In October 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF) opened its ‘Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in India’ to work in collaboration with the Government of India. Part of a network of such centres being set up across the world, it is located in Navi Mumbai, and was unveiled by none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But, what exactly is the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ the catchphrase that has been doing the rounds in business, tech and policy circles, which in recent years has been actively popularised by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF?
The origin of the term itself can be traced back to a 2013 initiative by the German government known as ‘Industrie 4.0.’ It was a strategic policy bid to harness the rapid convergence of digital technologies, manufacturing processes, logistics and human systems to build ‘smart factories’ or ‘cyber-physical production systems,’ with the stated purpose of preserving Germany’s global manufacturing dominance well into the 21st century.
However, this factory-centric understanding of new technologies obscure their true significance, says Schwab, who describes this shift as an Industrial Revolution in its own right. According to this view, the First Industrial Revolution, starting from the 1750s, used steam power to mechanise production; the Second advanced this by using electric power to scale up production in the beginning of the 20th century; while the Third deployed electronics and IT to automate production. Now, he says, a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the information revolution that has been occurring since the last century.
Schwab describes it as being “characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” However, unlike previous industrial revolutions, it is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. “The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent,” writes Schwab, and it is leading to “a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”
Schwab identifies a set of emerging technologies that are driving this change, including Artificial Intelligence, robotics, Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
Since this technological shift in production is “disrupting almost every industry in every country,” it also entails a paradigm shift in terms of logistics, trade and exchange, which Schwab calls ‘Globalisation 4.0.’ It refers to new frameworks for international cooperation that he says are needed to manage and adapt to the unprecedented pace and breadth of technological change unleashed by Industry 4.0. Announcing the theme of the WEF’s 2019 meeting as “Globalization 4.0: Shaping a New Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, Schwab declared, “Ready or not, a new world is upon us.”
The Policy Push in India
The WEF’s India Centre, set up in partnership with India’s apex planning body NITI Aayog, defines its mission as to, among other things, “accelerate the adoption of new technologies,” and to “co-design, test and refine governance protocols and policy frameworks to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks” from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Headed by former Cisco executive Purushottam Kaushik, it has J. Satyanarayana, a former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), as its chief advisor.
Milind Kulshreshtha, CEO of AIKairos, a company entrusted with running the Industry 4.0 implementation and education programme in India, recently listed the major policy moves by the Central government to advance this agenda. First, the NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog, has been designated the nodal agency to interact with the World Economic Forum for “elaborating the new policy frameworks for emerging technologies” (The terminology is intriguing – ‘nodal agency’ in bureaucratic terms refers to one entrusted with implementation or supervision of a policy or programme. This suggests a subordinate role for the NITI Aayog, India’s apex planning body, in shaping India’s own policy on Industry 4.0).
The prime vehicle for Industry 4.0 implementation in India is the Samarth Udyog Bharat 4.0 (Smart Advanced Manufacturing and Rapid Transformation Hubs) under the Department of Heavy Industries. Underpinning this programme is the National Manufacturing Policy (NMP), which aims at enhancing the share of manufacturing in GDP to 25%, to achieve which “Industry 4.0 is the only way ahead,” according to Kulshreshtha.
Initiatives such as NMP, Make in India, Digital India and now, the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan, add up to a wide-ranging and comprehensive policy framework and fiscal plan being put in place by the Centre for enabling Industry 4.0, which also follows a PPP (Public Private Partnership) model.
Of late, many government initiatives are being launched or rebranded as ‘Industry 4.0’ initiatives. For instance, in September 2019, the Railways announced what it claimed was “a pilot project to introduce Industry 4.0 in the country” at the Modern Coach Factory in Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli.
The Future of Jobs
The implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are huge, and especially so for countries like India, with its large population. Take for example the all-too-crucial matter of employment, which will be directly hit by ‘smart’ automation, the defining feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here’s what some of the major studies of automation has to say on its potential impact on jobs:
The World Bank’s 2016 World Development Report, ironically titled ‘Digital Dividends,’ makes some alarming projections, estimating that 69% of Indian jobs, 77% of Chinese jobs, 47% of US jobs, and an average of 57% of jobs in OECD countries could be replaced by automated processes and robots.
