When the Indian Union Government is preparing its last full budget presented on 1st February 2018, the stock exchange is hitting the skies and this spike in the indices is difficult to understand. Is there any insider’s information leaked from the sources that hold power? And the subsequent plea to cash the profits soon by the bodies that hold the information is not only baffling but difficult to understand. It is true that there is a buoyancy in the international market and that has kept the country afloat even when the Indian economy is not doing well.

The Economic Survey as it is tabled today is mainly concentrated on the non-essential factors and only lauding the efforts of the present government, but it has not answered why there is so much discontent among the farmers and why the farmers are forced to commit suicide if all is well with the Indian economy. The citizens need to know what are the sectors of the economy that are doing very well. The distress in the telecom industries has not much to do with the general wellbeing of the country.

What citizens are concerned about the core economic sectors, in other words, the citizens should know what is happening to Growth, Equity, and Democracy. These three factors are the important indicators to understand the country’s economic development. Mere economic growth is not the real indicator, and we know that the economy is not growing and if it is shown to be growing there is a twisting of the indicators and baselines.

The economic growth is important but equally important is the equity. Many reports have shown that the economic inequality in India is rising so much and this rise in the economic inequality is not healthy and it raises another important question: what is happening to the employment in India? The unemployment rate in India is high and no sector of the economy is having the capacity to create the jobs at the moment. The situation is grim. Along with growth and equity, the third indicator of the economic development is the democracy. Indian democracy is in shambles: there are riots and communal tensions all over India and when the law and order in the country are out of order, then the country is surely going to retard in the economy.

Judged from these factors of Growth, Equity, and Democracy, the survey appears to be a whitewash.

Author – Mangesh Dahiwale, Human Rights Activist

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