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Journalism of Courage
There may yet be a Wal-Mart in your neighbourhood. Or are we reading the prime minister’s ASEAN tour speech too optimistically? His rather firm support for FDI in retail may have in part been influenced by the need to convince an audience—the ASEAN business advisory council—sceptical of India’s current ability to keep silly politics out of sensible economics. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is also being philosophically consistent, whether at home or away. India’s biggest problem is itself; its biggest constraints are self-imposed—that’s been his theme is recent speeches. For FDI in retail, that warning would refer to the false arguments about job displacement.
Plenty has been said—and an awful lot written—about mom and pop shops shutting down and taking with them the friendly, smiling, simple shop assistants who apparently define a part of our culture. That’s what, with different details, America’s “liberal” and anti-free trade conservatives say about outsourcing to India. Do the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and its politically correct counterparts oppose outsourcing because the West is experiencing an economic-cultural hollowing out? So, hypocrisy is the first feature of those who oppose retail FDI; the second is history, or rather a lack of it. Over space and time, economic progress has involved job losses, job displacement, old skills dying out and new markets for new skills appearing. The transition is almost never seamless and is, therefore, almost always painful for some. But if that were the argument for stopping economic change, we would all still be tilling fields.
In fact, rather a lot of Indians do till fields. Many of them won’t, once manufacturing expands as much as it should. Indians who have for generations worked on the land will have to cope with new, and often discomfiting, working environments. Does that mean 60 per cent of India’s workforce should continue to be employed in farms? At least some of them, once given basic education and training, should be working elsewhere—in your neighbourhood Wal-Mart, for example.