The WEF’s own annual ‘The Future of Jobs’ report surveyed 12 key industries in 2018, and found that an average of 71% of the total task hours were performed by humans, compared to 29% by machines. The report forecasts that in just a span of four years (by 2022), this will change to 58% task hours performed by humans, versus 42% by machines.
A 2017 McKinsey study found that “50% of current work activities are technically automatable by adapting currently demonstrable technologies.” The study estimates that between 400 million and 800 million jobs could be displaced by automation by 2030. It further states that India’s labour force is expected to grow by 30% or 138 million people by 2030, and the country can accommodate them only by creating enough jobs to offset the effects of automation.
A 2018 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) report on the future of jobs in India, modelled on the WEF reports, found that 20-35% jobs in the IT/BPM sector “will face an existential threat to their jobs” by 2022. Figures for other sectors are as follows: Automotive (10-15%), Textiles (15-20%), Banking & Financial Services (20-25%) and Retail (15-20%).
Lists of jobs that could disappear entirely due to automation in the next ten years feature not only predictable ones such as manufacturing workers, cashiers and bank tellers, but also telemarketers, stock traders and travel agents. More surprisingly, construction workers and waiters, and even traditional occupations such as farmers and soldiers, too are among those endangered.
A Double Disruption
The consequences of such rapid scaling up of automation are unthinkable, especially given the massive loss of jobs globally in the post-lockdown scenario, and all the more so in India’s case. Since automation is being implemented more rapidly and at a far greater a scale in industrialised countries, it will also seriously curtail labour emigration globally, with huge implications for the India’s emigrants, the world’s largest.
In 2017-18, the National Sample Survey Office’s periodic labour force survey (PLFS) report revealed that the Indian economy was already in deep trouble, with the country’s unemployment rate at its worst ever in 45 years. The findings were deemed so damaging that the Centre did not release the report, forcing two expert members of the National Statistical Commission to resign.
It was in this already bleak situation that the government implemented the national lockdown, which had a catastrophic effect on the economy. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy estimated that a staggering 14 crore people were rendered jobless by the national lockdown implemented in March 2020. Joblessness remains at record-breaking levels in India, and recent reports indicate that the country is nowhere close to an economic recovery; which, in this case, only means a return to a dismal pre-lockdown employment scenario.
In fact, the 2020 edition of the WEF jobs report admits that “automation, in tandem with the Covid-19 recession, is creating a ‘double-disruption’ scenario for workers,” the dual impact of which is likely to exacerbate inequality “in the absence of proactive efforts.” Even as the world reels from the biggest ever unemployment crisis in recent history, the WEF has only stepped up its efforts to accelerate automation in the post-lockdown scenario.
The WEF and industry lobby groups and consultancies claim that automation will also create many new jobs, which will compensate for jobs lost, but offers no firm basis for such optimism. All the rhetoric about ‘improved efficiencies’ and so on that surrounds it cannot obscure the unavoidable fact about automation: that its fundamental purpose is to reduce – if not replace altogether – the role of human labour in production.
It’s worth noting that, in the short term at least, these champions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution themselves concede that increasing automation will have a hugely negative impact on employment. And yet, neither the WEF, nor its partner NITI Aayog, nor other automation enthusiasts like FICCI, do not really explain why they want to “accelerate” automation despite this.
A Top-Down Revolution
In his classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, the British historian E.P. Thompson wrote about the social havoc wreaked by the original Industrial Revolution in 18th century England: “The process of industrialisation is necessarily painful. It must involve the erosion of traditional patterns of life. But it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain… The experience of immiseration came upon them (the working class) in a hundred different forms; for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy; for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status; for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence; for the child, the loss of work and play in the home; for many groups of workers whose real earnings improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment.”
In ‘Beware of the Bot,’ one of the few critical studies of Industry 4.0 to appear yet, author Britt Baatjes questions the very notion of an industrial ‘revolution.’ “Indeed, some don’t consider them revolutions at all, because the majority of people have not been the beneficiaries of these so-called revolutions because of the economic system in which they occur. They have dehumanised production, alienated workers and taken people further and further away from their vocations. And, coupled with this, the natural world has suffered irreconcilably. Indeed, the first three industrial revolutions have caused many of our current environmental problems and contributed to the ecological crisis. The ‘revolutions’ have simply shaped and reproduced capitalism in various ways and always favoured the rich,” she writes.
