PRAGOTI

Prof. Utsa Patnaik, eminent Marxist economist, retired from CESP/JNU recently. She has inspired generations of students and researchers through her teaching and research spanning four decades. On the occasion of her farewell, students of CESP published an interview of Prof. Patnaik, which is reproduced here.

It is surprising that the NAC-recommended press release does not reflect any spirit of the strong social-political action behind the mobilisations around the food security issue since last few years. More distressing is to hear such discussions when the country has been witnessing high inflation fuelled by higher levels of food inflation. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the fears of the proposed FSA turning into a sham and, in turn, only used as a rhetorical cover against the opposition has almost come true.

In the general elections 2009, BJP had a distinct advantage in Jharkhand. The party won 8 out of total 14 Lok Sabha seats and planned to win a clear majority in the state assembly elections. The assembly results, however, came out to be a rude and shocking retreat for the BJP that too when circumstances absolutely favoured it. And for insiders, this turnaround is neither unexpected nor undesired.

The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2009 has been awarded to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. Their work separately on economic governance and rationale for property right structures is a more sophisticated rationale for capitalism and by extension its reigning-ideology-now-in-crisis - neoliberalism. The works of Coase, North and Williamson are the three pillars on which the ‘sophistication’ of ‘new institutional economics’ that informed the ‘good governance’ agenda of post-Washington neoliberal consensus was built upon. So it is not surprising that the Nobel memorial prize goes to the more 'sophisticated' theorists at a time when the 'crude' version faces a severe crisis of legitimacy.