June 28, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Beg your pardon?
How's about this para from Slate's In the Papers feature:
The New Yorker, July 5
Katherine Boo heads to the Indian costal city of Chennai to see how outsourcing looks from overseas. She finds Office Tiger, which was founded six years ago by a pair of Princeton grads and has quickly become the back office to dozens of America's largest companies. But while Office Tiger and its competitors have generated tremendous wealth for Chennai and other Indian cities, the country is still plagued by problems the free market won't fix: HIV cases are soaring, cities are running out of water, and the lowest castes still cannot find work. ... Another piece offers a concise portrait of Fallujah in the aftermath of the American withdrawal on May 10. Different groups are struggling for political control, and the Fallujah Brigade, the security force to which American troops ceded control of the city, wields little practical power. —A.B.D.
Cities "running out of water" is exactly what you'd expect from a system that sets the price of a commodity below the market level. As for the others, I'd guess that they're better off relying on the free market to invent their HIV drugs and provide jobs than on their government. Posted by Jane Galt at June 28, 2004 6:12 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
Surely this article has got things wrong: the lowest castes in India have never had even the slightest problem finding work. Of course, it's traditional in India that low caste workers are not paid for their labor.
Water is a paradoxical commodity in that is essential to life, so a pure-market approach is almost unconscionable; but without a market-like mechanism of distributing it, gluttony and waste become endemic. I personally like the scheme adopted by a Colorado front-range city (Ft. Collins, IIRC): you pay the base per-gallon rate up usage X, if your usage exceeds X but is less than Y, you pay 2x base, then 4x, then 8x.
One wonders what obstacles prevent this sort of policy from being implemented universally in water-scarce regions (besides the concept of western-US water rights, which is overdue for some radical updating). Some have brought research to the table suggesting that there are some deeper psycological issues at stake where water is concerned, a not-entirely-surprising postulate given its unique place in biological life-processes.
But since agriculture occpies something like 80% of all human water consumption, limiting municipal waste is only a small start to addressing the broader issues...
Oh, what DO we expect from a New Yorker reporter but neocolonialist paternalism? "Indians can't solve their problem -- Western economic colonialists should solve all their problems."
"Of course, it's traditional in India that low caste workers are not paid for their labor."
Before making statements like these, Jervis, it would be a good idea to read up on the subject.
Low caste workers in India are traditionally paid. The pay was low earlier, because the work was unskilled. Now, even that is improving, because of the enormous demand for domestic labor in the cities.
I live in a state in which water is very, very, scarce and a huge percentage, on a per-capita basis, is sold to farmers at a very, very, low price, so they can grow hay, which is then fed to cattle, which are often slaughtered at a loss, due to global over-production of beef. Gosh, I wish to those free-market ideologues would stop screwing things up!
Human Rights Watch reports the following about enslavement of lower caste workers in India.
An estimated forty million people in India, among them fifteen million children, are bonded laborers. A majority of them are Dalits. According to government statistics, an estimated one million Dalits are manual scavengers who clean public latrines and dispose of dead animals; unofficial estimates are much higher. In India’s southern states, thousands of Dalit girls are forced into prostitution before reaching the age of puberty.
Bondage is passed on from one generation to another. Scavenging and prostitution are hereditary occupations of “untouchable” castes. Dalits face discrimination when seeking other forms of employment and are largely unable to escape their designated occupation even when the practice itself has been abolished by law. In violation of their basic human rights, they are physically abused and threatened with economic and social ostracism from the community for refusing to carry out various caste-based tasks.
Bonded Labor
“Bonded labor” refers to work in slave-like conditions in order to pay off a debt. Due to the high interest rates charged and the abysmally low wages paid, the debts are seldom settled. Bonded laborers are frequently low-caste, illiterate, and extremely poor, while the creditors/employers are usually higher-caste, literate, comparatively wealthy, and relatively more powerful members of the community.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-09.htm
India is recovering from a socialist system. Did the command economy provide for low caste workers in a way that the free economy is unable to? I doubt it.
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