In the organised sector jobs are dwindling at the rate of three lakh per day for the past three-and-a-half months.
In order to save the situation, the government is trying to protect the collapsing big businesses which I call the monster economy.
They have eased Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) restrictions on the monster economy and reduced corporate tax to the tune of Rs 1,45,000 crore, thus making the corporate fat cats pay less tax than even a section of the middle class.
They have waived huge amounts of bad debts of the fat cats by calling it non-recoverable assets of the bank in question. Can one really save the economy by saving the monster? Can we provide jobs to every young Indian by feeding the monster? Certainly not.
The monster economy, during its heyday, had made profits through automation — through the reduction of labour.
Let me illustrate the relationship between automation and job loss by taking the examples of handloom and powerloom.
Powerloom though is no monster today. The powerloom sector has become a poor cousin of handloom, a really pathetic example of automation.
But even this pathetic machine kills 12 jobs per loom in comparison with the handloom, if you take both the fore-end and back-end of the weaving process.
The latest automated loom is 10 times faster than the powerloom, which means it kills 120 jobs per loom, in comparison with the handloom.
If this is the reality of job loss, the reality about climate change, about which young people the world over are agitating peacefully, is even more startling.
Hand-making sector, including handloom, is a complete antidote to climate change. Then, why are the governments killing these sacred sectors of economy and nourishing the monster?
The answer is simple. They think, or rather, they have been made to think that organising the sectors of production only means automation. Take any primary text in economics, it will tell you that success of a production system lies in our ability to organise it and not necessarily to automate it.
Organising the unorganised is not easy. Not even profitable in today’s standards. But then, do we have a choice?
We don’t, to save our livelihood and our ecology-environment.
Nurture the nature-friendly traditional art, craft, dying and weaving traditions. Save our jobs and save the earth in the process Well, this is what Gram Seva Sangh is agitating about. We are demanding that the unorganised sector be organised on a war-footing, for protecting traditional skills and saving nature.
Prasanna
Founder of Gram Seva Sangh. He is a noted theatre director and a Gandhian activist. To protect sacred economy that includes handloom sector, he recently undertook an indefinite fast that was withdrawn after six days. This came after Union Minister D V Sadananda Gowda assured of taking up the issue with appropriate authorities in the Central government.