The population at the bottom of the economic & social pyramids in India has always been subjected to a dismal & deliberate ignorance by the authorities, whose mouths keep spewing out heavy-duty phrases like “welfare economics”, “development for all” at the time of national & assembly polls. The people in this downtrodden category have always been treated as expendables; be it farmers, labourers, or migrant-workers, & this has become more evident in 2020 and 2021, symptomatic of a plutocracy, running on the blood sucked dry out of the toiling poor.

After independence, India had legislated 64 laws to safeguard the rights and concerns of the labourers. But under the current government of Modi-Shah, the safety, social security, and livelihood guarantee of the labour group have been decimated. Not heeding to the reservations and the concerns raised by the opposition, the central government passed the four labour codes unilaterally. As a result of this, where earlier the number of labourers who had lost jobs was at 6 lakh, now that number of jobless labourers stands at 35 lakh. That is the contribution of the current central government led by the gas-bag rabble-rousers blabbering about the vacuous idea of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’.

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On the Human Development Index scale, which is built using inputs from components of public health, education, and the standard of living (determined by the GNI), India stands at 131 rank for the year 2020, which is nothing short of national shame. India stands in the rank after countries like Bhutan, Maldives, Srilanka & Iran. Under the aegis of Modi, India is gradually falling in the HDI rank-list, which would bother people with some sense of welfare. But this sense would not find import into the craniums filled with the one-sided narrative circulated by the BJP-IT cell to cover-up the multitudes of failures of Modi-Shah. Purchase and acquisition of a few fighter aircrafts does not symbolize or certify that the nation is developing. The development is measured in terms of the social and economic security of the citizenry which adds to the long-term secular growth of the economy. After so many decades since independence, the electoral politics in India is still driven by factors like religion, caste, language, and other factors of social division. In fact, it can be said that the current government has attained its hold over the parliament through the use of religious polarization. Even now, in the face of the West Bengal election, Modi is away to Bangladesh to visit a temple in Orakandi, the stronghold of Matuas, a prominent refugee community in the poll-bound state with the ability to influence election results. The visit may have been cloaked under the intension of participating in the celebration of 50^th anniversary of independence of Bangladesh, but the timing of the visit cannot be unseen.

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Last year, when the country was facing the crisis of Covid19, the already plodding & creeping economy was decimated and strangled to a near end. On the other hand, during the same period the top wealthiest people in the country saw a surge in their wealth. As per the 10th Edition of Hurun Global Rich List 2021, India added 55 new billionaires or one billionaire every week in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which had led the GOI to initiate a mismanaged and bungled lockdown, causing deaths of many labourers who were far away from their homes. The plight and cries of the marginalized over-worked category of people, who are passed off as expendables, fell on the deaf ears of the Oligarchs.

Chairman and chief researcher of Hurun Report, Rupert Hoogewerf said, “Despite the disruption caused by COVID-19, this year has seen the biggest wealth increase of the last decade. A stock markets boom, driven partly by quantitative easing, and flurry of new listings have minted eight new dollar billionaires a week for the past year. The world has never seen this much wealth created in just one year, much more than perhaps could have been expected for a year so badly disrupted by COVID-19.” Globally, the total number of billionaires increased to a record 3,288 in 2020, an increase of 421 billionaires during the year. The Hurun Report also said, “Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the total wealth of all billionaires across the globe surged 32% during the period under review to $14.7 trillion.”

India retained the third spot in the number of billionaires from a country with a total of 177 billionaires living in the country.

In the list of Indian billionaires, Mr. Ambani was followed by Adani Group’s Gautam Adani & family with his wealth nearly doubling to $32 billion. This shows that the pandemic unilaterally destroyed the livelihood & wealth of everybody apart from the wealthiest people, highlighting the inequality prevalent in India after 2014.

As per information provided by the central finance ministry, before the pandemic, the number of the superrich in India was 80. During the pandemic, that number swelled to 90. The wealth from the gross profits of the superrich in India grew to around 48300 crore USD, which is one-fifth of the overall GDP of the country. During the Coronavirus crisis, which was identified as the world’s worst public health disaster in a hundred years, an economic crisis was triggered which can be compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The “sabka sath sabka vikas” was actually a diabolical fallacy that laughed on the face of the poor in India during Modi’s second term, especially in the year of 2020. Some of the following would clarify and throw light on the aforesaid claim. India’s 100 top billionaires witnessed their fortunes increase by Rs 12, 97, 822 crores since March 2020, and this amount is enough to give 13.8 crore poorest Indians an amount of Rs 94,045 each. The India supplement of the Oxfam report “The Inequality Virus” underlined that it would take an unskilled worker 10000 years to make what Mukesh Ambani made in an hour during the period Covid19 pandemic was ravaging through India. Also, an unskilled worker would need three years to make what Ambani made in a second.

The Oxfam report also highlighted that “India has the world’s fourth-lowest health budget in terms of its share of government expenditure.” The report further threw light on the failure & abysmal apathetic nature of the taxation system in India, stating, “If India’s top 11 billionaires are taxed at just 1 percent on the increase in their wealth during the pandemic, it will be enough to increase the allocation of Jan Aushadi Scheme by 140 times, which provides affordable medicines to the poor and marginalized.”

The stringent & unplanned lockdown imposed at the outbreak of the pandemic in India brought the already sluggish economy to a grinding halt, with countless migrant-labourers left with no means in cities far away from their homes. All these did not have any inkling of any effect on either the government or the cronies, whose wealth kept swelling while many migrant-labourers were left without food, money, or means to return home during the lockdown. Some of the labourers, who were disallowed to use trains to return home during the pandemic-induced lockdown, got crushed by goods- trains while they slept to rest their tired bodies.

What did not take them home, took their lives away!!!

After the super-sized debacle of the Covid-lockdown, India now faces the issue of farmers being pushed aside for the benefit of the cronies, whose wealth surged during the lockdown, last year. The farm-laws which the government stated are to liberalize the agro-markets, are in fact designed to help the cronies who intend to capture the entire agricultural-market in India. The laws would allow the buyers to end the contract any time, would do away with the MSP, and instead will force the farmers to sell the crop-produce at the least selling price, and will indirectly legalize the hoarding of the agro-products, which would trigger steep food-price inflation. That would add to the pain of the currently prevalent price rise for the public for various items like Fuels.

It is not that the earlier governments were not without their faults, but under the current government, the categories of people like labourers, migrant-workers, farmers are under dire challenges or existential threats, to be stated more correctly, with the economic inequality widening with each passing day.