As the people of India – and humanity at large – stare at yet another top-down ‘revolution’ conceived and implemented unilaterally by financial and technocratic elites who are not accountable to the public, it is important to remember this historical record. Especially when its proponents themselves admit that it will be far more disruptive than previous Industrial Revolutions.
The debate around the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and there’s none yet – is particularly crucial for India, expected to be the world’s most populous country as early as 2027. Why then is the Modi government, whose record on employment in the pre-lockdown period was already abysmal, actively promoting automation in the post-lockdown scenario? And that too in the middle of record joblessness? Indeed, how wise is it for a demographically booming India to blindly embrace a technological shift conceived by highly industrialised nations with declining populations? These are questions every Indian should ask, and before it’s too late.
In the short term at least, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is set to transform the world to an unprecedented degree. What may turn out to be the most consequential change of our times is happening silently, without parliamentary debate, judicial oversight, media scrutiny or public discussion; the standard checks and balances of any democratic society. That should worry us all.
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Part II: The Great Reset: Davos Playbook for Post-COVID World
The World Economic Forum (WEF), a non-profit based in Geneva, states its mission as being “committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas.” Over the years, the annual WEF meeting held at Davos-Klosters, a Swiss mountain resort, has emerged as the world’s most prestigious gathering for its financial, technological and political elites.
The list of attendees for Davos 2020 (the 2021 event was held virtually) reads like no other; counting in it just about every major head of state from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi, heads of major multilateral organisations, some of the world’s biggest investors, representatives of major banking firms, leading lights from the worlds of economics, technology and law, as well as top executives of Fortune 500 companies, all of which, incidentally, are official partners of the WEF. In a display of the WEF’s global reach, the event was accompanied by virtual events in 430 cities across the world, pulling in thousands more attendees.
Later that year, as the world reeled from a series of unprecedented blows in the form of COVID-19, the lockdowns and the resultant social and economic crises, the WEF stepped into the vacuum created by these events to announce its ‘Great Reset’ initiative, the single most decisive and ambitious attempt by any organisation to shape the contours of the post-lockdown world.
What’s so great about The Great Reset?
Officially, the WEF describes the Great Reset as “a commitment to jointly and urgently build the foundations of our economic and social system for a more fair, sustainable and resilient future.” On the surface, this seems like a commendable attempt to give direction and focus to the world in a time of chaos. Such is the vision articulated by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF, which held its 2021 summit on the theme of the Great Reset.
According to Schwab, in a world beset by a host of economic, social and environmental challenges, “The Covid-19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit any more for the 21st century. We have to restore a functioning system of smart global cooperation structured to address the challenges of the next 50 years.” He called for the world to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.”
Echoing these sentiments, Prince Charles, who announced the event along with Schwab, said: “In order to secure our future and to prosper, we need to evolve our economic model and put people and planet at the heart of global value creation.” António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, chimed in, “The Great Reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.”
In many ways, this rhetoric is indistinguishable from the language of bland do-goodism found in the proceedings of the UN or reports by international NGOs. But beyond rhetoric, what does the Great Reset have in store for the world, at least, as its originators would have it?
The Gameplan
How does the WEF imagine it would actually work itself out in terms of policies and institutional and structural changes? Here is how Schwab, who has personally conceptualised the Great Reset, and has even published a book on it explaining his ideas, describes its three main components:
Stakeholder economy: The first component consists of government policies that would steer the market toward “fairer outcomes”, ultimately to build a “stakeholder economy.” This calls for, among other things, improved government coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition, and reforms that promote more equitable outcomes, such as wealth taxes.
Shared goals: The second component of the Great Reset agenda is to ensure that investments advance shared goals that benefit the world at large. Among other things, this calls for the ambitious economic-stimulus plans announced by most major countries, as well as investments from private entities and pension funds, to be used to build a new, “socially equitable and environmentally sustainable global economy” that works in the long term.
