Dalit and Adivasi have been displaced by a range of enormous infrastructure

BHUBANESWAR:A decade of enormous growth has created billionaires, a new and mushrooming middle class and a vast underclass of people living in extreme poverty. The middles class has doubled in size since 2001, from 6 per cent to 13 per cent (amounting to around 153 million people).

Yet inequality stalks the land: in the cities with their extensive, overcrowded slums sitting alongside the new high-rise shopping malls, between desperately poor rural communities and urban dwellers and within the countryside itself. There is inequality within inequality, as government definitions of what constitutes poverty are re-imagined to exclude great swathes of people in need.

India’s economic growth, neatly tied together with government corruption and neglect, has been fuelled by a toxic cocktail of 20 years of market liberalization, land grabbing and mineral extraction; the privatization of water supplies; and extensive dam building. Millions of mainly Adivasi people, who make up 9 per cent of the population, and Dalit people have been displaced by a range of enormous infrastructure projects, notably the corporate takeover of the countryside, which has seen subsidies to small holder farmers scrapped, access to credit made all but impossible, the Indian market opened up to foreign multi-nationals and a embarrassment of state incentives provided to Indian corporations.

The most sensitive sign of the community carnage being inflicted on the poor is the pestilence of farmer suicides. Drowning in debt and despair, farmers are committing suicide at the unimaginable rate of one every 30 minutes, with around 250,000 taking their own lives between 1995 and 2009 alone.

Summon as the world’s largest democracy and touted as “an emerging economic powerhouse”, India’s economy is beginning to cough and boil with the rupee trading at an all time low, and the current account showing an billions dollar deficit.