The capitalist media have touted India as a development success story for the recent surge in investment by information technology companies and its increasing agricultural productivity.

India’s economic development, however, remains marked above all by imperialist superexploitation. This is at the root of the growing gap in living standards between the bourgeoisie and relatively small middle class, on one hand, and the vast majority of the country’s 1 billion people, on the other.

Some 214 million of India’s inhabitants were undernourished in 2001, an increase of 19 million over the preceding four years, according to the UN’s annual State of Food Insecurity in the World report issued last November. The same year, India for the first time became a major grain-exporting country, stockpiling some 60 million tons of rice and wheat and selling 10 million tons of it abroad. In spite of this grain surplus, in 2002 a survey conducted by the government found that nearly half of India’s children under five years of age were malnourished, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The trend is not confined to India alone. Overall, the UN report noted, the number of undernourished people in semicolonial countries increased by 18 million to 798 million between 1997 and 2001. During the same period, countries such as Brazil, China, and India have become major agricultural producers. The UN World Food Program estimates that farmers today produce enough food on a world scale to provide everyone on the planet with a 2,800 calorie diet, the equivalent of the U.S. government’s recommended caloric intake for teen boys and active men.  
 
Limits of the Green Revolution
In the past decade, India has become one of the world’s leading agricultural producers, harvesting 70 million tons of wheat a year—more than the United States. It has also become a major producer of fruits, vegetables, and milk. This is confined to capitalist agriculture geared to a large degree toward exports, not subsistence farming.

This development has its roots in a campaign launched in the late 1960s called the “Green Revolution.” Modern agricultural techniques were introduced, including irrigation methods, new forms of seed, and the expansion of farming areas in the Indian countryside. These changes resulted in a substantial increase in agricultural yields. The average produced per unit of farmland increased by 30 percent between 1947 and 1979 and a substantial percentage of grain production went over to high yield varieties of seed. India was used as an example for agricultural development projects in other semicolonial countries.

In spite of these advances, the majority of small farmers in India continue to use medieval technology to work the land. Oxen remain a standard for millions of exploited rural producers.

While this increase in agricultural production did have an impact on access to food for many, the Wall Street Journal noted in a June 25 article that “in a sign that there are limits to the Green Revolution, the absolute number of hungry people in India began to rise again in the late 1990s.”

While the big-business daily blamed the paradox on “inadequate infrastructure, local corruption and rural poverty,” it neglected to mention decades of unrelenting imperialist domination as a source of the problem. Today New Delhi owes a whopping $112 billion to the largest banks in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. That figure has continued to climb over the last decade.

New Delhi keeps its markets open to penetration by finance capital from the imperialist centers in part as a condition to gain more credit and to help relieve the debt. This is at the root of the so-called technology boom in India that has brought 1 million jobs for software engineers, customer service agents, and claims processors to the country. Drawn by the enticement of cheap labor, tariff reductions, and other concessions forced from New Delhi by the imperialist lending institutions, major capitalist monopolies have increasingly used India as an export platform to boost their profits.

But every one of these investments has further warped India’s economy to serve the needs of the imperialist powers that have dominated its economy for decades and line the pockets of India’s superwealthy rulers, as opposed to resulting in stable, national industrial and agricultural development. As a result the explosive contradiction between the potential and reality of life for the majority in India has sharpened.

Today 60 percent of India’s population lives in some 650,000 villages scattered throughout the country’s rural regions. Only 10 percent of those villages are connected to a paved road, reports the Financial Times, and fewer than half have access to clean water and electricity. Building roads that can support trucks is a precondition for supplying food in sufficient quantities to the rural population, and providing a means for small farmers to market their crop.

This disparity is what lay behind the electoral upset in May that swept the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from office in the last elections. While the BJP campaign highlighted economic advances that served to benefit a relatively small proportion of India’s population, the victorious Congress Party demagogically appealed to the rural poor, promising aid and development for the countryside.

“In the two states where the former BJP-led government fared especially badly—Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—the gap between India’s high-tech centers and surrounding farming areas had become the most pronounced,” reported the Journal. “Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, grew prosperous as the state’s government courted U.S. companies such as Microsoft Corp. and General Electric Co. and the World Bank praised the state for its economic progress.

“But about 100 miles outside the city’s glittering office towers, farmers in the town of Kalimela say they’ve benefited little,” the article continued.

“The government hasn’t helped us. No roads. No water,” the Journal quoted Jarappa Sonia, 35, a sugar cane and wheat farmer from the town, as saying. The Congress Party’s promise of free power for the farmers in the state was one of the keys to its victory there, a region where electricity rates had become a millstone around the neck of small producers.  
 
Congress Party in power
The Congress Party’s election reflected the worsening conditions facing the rural majority in India. But the party has made it clear that, now that it’s in power, it plans to continue largely along the same course as its predecessor.

In a July 9 article in Business Week titled “Reason to Hope for Greater India,” the capitalist weekly’s Bombay bureau chief, Manjeet Kriplani, stated that the new finance minister has shown his “good intentions about continuing economic liberalization.” Kriplani reported that the finance minister has “increased allowable foreign investment in telecom from 49% market share to 74%, insurance from 26% to 49%, civil aviation from 40% to 49%, and he eliminated tariffs on computers.”

Kriplani also noted that the government’s new education programs would be financed by a 2 percent increase in taxes and that its finance minister has “promised to develop the agri-processing industry with less onerous regulations and elimination of tariffs on equipment imports such as tractors.

“The food and food-processing business in India,” Kriplani added, “has attracted much attention from foreign corporations.”  
 
 
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