Technology governance: The third priority of the Great Reset is to manage and direct the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ so that its disruptive impacts are minimised, and its benefits maximised. Among other things, the WEF calls for greater collaboration between governments, corporations, universities, research institutions etc., to achieve this. (The WEF’s advocacy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 was covered in detail in the first part of this series).
The Great Reheat?
Schwab’s book outlining his vision of the Great Reset has been touted as “the first policy book on the Covid crisis globally.” But given how comprehensively it deals with just about every aspect of governance and the economy, it’s clear that there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Not surprising then, that it was published as early as June 2020, when the world was still reeling from the lockdowns. It’s actually a much-reheated dish, which recycles many of the ideas Schwab and the WEF has been championing for decades through a number of publications and events over the years. Of special interest among these is a 600-page report released as part of the WEF’s ‘Global Redesign Initiative,’ organised along with the United Nations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and described as “the most comprehensive proposal for re-designing global governance since the formulation of the U.N.”
All of the WEF’s proposals have more or less the same official line: a radical transformation of global systems in line with new technological, political and environmental realities. What is never mentioned is that this transformation, conceived and promoted by technocrats such as Schwab, and sponsored by global financial powers whose interests it is meant to serve, is to be executed top-down, ignoring democratic norms and bypassing parliament and other public institutions; a process euphemistically called ‘public-private partnership.’
The Great Reset in action
The WEF’s high profile but exclusive annual Davos event, now the top draw for political and policy leaders around the globe, is the most significant conduit through which the organisation influences government policies worldwide. Thanks to the intense media buzz it creates around these events, they also play a huge role in influencing the general public with the ideas it wants to promote.
At the moment, the WEF is actively injecting the idea of a ‘Great Reset’ into the mainstream through slickly produced video features and podcasts targeting the general public, apart from major features in such favoured outlets as The Economist and Time magazine. In fact, Time’s special issue on Davos 2020 was produced in partnership with the World Economic Forum (not coincidentally, Time’s owner Marc Benioff sits on the WEF board).
The WEF is also increasingly playing a hands-on role when it comes to the implementation of its agenda through a range of ‘strategic partnerships’ and affiliate programmes such as Global Shapers, Young Global Leaders and UpLink Platform which cover not just manufacturing and trade, but every field from governance to agriculture to health.
A particularly ambitious effort is its Fourth Industrial Revolution Network, which opened its India Centre in Mumbai in 2018, in partnership with NITI Aayog, India’s apex planning body, explicitly defining its mission as to “co-design, test and refine governance protocols and policy frameworks” that enable Industry 4.0.
Corporate Capture of Global Governance
The true significance of the Great Reset cannot be understood without knowing the history and agenda of its originator. The WEF started life in 1971 as the European Management Forum, the brainchild of Schwab, then a business professor at the University of Geneva. It later broadened its invitee list to include political leaders and its agenda to include “resolving international conflicts.” Afterwards, it introduced a membership system for the world’s 1,000 leading companies, and in 1987, changed its name to ‘World Economic Forum.’
Even though it claims to be “independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests,” by way of disclaimer, the fact is that the WEF organisation is the premier mouthpiece for global financial and corporate elites today. It’s a central player in a tightly-knit web of privately funded mega ‘non-profits’, ‘think tanks’ and assorted lobbying organisations through which the world’s power elite seek to shape policies and events to their advantage.
However, the WEF is not just any industry lobbying group. It can be argued that especially in the last decade or so, the Davos events have almost become a de facto world parliament, eclipsing even the UN General Assembly meetings in the breadth and depth of influence and prestige it commands.
Not content to project itself as a kind of faux-U.N. for plutocrats, in 2019, the WEF went one step ahead and signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to officially partner with the UN. The move was widely condemned by hundreds of leading civil society organisations, who denounced it as “corporate capture of global governance,” which they said “delegitimises the UN and weakens the role of states in global decision-making.”
Furthermore, they point out that the agreement grants transnational corporations (not coincidentally, all WEF members) preferential access to the UN System, at the expense of states and public interest actors. A key component of the agreement are a set of public-private partnerships to globally deliver public goods in many fields, including education, financing, climate change, and health.
