I am fed up with people saying we need to produce more food. We already produce 4,600 calories per person per day which is twice as much food as we need. The problem of nearly a billion people going hungry is not for want of food but of access and equity. India produces excess foodgrains and yet it has the largest number of hungry people in the world. The US has 42 million hungry people. So what needs to change?
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Free market indeed
An area of 177 ha was acquired for POSCO (India) Limited in Jagatsinghpur district with a land acquisition cost of Rs 11.85 crore. The approximate present value of the said land parcel is Rs 64.22 crore.
Anybody who promotes free market type interventions India must keep in mind that the so-called economically liberal, capitalist actors operate on a market which is anything but free. The idea of a free market anywhere is highly suspicious, but in India even more so.
The corporates for whom the promoters of the “free market” are working to create access for often rely on cosy (often corrupt) deals with government to make their business projections work.
Case in point – land acquisition at bargain prices as above.
We all create the conditions in which rapes can flourish
No amount of severe (capital) punishment, “improved” policing or Bollywood moral outrage will ever solve the problem as long as the systematic treatment of women as long as “the elaborate everyday control of women’s lives by families and institutions” is in place.
While “marital rape, date rapes and the sexual violence that takes place within the family are systematically ignored” there are no safe places for women, or frankly speaking anybody else – especially not anybody in a vulnerable or subaltern position whether of an alternative sexuality, sex worker, muslim, working class or adivasi. Especially if you’re in any position of power – whether that be upper middle class, educated, man or white (all four which I check) – you do certainly do have a share in the responsibility for the culture that creates the context in which these rapes are happening.Being supposedly outraged, calling for beheadings or speedy justice is nothing but trying to shirk that responsibility making this an isolated event perpetrated by people who have nothing to do with you.
Read more:
http://www.sify.com/news/we-are-all-part-of-the-rape-culture-news-columns-mmsxrUdgfed.html