Poverty is not an original state, nor are the poor the victims of their own faults and weaknesses. Nor is it due to shortcomings in personality or morality, or failures in family or upbringing. Poverty is about exclusion, physical and economic insecurity, fear of the future, a constant sense of vulnerability. Poverty is created by societies and governments. Poverty is experienced as individuals, family and communities. Poverty is embedded in complex of policies, interactions and relationships.
- Poverty is self-sustaining. In the modern economy, once a person or group is caught in its trap, it is hard to escape the cycle of poverty. It destroys self-confidence and the capacity to organize collective action and response.
- Economic globalisation, which include the privatisation of state resources and functions, and the introduction of charges even for the most basic needs reinforce the cycle of poverty by cutting off possibilities of social mobility.
- A powerful economic and political class emerges on the back of this poverty, with no interest in social reform, creating further obstacles to equitable distribution of resources. In this way poverty leads to social exclusion.
- Poverty negates the realisation or enjoyment of human rights. The purpose of human rights, a life in dignity, is rendered impossible by poverty. The daily struggles of the poor constantly humiliate them.
- There is no real possibility of poor people enjoying rights, whether civil and political or social, economic and cultural, without resources such as education, physical security, health, employment, property, participation, and due process - all of which poverty negates. In poverty there can be no control over one’s life chances or even everyday life.
- Existence in hovels without the basic amenities of life allows no time or ability for self-reflection, essential for identity, self- realisation, or making moral judgments. Poverty generates habits of subservience and docility that denies the premise of the equality and dignity of all persons.
- Poverty also forces persons into slavery and bondage, and stories of parents selling children into slavery out of desperation are now common place in states like India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria - and many other parts of the world.
- A poor man cannot support his family and tends to draw away from it, burdening the wife with additional responsibilities to sustain the family.
- Poverty creates or reinforces divisions within the family, in which the male members get priority over scarce family resources. In this way poverty subverts decent and fulfilling family life.
- Family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society which is entitled to protection by society and the state.
- Poverty not only deprives and demeans the poor but also affects the affluent and society. It sharpens inequalities and leads to crime, law and order, as the poor resort to various forms of self-help to eke out a living, including thefts and robberies. Security becomes an obsession for the middle classes, turning their suburbs into fortresses. The slums that grow out of poverty breed diseases and environmental degradation that can scarcely be contained within the confines of the slums.
- In the modern age poverty poses a major threat to social consensus and political stability. Poverty erodes the moral fibre and the moral cohesion of a society. It destroys the self-confidence of the people caught in the cycle of poverty, and leads to the waste of resources.
- Ideology is used to justify the limits on the role of the state in providing social welfare. Disparities of opportunities and incomes have increased in recent years. The poor can make themselves heard only by irregular demonstrations, to limited effect.
- We need fundamental social and economic reforms to ensure all its residents a decent life in dignity which is so eminently within reach, based on its wealth and resources.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995. Two major changes agreed were: (i) not to impose import duties in excess of certain agreed rates and (ii) not to manufacture a patented item using alternate process.
- The large-scale imports of goods from China taking place at present is a consequence of provision (i) of the WTO which we willingly accepted.
- The provision (ii) restricted the growth of our pharmaceutical companies.
- The drugs invented by MNCs were hitherto produced by our pharma companies using alternate processes and making them available at a fraction of the MNC's price and that freedom was lost.
- The major benefit expected from WTO was that our farmers will be able to export their produce to the developed countries and get much higher prices. But the developed countries fudged the rules of the WTO and continued to provide subsidies to their farmers and that deprived our farmers ability to export their goods.
- Thus the WTO and the globalisation has become largely a losing proposition for us. It has even become a losing proposition for developed countries like USA as well. They find that their jobs are disappearing.
- The WTO needs to shape up for the US to stay a part of it, said former Trump trade advisor Dan DiMicco. He further said that WTO has enabled China’s bad behavior and allowed the country to manipulate its currency from 1995 to 2015. Nobody has held them accountable.
- President Donald Trump told that the WTO has treated the US “very badly". Trump also said "I hope they change their ways. We’re not planning anything now, but if they don’t treat us properly we will be doing something.” Trump told his advisors, “I don’t know why we’re in it. The WTO is designed by the rest of the world to screw the US"
- India has walked out of the WTO mini-ministerial being held in Geneva in July 2006 to thrash out the thorny agriculture and industrial tariff issues, with the US refusing to agree for wider cuts in farm subsidies. The Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath said: "We came here to negotiate, but there is no space for negotiations. We are on 8 to 9% growth. I've come here looking for a trade deal which helps me to reach 10 to 11%. I have not come here to get a trade deal which makes me go to 4 or 5%."
- The failure of WTO to move ahead in framing rules for global trade means that globalization is retreating.
- Our Mughal rulers thought that by allowing the British to trade in India will be beneficial for the country. Similarly, we have agreed and signed the WTO treaty because we thought we would get foreign investments and access to foreign markets for our exports.
- The globalisation under the Mughal rulers and the WTO are fundamentally similar. In both the cases, we ceded our sovereign rights willingly in the belief that the benefits will be more than the costs. In the former case the benefits to us were less than the costs and that arose Mahatma Gandhi and we retracted from that globalisation. Very much the same is happening with the WTO today.
- The globalisation succeeds only if it provides more benefits than costs to all the member countries. We can today walk out of the WTO because it is not beneficial to us. People are the ultimate sovereign and no power on earth can take their sovereignty away. The people will rise no matter how strong the forces of globalisation are.
- The challenge is to inform the people of the benefits and costs of globalisation to make an informed choice to withdraw or not. The worry is that our intellectuals will get coopted and misinform the people of the true costs of present globalisation.
- Our government should wake up, walk out of WTO and start supporting domestic businesses instead of running after MNCs.
Copying western models and implementing in India without proper groundwork is futile. The more we stay in WTO and globalisation, the more our poor and peasants would lose and suffer. Since the present WTO model can't be modified so easily due to the influence of vested interests like China, the only option India has is that it should walk out of WTO and work in the direction of mutually beneficial bilateral treaties and self-sufficiency.
