The events of current time starting with trade war and leading to Corona outbreak have shaken the very foundation of present day economic beliefs. I call them beliefs as they are just sort of ideas which have consistently failed but still we have chosen to turn blind eye to them. Globalization is one of those sugar daddys which stands exposed further.
I will put forward in detail as to what I mean by above statement. But to start with lets understand what is globalization. When the industrial revolution started taking shape imperialism came into picture. Once that ended with debacle of world war another concept was coined which is global market leading to global trade. With increased push on GDP growth started cut throat competition and transformation of market by way of propaganda in form of advertisement, research, creating war like situations. Lets take an example that Miss world and Miss universe like competitions are held which generated so much euphoria that lead to booming cosmetics industry. Similarly bombing third world countries with political agendas created market for arms race. There are so many other examples but in order to stick to the topic I will stop here. This taken together whole world started acting as market where there was huge dependence on other countries in order to sustain domestic needs, eventually, after the growth of Chinese giant manufacturing industry has taken a shape of demon where every country in the world is dependent on them for small portion or the other called globalization. This ranges from charger of mobile phones to basics of pharmaceuticals and many more.
Sooner taking this as base when Chinese are flexing muscle as well as posing threat due to Chinese virus outbreak the whole world looks stranded. More and more gripping towards recession which is looking to be even worse than great depressions of late twenties and late forties. The supply chain having been disturbed and have forced the global market to look for ways as to where it went wrong and how to correct it which looks a distant possibility given the circumstances. Since the beginning of this approach it was well known that it is different form of imperialism and world market which was dominated by Europe and US never thought this will fall so badly for them. Hence they were all gaga projecting this as solution through their propaganda machinery including the UN and its branches.
Even when we look at it from a different perspective what I call from the perspective of arthshashtra which is completely different from western economics it always had lacuna’s which were ignored. In order to illustrate this, best thing is what my father used to say. Whenever you go to a new place you must try their local delicacies which will keep you adapted to that local weather. But the question is do we find a huge difference across geographies these days? Answer is no. This is something which has changed our food habits to living habits leading to all form of diseases called life style diseases. This has brought an end to local identity in form of crafts, heritage, occupation etc. This has further made us alienated from our cultural, societal and local needs forcing us to adopt western economics which is far more error prone and mostly expose us to vulnerability of global upheavals.
Now what is it that we did wrong? What lead us to this disaster. After the loot and foolishness of around four decades due to balance of payment crisis India opened its door to global markets and since then we have never looked back to localisation of the manufacturing. We created five year plans in order to make ourselves a manufacturing hub where we failed miserably leading to re branding that exercise as Make in India in 2016. But the point to be noted here is after the transfer of power we have been ignoring arthashashta and moving towards Economics which has forced even the strong foundation of Indian economics to be vulnerable towards world upheaval. Point to note one person MR Manmohan singh Usually lauded as the reformist of Indian economy has been the fore bearer of this change and disaster. Starting from 1971 as cheif economic advisor he has been there on almost all the big economic posts like planning commission deputy charman, RBI gov, finance minister, prime minister etc. while we kept getting bad to worse as an economy. Nowadays we find that only big words like GDP, CAD etc form the base of economic analysis which does not make sense unless the foundations are corrected.
Isolated field of study as economics has been the biggest blunder that we have adopted from west.
What needs to change is an important aspect that needs to be discussed. First and foremost with this recession looming, a huge investment is required in localisation of the economy. We must revert the foolishness of 1991 which is a daunting task as we overnight made skilled people as unskilled labor by decisions of 1991 reform. Craftsmen, artisans, weavers and many more who were skilled in what they were doing were turned into unskilled labors forcing to be migrated to the big cities. All of them who had acquired these skills are now being employed in MNREGA for digging roads which is pathetic. Huge push must be made in cleaning the Indian economy.
This cleaning is required in changing the mindset of pub going youth towards dairy business. Meat exporting country towards animal husbandry. Revival of local crafts, artisans, agriculture and agriculture based industry. Huge push is required in order to bring this human factor in wealth generation which will further need to incorporate holistic economic attitude towards bringing together the cultural, local, dharmic and natural factors. Global dependence will always keep posing problems like this which will shake the very foundation of economics every time such things arise. In absence of these approaches we will be remain there with same problems waiting for another disaster to kill us either physically or if left economically.
