The Hindu : Author raises questions about British aid for A.P.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 23, 2004

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Author raises questions about British aid for A.P.

By Dionne Bunsha

MUMBAI, JAN. 22. The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, may be patting himself on the back for getting £342 million from the British Government's Department for International Development (DFID). But well-known British author George Monbiot fears that this aid could worsen public utilities in the State. After the conclusion of the World Social Forum, Mr. Monbiot is planning to visit Andhra Pradesh to study how British aid is being spent there.

Questioning the British Government's motives behind such aid, he said it was being used to privatise public utilities and creating business opportunities for British companies.

"Why is the British Government giving the A.P. Government such large amounts of aid? It is 15 times more than the amount it sent to Ethiopia last year for famine relief," Mr. Monbiot asked.

And why does the British Government want privatisation? "Because the biggest exports from Britain are in the service industry. It will take over the public services that are being privatised. There is an enormous export market for Britain in that," he said.

Andhra Pradesh was being used as a laboratory for total privatisation, Mr. Monbiot felt. "What's happening there is the same thing that happened in Chile in the '70s. Every public utility is being sold off. Small and medium businesses are being closed down. Small farmers are being replaced with agro-industry. And this is what the British Government is trying to encourage."

Often called a "trouble-maker," Mr. Monbiot is happy with the title. "Trouble-makers preserve democracy. People should be constantly challenging, threatening and exposing the system. Without that, democracy becomes corrupt," he told The Hindu.

Although Mr. Monbiot was one of the main speakers at the recently concluded WSF, he was critical of several aspects of it. "There is a global class of intellectuals who get together, talk to each other and provide opportunities for each other. But we are not talking to people outside their own circle. We keep talking about what the working class wants. But where is the working class? They are not inside the meeting."

At the WSF, there was this mutual unintelligibility, he said. "While we sit in the sessions, we can see the mass processions going past, but we can't understand the chants and we can't read the banners. We don't know what's going on. Some workers may pass by our meeting and put their head through the door and they see people sitting on the platform talking English. They have no idea what is going on either."

Apart from the WSF, Mr. Monbiot suggested that a parallel meeting was needed which "is more representative of direct democracy."

He said that this would ensure that the poor were properly represented at the meeting and not just "an elite class of intellectuals." He felt that activists had to fight issues at the global level "That's the level at which our opponents operate. But also because that's the only place that most of the issues we care about can be resolved — climate change, debt, trade, nuclear proliferation, war. You cannot resolve them at the national level."

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