The WEF calls itself “the international organisation for public-private cooperation.” As it turns out, their use of the definite article ‘the’ is more significant than it appears. One commentator recalled how the WEF’s Global Redesign Initiative report had “recommended a sort of public-private United “Nations” – something that has now been formalised in this MoU.”
Backed as it is by the full weight of some of the world’s most powerful financial interests and technology corporations, the Great Reset is more than a theoretical construct or a techno-fantasy woven on the magic mountain of Davos.
And given the evident compliance of political and policy elites to this agenda, it very much has the power to remake the world in its image.
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Part III: Farm Laws, Atmanirbhar Bharat, and the ‘Great India Reset’
Crisis as Opportunity
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, thinks of the ‘Great Reset’ as “not a serious effort to actually solve the crises it describes,” but yet another attempt by the Davos class to pose as saviours of the world while advancing their interests. “All kinds of dangerous ideas are lurking under its wide brim, from a reckless push toward more automation in the midst of a joblessness crisis, to the steady move to normalize mass surveillance and biometric tracking tools,” she wrote recently.
Food sovereignty activist and author Vandana Shiva goes one step further, saying that it’s about the WEF’s corporate backers “controlling as many elements of planetary life as they possibly can. From the digital data humans produce to each morsel of food we eat. The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life.”
German investigative journalist Norbert Häring, who calls the WEF “the club of the world’s richest people and the largest nature-destroying corporations,” views the ‘Great Reset’ as one of the biggest social engineering exercises of all time. “The feeling that something is going terribly wrong and that a reset is really necessary is very widespread in society. Thus, for those who benefit most from the current situation, there is an urgent need to control the discussion. And this is exactly what the Great Reset is for,” he says.
Moscow-based political analyst Andrew Korybko echoes this view, saying that the ‘Great Reset’ “is not a “conspiracy theory” like critics claim, but simply a strategy for capitalising on the prevailing chaotic conditions of the contemporary world to advance prior plans that might not have been popular under other conditions.”
The critics’ fears are justified, given what we know of the WEF’s track record, which, among other things, includes a systematic attempt to hijack the UN system on behalf of its billionaire backers. The ‘Great Reset’ is their global playbook for the post-COVID world, which, in the guise of reforming capitalism, seeks a greater role for capitalism in the world. Yet another attempt – perhaps the most ambitious till date – for the corporate takeover of global governance – and what’s left of the global commons.
A Great India Reset?
Of late, India’s policy and business elite, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, have been spouting the ‘Great Reset’ rhetoric. “The restart will not be possible without a reset. A reset of mindset, processes and practices. Post the World Wars, the entire world worked on a new world order, new protocols were developed and the world changed itself,” he said recently, addressing the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, another globalist platform with an agenda similar to Davos.
Beyond the rhetoric, how closely aligned is the WEF agenda, with its ardent advocacy of Industry 4.0, and now the ‘Great Reset’, with the Indian establishment?
For more than three decades, the WEF has maintained close ties with India’s political, policy and business elite, who are regular fixtures at its annual Davos meetings, as well as the annual India Economic Summit, held in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the leading organisation representing India’s private sector.
For at least a decade or so, the WEF has been directly influencing Indian policy through its various affiliate bodies, such as the NVA India Business Council. The purpose of the Council, which counts the likes of the Adani Group and agribusiness majors like Dow and Monsanto among its members, is to push for greater ‘reforms’ and ‘public-private participation’ – i.e further industrialisation and privatisation — of Indian agriculture, in line with the WEF’s global programme called the New Vision for Agriculture (NVA). This is a goal that has been long-pursued by the umbrella of international agencies that share global capital’s agenda along with the WEF, and have found their biggest victory in the recent farm bills promulgated by the Modi government.
In 2018, the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Network, opened its India Centre in Mumbai, in partnership with NITI Aayog, India’s apex planning body, explicitly defining its mission as to “co-design, test and refine governance protocols and policy frameworks” to be built around emerging technologies. The Centre is housed in Reliance Corporate IT Park in Navi Mumbai, owned by Mukesh Ambani, himself a member of the WEF board, and was opened by Prime Minister Modi.
