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Preliminary Findings by the Jury of the Independent People’s Tribunal on the World Bank Group in India
We, the twelve jury members, have listened to four days of testimony and depositions from affected people, experts and academics from some 60 grass roots, civil society groups and communities from all over India. The presentations covered 26 different sectors of economic and social development, ranging in scope from the macro-economic impact of wide ranging economic policies to testimony from representatives of communities said to have been harmed and impoverished by specific World Bank financed projects. Our members include former justices of the Indian Supreme Court and High Courts, lawyers, writers, scientists, economists, religious leaders, and former Indian government officials. We note that the World Bank Delhi office received an invitation to attend the Tribunal two weeks in advance, but did not wish to participate in the proceedings.
First and foremost, the evidence and depositions we have witnessed presents a disturbing and shocking picture of increased and needless human suffering since 1991 among hundreds of millions of India’s poorest and most disadvantaged in rural areas and in the cities. It is clear to us that a significant number of Indian government policies and projects financed and influenced by the World Bank have contributed directly and/or indirectly to this increased impoverishment and suffering. All this has taken place while a minority of India’s population that constitutes the middle class and rich has enjoyed the fruits of an economic boom.
The most disturbing leading indicator for this suffering is the
alarming increase in farmer suicides since the 1990s. From 2001 to 2007
alone, according to the Indian Minister of Agriculture, 137,000 poor
farmers have killed themselves. These deaths are not random events; the
evidence we heard points to increasing financial pressures on farmers
all over India as a result of some or all of the following policies,
such as: reduced subsidies from the Center and states, higher prices
for poor farmers for irrigation water, electric power, and seeds;
reduced subsidies for agricultural inputs, reduced access to low
interest loans for the poor, and opening up of the Indian economy to an
uneven playing field in international trade in agricultural
commodities. India’s farmers must now compete with imports from the
heavily subsidized farms of the European Union and North America, at
the same time when even the most meager state assistance for the
poorest farmers is reduced. India was once self-sufficient in food
production; its food security is now dependent on imports. It is clear
to us that major World Bank Economic Restructuring, Structural
Adjustment, and Sector Loans have directly promoted and helped to
finance these economic policy changes which are a disaster for much of
India’s more than 700 million rural inhabitants, and most disastrous of
all for poor farmers.
Other World Bank loans have promoted the institution of user fees in
the health and education sectors, as well as partial privatization in
these sectors. Whatever the justification for these policies, we heard
how in practice, they have further disadvantaged the poor. The Bank is
promoting legal and regulatory changes the main focus of which appears
to lessen the social and environmental compliance burdens for industry
and investors, rather than protect the vulnerable livelihoods and
environments of India’s poor majority. The net effect of many Bank
prescribed policy “reforms” appears to be the reorientation of the
Indian State priorities from striving to secure a safety net for the
poor and vulnerable to providing a safety net for large domestic and
international corporations and investors.
We heard witnesses from the poorest Dalit and Adivasi communities
describe the deterioration for their communities from poverty to
destitution because of forced displacement caused by World Bank
financed projects. A number of these projects are notorious and
communities have sought redress for years: the Bank’s massive loans for
thermal power development in Singrauli in the 1980s displaced many tens
of thousands of poor, who have sought economic rehabilitation and
improvement of toxic environmental conditions, with no redress from the
Bank or its Indian government borrower, NTPC. We heard of the plight of
hundreds of families impoverished by displacement in the Bank financed
Coal Sector Rehabilitation Project, despite the claims of a separate
Bank Coal Sector Environmental and Social Mitigation Project. Although
the Bank’s own Independent Inspection Panel found in 2002 that Bank
management violated its own environmental and resettlement policies on
37 counts, Bank management has taken no effective measures to
ameliorate the condition of these families. These examples are only a
small sample of a massive pattern of forcible displacement of India’s
poorest and most vulnerable populations for large scale natural
resources extraction, infrastructure and urban projects, a number of
which have been directly financed by the Bank. The Bank has announced
its intention to increase its financing of large scale projects while
at the same time there is disturbing evidence of its widespread failure
to implement its environmental and social safeguards, as well as
indications of intentions to even dilute the effective rigor of these
safeguards.
One of the disturbing impressions we gathered from the presentations is
that the bank seems to have developed the art of making policies whose
safeguards are only on paper. It has devopled a language game in which
words like empowerment actually mean disempowerment, sustainable means
unsustainable, public-private partnesrship means using the public to
promote the interests of the private.
It is impossible to do justice in our short preliminary statement to the volume, scope and intensity of the scores of depositions, expert presentations, and eye witness accounts we have heard over the past four days. The Tribunal will be publishing more detailed accounts, and we will submit a more detailed set of findings and recommendations in future weeks. What emerges is a picture of an institution whose influence on the economic and social policies of the Indian government is much greater than the amount of its lending might indicate. The Indian Government, of course, shares at the very least equal responsibility for all of the abuses we have witnessed, indeed a significant number of officials in key ministries such as finance and planning have either worked at the Bank or IMF, or share their assumptions and biases. Together all bear considerable responsibility for wide reaching policies and specific investments which in the name of growth and development have had the cruelest impact on the most vulnerable groups in our society.
We hold the Indian government accountable and call for changes in these policies. India and the international community must join to hold the World Bank accountable for policies and projects that in practice directly contradict its mandate of alleviating poverty for the poorest.
See also
- Press release: 25 September 2007: World Bank Officials Refuse to be Held Accountable
