Portraits of Liberalisation

The world might have been aware of the slogan – ‘Shine India.’ In the year 1991 India opened its doors to the economic globalization. The outcome of globalization has been a huge increase in salaries of the personnel working for MNCs or their local competitors. This has come really as a boon for the English-speaking upper middle-class. With superior access to disposable income, the seduction of consumerism becomes tough to resist, and the demand for unrestricted globalization inevitably pursues the attraction for consumer goods. Although these sections of society are in numerical terms a very small minority in the country, they are able to manipulate considerable authority on account of their financial clout. The larger section of the people lost their living wages in the darkness under the light. The number of BPL (below poverty line) mass has increased to a huge 78% of the whole population. These photographs are an evidence of how inequality is being engineered in this country. As in India the understanding that labour laws pose ‘rigidities’ that hamper the ‘flexibility’ of business interests is quite well established, with the recommendation of WTO and IMF, government started paralyzing the labour laws that existed in the earlier time of welfare state so that the wages for the common industrial workers become lesser… and lesser. Loomtex Engineering Pvt. Ltd., a jute mill situated at Barrackpore near Kolkata, adopted a unique strategy. They denied paying the workers their justified pensions and gratuities after retirement. Instead of that they offered the workers to continue their job with minimum wages. Nowhere to go the poor old workers continued to work hard in the factory. The number of on-job retired worker is an astonishing 3133 out of a total of 4500 workers in Loomtex. Their wages start from less than $1 per day. Not only that, they are refused to have compensation even though they have lost their fingers, their legs to satisfy the hunger production. The company ensured cheapest labour from the 80 average old workers, on the other hand, the number of young jobless workers increased. The dark becomes darker in the name of inequality under the light of this liberalized economy.

Names of the characters have been changed due to justified reasons.