ON PRIVATE PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
there seems to be at present an overwhelming positive opinion, if not general consensus, for its ushering and continuance in most of the sectors of a national economy, including those carried on exclusively by the public sector earlier, for better results and more facilities to the public – and this not only in our country but the world over, including the ‘socialist’ states like China, Vietnam, etc. In India there was never any ‘state’ or other sort of socialism despite the high-flown speeches of our leaders and inclusion of the word ‘socialist’ in our constitution. However, a quite damaging sort of command structure economy hampered the proper growth of our sociopolitical and economic forces. Mainly due to the initiative by the union government of late Sri P.V. Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Sri Manmohan Singh, the economy was opened up and serious dents made in the license-permit raj. Since then we witness a high rate of growth in the economy with consistent increase in the GDP and liberalization of many economic and inter-related social/political structures too – with the telecom boom, software industry explosion and the resultant widespread diaspora of our engineering, technical etc. graduates-experts all over the world, in turn contributing to our further growth. Here, we see a more astounding accomplishment by our neighbor China with it flourishing more under the liberal policies and market economy measures of a Deng than under the orthodox campaigns under Mao. Overcoming several hurdles, China is fast emerging a superpower with real incomes of people lifted and most of the poverty eliminated. It is to be noted that even the ideal/practice of socialism requires an immense growth of material forces of production, and the establishment of state monopolies/command structure economies with undermining of civil liberties/human rights was not contemplated even, originally. What occurred was a serious aberration that needs to be corrected by modern socialist ideologues/activists, with the earlier ‘state socialisms’ already replaced by thriving [state] capitalist economies now. The current calamitous developments in the name of globalism and superpower hegemony, no doubt, call for a new sort of alignment of socialist forces once again but with the lessons learnt from the bitter past which are applicable to our country too. §§§
No comments:
Post a Comment