India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
Governments of every political dispensation have sought to hollow out India’s rural employment guarantee scheme. Only a mass movement that keeps the vulnerable at its centre can make the MGNREGA what it is supposed to be.
India is actually known as the disease capital of the world. It probably accounted for a quarter of the total corona pandemic deaths. The reason for India’s health crisis—which became so evident to everyone during the second covid wave—is the dismal state of our public health system.
The social sector expenditures of the Modi Government are not just far lower than the developed countries, they are even lower than its peer countries. And as regards education, the Modi Government has cut the budget for school education by a huge 40% over the 9 budgets it has presented so far.
Under the distressing times of COVID-19, the Rajasthan Budget 2022-23 guarantees 100 days of employment for families in urban areas. However, the Central government has not paid heed to demands for such a scheme and has even reduced allocations for MGNREGA.
Recalling the role that the educated, upper-caste, upper-class young woman from Mumbai, Godavari Parulekar, played in the famous Warli revolt that she led from 1945 to 1947, wherein she taught the Adivasis of Dahanu and Talasari tehsils to ‘fight well’, and free themselves from oppressive practices of decades.
This is the year 2022, the target year the PM himself had set way back in 2016 for doubling farmers’ income. But like his other promises, this too was a mere jumla, the agricultural sector crisis continues, and so, predictably, this year’s budget speech makes no mention of this promise.
At a time when India seems to be ready to hand over its railways, highways, ports and pipelines to private hands on lease, these frauds come as a rude reminder of how the government is gambling with the savings of ordinary citizens.
The 2022–23 union budget should have spelt out an economic strategy for reviving the economy and tackling the unemployment and poverty emergency gripping the country. But the FM does not even show cognizance of the problem.
Fifth and last part of a long article that discusses how the commons in England were gradually driven out of existence, the small farms engrossed, the land enclosed, and the commoners forcibly removed. This part discusses the mass resistance to privatization and dispossession.
The economy is in such dire straits: there is an urgent need for a strategy that promotes economic revival, while providing relief to the poor, and contributing to an abatement of inflation. However, the 2022-23 union budget does not even show cognizance of the problem.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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