OneWorld.net (U.S.)

In September 2007, over 600 people assembled in Indian capital New Delhi to put the World Bank on trial. In four days of parallel sessions in front of more than a dozen judges, people from all walks of life aired their grievances against one of the world's most powerful institutions.

In convening an Independent People's Tribunal on the World Bank (WB) in India, they did more than simply chalk up another protest against injustice. The people's tribunal is a shrewd political strategy aimed at renewing a silenced debate over neoliberalism and economic policy. But most profoundly, it is a direct assault on one of the Bank's most powerful tools: the monopoly on knowledge.

In fact, based on the success of the tribunal in India, the idea is spreading. In Europe, citizens of donor nations have convened a people's tribunal on the WB with witnesses from Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and in Bangladesh, a tribunal on the WB, Asian Development Bank (ADB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just been announced.

The World Bank in India

Since 1949, India has been one of the WB's favourite clients. Historically, it has borrowed more money from the Bank than any other country. Currently, it ranks among its top four borrowers, along with China, Russia, and Indonesia.

Unlike many borrowing countries, India has also been faithful in paying off its loans. Thus, providing it with an assured, steady return of funds. Without a few reliable clients such as India, the WB would be hard pressed to continue its operations.

In its early decades, the WB emphasised on infrastructure projects. It lent money for dams, canals, railways, highways and other large construction projects. These endeavours generally required foreign expertise, and the funding was largely used to hire foreign multinational firms to build infrastructure.

In India, the most infamous of these projects are the Sardar Sarovar dams on the Narmada river. These structures eventually became such a political liability that the WB jettisoned them. However, it continues to finance infrastructure. It has recently recommitted itself to "high risk, high reward" projects in the same vein as the Narmada project.

Emphasis on policy change

But in recent years, a far greater share of its lending goes towards policy change.

For decades, the WB and its sister institution, the IMF have pressurised borrowing countries to adopt policies that they believed would foster economic growth. These neoliberal policies were a standard package that varied little from country to country.

Known as liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation, these policies push countries to privatise public assets, reduce regulation and state controls on multinational corporations, reorient their economies away from self-sufficiency and towards exports, weaken labour and environmental standards and do away with other barriers.

While India accepted large quantities of money for projects, it generally avoided large-scale policy changes until the 1990s. By then, it was heavily dependent on oil imports. When the first Gulf War caused oil prices to spike, India found itself short of foreign reserves needed to import oil. It turned to the IMF for help, and got it. But with strings attached. Bowing to external pressure as well as the pressure from upwardly mobile middle class, India began adopting neoliberal policies wholesale.

India's once meager foreign exchange reserves are now second only to China's. Economic growth rates are around 8% or 9% per year. The stock exchange is booming, and Indian corporations are becoming global players. For the WB, it is the vindication of their neoliberal faith (Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia and Southeast Asia having all produced spectacular failures with the same policies).

The invisible debate

Those who came to the tribunal had another story to tell. They represented more than 60 grassroots and civil society groups and communities from all over India. The rural poor spoke of growing hunger and malnutrition in their villages, reflected in official statistics showing that the availability of food grains has fallen to its lowest level since 1973.

The urban poor testified that pollution of industrial areas is growing steadily worse, and with it their health. Slum dwellers spoke of displacement by slum clearance and urban renewal projects. Tens of thousands have been rendered homeless. Personal indebtedness is skyrocketing with farmer suicides being the most obvious symptom. Landlessness continues to be a problem.

The new economy's voracious appetite for natural resources has set it on an increasingly violent collision course with adivasis and other rural peoples.

While neoliberalism has generally done well for the wealthy and the urban middle classes, it also brings huge costs. But those costs are generally borne by the marginalised and the disenfranchised, and in particular the poor, and so they are quite simply not discussed.

In the 1990s, India's neoliberalisation project sparked off a good deal of furious debate: in the press, in Parliament, in academia and in chai shops. The pros and cons, the winners and losers, were argued back and forth. Now, that debate has largely fallen silent.

It is as if the questions were settled; or, even as if neoliberalism was simply a historical inevitability.

It was a transparent attempt to close off debate about this most controversial set of economic policies. At the same time, in the US, Reagan's advisers attempted to do the same thing more subtly by claiming that neoliberal policies were not "political" issues; they were simply "good management".

By attempting to monopolise the conversation on how poor countries should develop, the WB has sought to stifle its critics. Its staff and consultants publish hundreds of articles and reports annually. It funds even more studies by outside researchers. It has a well-oiled public relations machine. It runs a mini-university, the Economic Development Institute. And it encourages staff exchanges to spread its gospel to other institutions.

Perhaps most importantly, it employs some 10,000 development experts – by far the most numerous, best-paid and most-prestigious positions in the field of development economics. But unlike a university, the WB does not tolerate diversity of opinion within its ranks.

In recent years, it has attempted to formalise this dominance of the debate by enthroning itself as "the Knowledge Bank" – the single source for all information, knowledge, and theory on developing countries' economies.

What this means in practice is that alternatives to the Bank's neoliberal agenda are not merely rejected, they are never even considered.

When New Delhi took a WB loan to design improvements in its municipal water supply system, there was no debate about what the priorities should be or which of the various models should be employed. The entire design of the project was handed over to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), an international consulting firm and one of the Bank's pet contractors.

PWC, unsurprisingly, returned a blueprint for privatisation, without any mention of alternatives. The people's voices, those who would drink the water and pay for it, were never heard.

Not content to dominate the consulting firms and borrowing governments, the Knowledge Bank is reaching further upstream, into universities, to ensure that its ideology is taught as fact throughout the field of economics and to the press to keep public debate within neoliberal bounds.

The people's knowledge

Not surprisingly, the voices of India's poor and marginalised are conspicuously absent from the Knowledge Bank. Though, the WB fetishises them with lush, National Geographic-style photographs and heartwarming anecdotes, they are excluded from its decision-making processes.

Over 60 groups, including social movements, communities, NGOs and unions, began planning the tribunal last year. It was an incremental process of refining the concept while broadening the base of supporters. The idea of a people's tribunal caught everyone's imagination.

The tribunal attracted a 15-member jury from a wide range of fields, including historian Romila Thapar, writer Arundhati Roy, activist Aruna Roy, former Supreme Court Justice P.B. Sawant, former finance secretary S.P. Shukla, former water secretary Ramaswamy Iyer, scientist Meher Engineer, economist Amit Bhaduri, Thai spiritual leader Sulak Sivaraksa and Mexican economist Alejandro Nadal.

In their preliminary findings, they found "increased and needless human suffering since 1991 among hundreds of millions of India's poorest and most disadvantaged" and that "World Bank’s 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."

The tribunal concluded: "[T]he 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."

The jury also took note of the propaganda that the Bank employs to disguise this reality. "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 developed a language game in which words like empowerment actually mean disempowerment, sustainable means unsustainable, public-private partnership means using the public to promote the interests of the private."

One thing that the jury was unable to hear was the defence of the World Bank itself. The Bank initially had accepted the tribunal's invitation to appear and defend itself against the charges, reneging at the last moment saying that it would not be held accountable to such a forum.

Source: Samar