Modi has not just been a regular visitor to the annual WEF events since his days as Gujarat chief minister, but is a self-avowed fan of Davos. The ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summit, which made him acceptable to India’s corporate sector post the Gujarat riots, was explicitly conceived as “the Indian Davos” by Modi, who had told the media that he was “proud to have created the Davos momentum in India.’’ In 2018, Modi became the first Indian head of state to deliver the inaugural address at the Davos summit.
Recently, in his virtual address to this year’s Davos summit themed on the ‘Great Reset’, Modi reaffirmed his government’s commitment to the WEF agenda. “The Atmanirbhar Bharat campaign that we are running today is fully committed to global goods and global supply chain. India also has the capacity and capability to strengthen the global supply chain, and most importantly reliability. India today has a huge consumer base and the more it expands, the more the global economy will benefit,” he stated, giving a whole new meaning to the notion of self-reliance.
Resisting the Reset
According to Korybko, the Modi government’s radical vision to rapidly neoliberalise the Indian economy is comparable to Russia’s experience of neo-liberal “shock therapy” after the end of communism, which saw a massive wealth transfer from public to private hands after Western-backed oligarchs rapidly cornered large chunks of public assets. He views the Modi government’s new farm laws as advancing the same neoliberal agenda, which he says has found its latest expression in the ‘Great Reset’. In an article titled ‘Indian farmers are rising up against Modi’s ‘Great Reset’ he recently wrote: “The farmers know what’s in store for them if they fail in their efforts to get the government to reverse this policy, which is why they’re rising up against the “Great Reset.”
American analyst F. William Engdahl traces the new farm laws directly to Davos, calling them “a direct result of several years’ effort of the World Economic Forum and its New Vision for Agriculture initiative,” which he says has relentlessly pushed a corporate model of farming in Africa, Latin America and Asia in the last decade. He further writes, “India is the last bastion where global agribusiness has been unable to dominate the production of food. For the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’, India’s traditional farm and food system must be broken. Its smallholder family farmers must be forced to sell to large agribusiness conglomerates and regional or state-level protections for those farmers eliminated. It will be ‘sustainable,’ not for the small farmers, but rather the giant agribusiness groups.”
This view is corroborated by a detailed recent investigation by the Caravan, which exposed the farm laws as nothing but an effort to “remake India’s agricultural economy for large private players.” It identifies the many private players set to gain from the move, the biggest beneficiary being the corporate house known to be the closest to the Modi regime, the Adani Group (whose chairman Gautam Adani is an ‘Agenda Contributor’ to Davos, and whose agribusiness subsidiary Adani Wilmar is part of the WEF’s NVA India Business Council).
Similar is the case with the agricultural economist Ashok Gulati, member of the Task Force on Agriculture set by the prime minister under NITI Aayog and chairman of the Expert Group on Agriculture Market Reforms, who has been one of the loudest voices in the defence of the new farm laws (The Caravan expose contains a detailed takedown of his arguments). Gulati is one of 20 ‘Global Leadership Champions’ of the WEF’s New Vision for Agriculture,’ and the only Indian figure on the list.
Initiatives like the NVA offer clear proof — if proof is still needed – for global capital’s relentless expansion into new turf in search of greater profits, and the role of ‘front organisations’ like the WEF in enabling this.
Whether in the form of the ‘Great Reset’ or something else, the fact is that the mega corporations, investment funds and ‘non-profits’ fattened on four decades of neoliberalism are well placed to turn every crisis into an opportunity for themselves.
If anything, the present crisis has only emboldened them; even as the world is disoriented by the pandemic and the economic shocks of the lockdowns, its billionaire elite have made windfall gains, growing richer by an astonishing $10.1 trillion in the first six months of the crisis.
It naturally follows that as long as the crisis lasts, it will be used to push through their relentlessly expansionist agenda with minimal resistance. In India though, the eruption of massive protests against the Modi government’s farm laws, have put an unexpected spoke in the wheel of this agenda.
Perhaps history will mark the ongoing struggle of Indian farmers as not just the largest protest against corporate takeover in the country’s history, but the first battle cry to be sounded on the frontlines of a global resistance to come.
(The writer is a freelance journalist. Article courtesy: Newsclick.)
