Shelley Kasli
Great Game India
31 July 2017
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales
has been highlighting his government’s independence from international
money lending organizations and their detrimental impact on the nation,
the Telesur TV reported.
“A day like today in 1944
ended Bretton Woods Economic Conference (USA), in which the IMF and WB
were established,” Morales tweeted. “These organizations dictated the
economic fate of Bolivia and the world. Today we can say that we have
total independence of them.”
Morales has said Bolivia’s
past dependence on the agencies was so great that the International
Monetary Fund had an office in government headquarters and even
participated in their meetings.
Bolivia is now in the
process of becoming a member of the Southern Common Market, Mercosur and
Morales attended the group’s summit in Argentina last week.
The Cochabamba Water War
Bolivia’s popular uprising
known as the The Cochabamba Water War in 2000 against United
States-based Bechtel Corporation over water privatization and the
associated World Bank policies shed light on some of the debt issues
facing the region. India is following the same path under its Smart
Cities program (to be discussed in later articles).
“The Bank and the IMF have been requiring these countries (in the Global South) to accept “structural adjustment,” which includes opening markets to foreign firms and privatizing state enterprises, including utilities,” the New Yorker reported.Some of Bolivia’s largest resistance struggles in the last 60 years have targeted the economic policies carried out by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Most of the protests
focused on opposing privatization policies and austerity measures,
including cuts to public services, privatization decrees, wage
reductions, as well the weakening of labor rights.
Since 2006, a year after
Morales came to power, social spending on health, education, and poverty
programs has increased by over 45 percent.
Can India Too Declare Freedom From Central Bankers?
While Bolivia has kicked
out the Central Bankers and took back their most precious national
resource ‘Water’, Indian Government is inviting them into the country
with open arms and even willing to sell our own rivers and drinking
water! The situation of India in contrast to Bolivia is aptly described
in the book India in Cognitive Dissonance.
To solve the dreadful
water crisis that had started taking over several parts of India,
Government setup a grant of 10 crores, which was allocated to the then
leading Dharwad University to find a solution for the drinking water
crisis. The University came out with an excellent de-salination
technology — Indian Scientists worked with Indian Money. But once this
ingenious technology was discovered, the details were sold to Saudi
Arabia for over 100-crores. Saudi Arabia has used this technology to
implement its water de-salination, but India has not till date
implemented this technology discovered by our own scientists, which is
anyway much less expensive than towing chunks of an arctic iceberg to
the equatorial regions and getting the drinking water from there; as has
been recently proposed!
No PILs were filed for
this wastage of public money, betrayal of trust in the critical area of
providing Safe Drinking Water for all citizens of our country, nor was
any investigation conducted to punish the guilty, now was there any
suo-moto case in the matter. Instead, we have consolidated the position:
“India’s own Rivers and Drinking Water for sale in India: by companies spawned from Pepsi and Coke, the same who have been kicked out of many small countries including Bolivia over a decade ago, for claiming to own all of Bolivia’s water, including its rainwater!”
Source: GGI News
Did you know you can lease a river in Chhattisgarh for 22 years. At just Rs. 1 per annum. While thousands go thirsty. The Madurai bench of the high court has ruled against the local people and in favor on Coca Cola and Pepsi units in Tirunelveli district for supplying water from the Thamirabarani river. In August 2016, the Karnataka government gave Abu Dhabi-based businessman B.R. Shetty permission to privatise the iconic Jog Falls Rs 450 crore and turn it into a tourism hotspot.
Isn’t it ironic that from
the last 70 years since Independence India is the largest recipient of
loans from the World Bank, amounting to $102.1 billion, between 1945 and
2015 (as on July 21, 2015), according to the Bank’s lending report; with an external debt of $485.6 billion at the end of March 2016 as per Reserve Bank of India.
How are we going to repay
these loans, if at all? What are the conditions attached to these loans
in case of delay or default? The recent case of how the Troika (World
Bank, IMF & ECB) Vultures (as they are known) ripped apart
debt-ridden Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal and Spain should be a
warning bell to sleeping Indians. Can the current self-proclaimed
nationalist Government stand up to these Central Bankers like the
Bolivians?
Shelley Kasli is the
Co-founder and Editor at GreatGameIndia, a quarterly magazine on
international affairs providing global intelligence through strategic
analysis by placing events in a geopolitical and historical framework to
better understand international developments and the world around us.
This article was originally published by GGI News.
Featured image is from Zee Business.
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