Economic security and globalised protest

A report by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), alleging that certain foreign funded NGOs are deliberately stalling India’s development projects, revives an old and complex question. What is the future of nation-building in an age of both globalised capital and globalised protest?

Allegations about NGOs undermining India’s economic security surfaced even under the previous government, particularly in the context of massive protests against the public sector nuclear power plant at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

What is new is the claim, put forth in the leaked IB report, that a series of such protests have held back India’s GNP growth by as much as two to three per cent. This claim has immediately been challenged as being baseless by a variety of commentators.

Nevertheless, allegations that some foreign-funded NGOS are deliberately working to stall India’s growth needs to be examined from two angles – India’s governance structures, and what constitutes economic security in a democracy.

Since all foreign contributions to NGOs have long been regulated by the Home Ministry, it is the ministry that needs to answer if any of the permissions it gave went awry, and why. It is crucial that this scrutiny of the Home Ministry’s decision-making and monitoring mechanisms become more transparent than it has been in the past.

In this context the leaked IB report with its generalised allegations has muddied the public discourse. This can be rectified by the government setting up an open and public process for charges to be levelled and answered. In the absence of this the public will be left confused amid a flurry of allegations and counter-claims.

Similarly ‘economic security’ needs to be defined and refined in a multi-dimensional way. Yes, achieving a rising GNP is important but by what means?

For the first forty years after Independence it was common for industrial projects to displace local people without adequate relief or rehabilitation. It is the success of Indian democracy that sustained protests by project-affected people have made it harder for both the government and the private sector to ignore the property rights and human rights of people at the bottom of the pyramid.

And yet, as government-sponsored reports have shown, violations are rampant. This is why protests have been on the rise and are being led more and more by local people rather than middle class activists who are internationally networked.

What kind of technologies and business models will ensure India’s economic security needs to be chalked out after free and fearless debate. True economic security will depend on policy makers and politicians giving both proponents and opponents of controversial technologies, such as Genetically Modified (GM) foods, a fair hearing. This cannot be done if either side in a dispute is dismissed by political leaders as being anti-growth and anti-national.

Globalisation of democratic protest goes hand-in-hand with the globalisation of capital and industry. These are two sides of the same coin.

The good news is that this process has also spawned many international platforms and mechanisms that have been created by both private companies and NGOs, with support from or the participation of governments.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an international NGO partnered by the United Nations and some of the world’s largest multi-national corporations, is an example. GRI’s India office recently held an intensive conference on “Sustainability Reporting for Sustainable Development” in Mumbai. Approximately 6276 organisations, including MNCs and international non-profit groups, now use the GRI platform to do sustainability reporting.

One of the speakers at the Mumbai event was Ashok Pavadia, Joint Secretary, Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) Government of India, who authored the DPE’s guidelines on sustainability and CSR. The Indian guidelines, Pavadia said, are a blend of various international guidelines because sustainability is necessarily seen in a global framework.

In India there are eighty two companies that have adopted the GRI framework and the number is growing. However, according to Pavadia, many companies tend to comply with sustainability guidelines in a perfunctory way, while some even falsify facts. Calling for a more expanded definition of sustainability, Pavadia urged companies to be transparent about both their successes and failures in this sphere. This will help other businesses shorten their learning curve.

The future of nation building in the age of globalised business will hopefully be shaped through such forums, with NGOs and business working together to hammer out the finer details.

Rajni Bakshi is the Gandhi Peace Fellow at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

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