rise, imposing further burdens on their quality of life,” Yechury said.

The CPI(M) leader further said such statistics come at a time when there is an unprecedented decline in the international prices of oil.

The sharp fall in international oil prices should have led to a decline in the country’s current account deficit, he argued. “This would have eased a large number of pressures on the Indian economy and its global standing. However, in September this year, the trade deficit rose sharply to an 18-month high of $14.2 billion. This is because of a massive surge in gold imports,” he said.

He claimed that since Modi took over as PM, the four sectors of the economy which were showing signs of revival have actually registered a decline. People are having increasingly lesser disposable incomes to purchase consumer goods, he added.

“This is only natural given the fact that a larger and larger share of their incomes is being consumed by the costs of sheer survival,” he said in the editorial.

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