India’s employment guarantee sabotaged to the point of extinction by the neoliberal Narendra Modi

I have closely followed the progress of India’s – Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) – since its inception on September 7, 2005. The scheme has been a major success in reducing rural poverty and providing income security to poor rural communities in India. It has also reduced the so-called ‘desperation migration’ from the rural areas to the already crowded and dysfunctional urban areas. And, the work produced massive community benefits – infrastructure, amenities, etc. The neoliberals in India have always hated the scheme. PM Narendra Modi has long railed against it. Now, finally, they have repealed the governing legislation and replaced it with a new Act that scraps the employment guarantee and puts a fiscal straitjacket on the remaining job creation opportunities. Neoliberals 1, the Indian poor 0.

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Is there hope for a post neoliberal world?

I grew up in a society where collective will was at the forefront and it is true to say people looked out for each other. The state – at all levels – had various policy structures in place to provide levels of economic protection for the least advantaged members of society. Having grown up in a poor family, those structures were important in allowing me to stay at school and then go onto to university. It also allowed my friends on the housing commission estate (state housing) who had different skills (not academic) to get apprenticeships and build careers that gave them material security in that way. It wasn’t a perfect period – there was racism, misogyny, and xenophobia – but as mass education spread, my generation left a lot of that behind. I was thinking about that when I read the recent article by Robert Reich in the UK Guardian (December 29, 2026) – Americans are waking up. A grand reckoning awaits us – which carried a resonance of some of the things that I have seen emerge in Australia as well as this 4-decade or so neoliberal nightmare reaches some sort of denouement.

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When contraction is called expansion – Japanese government style

Well my holiday is over. Not that I had one! This morning we submitted the manuscript to the publisher for the Second Edition of our Macroeconomics text, which will come out later this year. Finishing a massive project like that is always non-linear – the last few months are hideous – checking everything and filling gaps. Anyway, that was the Xmas break. And as the New Year starts, one always hopes that humanity learns from the mistakes of the previous year. In economics, though, that is the hope of the forlorn. I read this morning’s Japan Times newspaper and lo and behold there are predictions of dire consequences as a result of the current Cabinet decision to shift focus away from pursuing a primary fiscal surplus to massaging the public debt ratio. The mainstream economists are arguing about the relative virtues of each and forecasting gloom. The reality is that neither target is worth attention. Meanwhile, the privatised rail companies are negotiating with communities for the closure of certain rail segments because they are loss making. All that discussion is about costs per passenger km, rather than satisfaction gained from bringing people together. The priorities are all wrong.

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