Episode 160 – Agitating Out of Poverty with Ruchira Sen

Macro N Cheese – Episode 160
Agitating Out of Poverty with Ruchira Sen
February 19, 2022

 

[00:00:04.310] – Ruchira Sen [intro/music]

One of the most peculiar things about India is the declining labor force participation of women. And by that I mean labor force participation in paid work. Because if you see women’s contribution to unpaid work, it is phenomenal. It is huge. Women are pretty much holding up the burden of the country on their shoulders, and they’re not even getting paid.

[00:00:30.550] – Ruchira Sen [intro/music]

My child is American. He was born just as I was about to leave grad school, and I remember some of my friends were teasing me about my anchor baby.

[00:01:42.110] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.090] – Steve Grumbine

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We’re going to India today. I’m going to be speaking with Dr. Ruchira Sen. She’s an assistant professor of economics, at Jindal School of Journalism and Communication at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. She teaches macroeconomics, data analysis for storytelling, and data journalism. Her PhD in economics is from University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Ruchira is primarily concerned with low paid and unpaid labor in various fields from housework and marriage to the media. She has written on dowry as a gift system in South Asia and how it relates to violence, and on international networks of care and how they impact the USA. Her recent research is on mediated activism in India. Ruchira is primarily informed by an international postcolonial feminist view of the world by MMT and Marxism. And that, my friends, is a lot to talk about. Ruchira, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:02:49.740] – Sen

Thanks for having me, Steve.

[00:02:51.740] – Grumbine

I have never thought I would have the opportunity to deep dive into India, and today we’re going to do that. This is exciting. I’m really stoked about this. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to Modern Monetary Theory because, let’s be honest, heterodox economics, the Academy has shut us out, so to speak. And a lot of the writings never make it to the journals. What draws someone into a heterodox field like that?

[00:03:22.990] – Sen

Steve, in India, when I first went to St. Stephens College, which was in the University of Delhi, and there, just as I had entered College, the curriculum had just been revised and history of economic thought had been struck down and it had been replaced with more neoclassical principles of macroeconomics kind of approach, which Mankiw was teaching at Harvard.

So, when you’re in the periphery, often you find that the ideas that are in the core come to you a bit late. And in this environment where, well, we were 18, so, as young teenagers, were getting into neoclassical economics. In that time, right across Delhi there was another University, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, which still had a good deal of space for heterodox economics.

So, when I was doing neoclassical economics, I was extremely unhappy. I think college was very difficult for me for various reasons. Just being a young woman in Delhi can be quite hard. Perhaps that was one reason why college was difficult, but I was also very disillusioned with the economics that I was doing. Greg Mankiw’s book starts almost immediately saying that if you’re an economist, you have to think at the margin and that is something that you still see today when you see well renowned economists calling Isabella Weber not a real economist, or you find Larry Summers being outrightly sexist to Stephanie Kelton.

So, that’s what was happening in Mankiw’s book. It said that if you want to do economics, then you can only think one way. And I thought that this is religion, this is not science. And when I had the opportunity to do something else, I decided to go across the city and I went to Jawaharlal Nehru University and, there, I met the most fantastic Marxist scholars.

I met Prabhat Patnaik who taught me macroeconomics. I met Jayati Ghosh who later became, in many ways, my mentor and one of those people whose careers I have always looked at and who I admired greatly. I met C.P. Chandrasekhar. So, many of the greats of heterodox economics. I met them at Jawaharlal Nehru University and they taught me.

Then, a big watershed event happened in my life, which in India it’s called the Nirbhaya Incident. It’s the anti-rape agitation. There was a young woman who boarded a bus at my bus stop, which is in Munirka in Delhi, and the bus was taking her to Dwarka. But on the way, the men who were in the bus raped her in the most brutal fashion. I will not even describe it here, and hurled her and her friend outside the bus.

What happened then was, you see change in Indian discourse on gender. Many of us started agitating for women’s rights to space, women’s rights just do simple things like board a bus. So, that kept me in India for longer than I meant to be. There was a lot of pressure on me to take exams so that you can get a lectureship, try to get into the bureaucracy.

I wanted to continue to study heterodox economics in the tradition that my professors were studying in. But, at the time, I decided to give everything a pause and I was agitating for women’s rights. As the movement started petering down, I realized that I have to do something with my life and staying in JNU was becoming expensive and my stipend wasn’t adequate to get me through to a PhD.

So, I figured why not go to the USA where they have some resources and they do have heterodox economics there. So I applied to a bunch of places, and I somehow ended up at UMKC, and I met Fred Lee, I met Mathew Forstater. I did classes with Stephanie Kelton. I had a macro class with Eric Tymoigne and Randall Wray, and it was, I think, the best six years of my life after that.

And that’s how I came to MMT. I was at first skeptical for many reasons. MMT in the core can be quite strange for somebody who comes from a developing country. Also, because the idea that external debt matters did not really exist until the work of Fadhel Kaboub and Ndongo Sylla. So, in the beginning, I was very skeptical of MMT in the core, but I really enjoyed a chance to read John Maynard Keynes in the original, which was fabulous.

And then I think after I came back from the US, I was always interested in chartalism. I really loved Mathew Forstater. He’s also one of the people I really respect and admire, and I really enjoyed his work on western colonial Africa. So, when I came back to India, I started thinking about MMT more seriously. And that’s where I am now.

[00:08:49.630] – Grumbine

That’s incredible. You mentioned some things that should pique a lot of people’s interests. I’m very interested. India is unknown to a lot of people in the United States. I have friends that go back and forth to India that I talk to, but I don’t really understand what India is like today. Whenever we read a western newspaper, it’s loaded in propaganda and things that are meant to elevate US interest. Tell me about India, how the political system works.

[00:09:21.550] – Sen

Well, I’m going to try to stick to the things that I know because there are better economists to talk about ideas such as inequality. However, India is a deeply unequal country. Most of the GDP is in the hands of a few, and people who are comfortable are also in very high deciles. So, there is a very strong inequality in India today. We’ve had neoliberal reforms since the 1990s, which has meant a gradual withdrawal of the state from almost everything.

And that has specifically impacted the lives of women. Because when the state withdraws from providing you basic services like water, electricity, then it’s usually the women who become additionally burdened in terms of managing their homes. So, you will have issues such as going to fetch water, trying to find where you can get electricity, even fanning your baby, and trying to put your child to sleep.

So, there is vast inequality in India, and there is also a lot of burdening of women’s labor. And one of the most peculiar things about India is the declining labor force participation of women. And by that I mean labor force participation in paid work. Because if you see women’s contribution to unpaid work, it is phenomenal. It is huge. Women are pretty much holding up the burden of the country on their shoulders and they’re not even getting paid.

[00:11:00.340] – Grumbine

Wow. So, we had talked offline about how in the United States the left is largely on the fringe. We don’t really have a political party that carries our message forward. And so we end up being co-opted by the Democratic party that is largely center right. And we end up not being involved in the political process. And teaching, educating and agitating, but not really being a part of the policy space and creating the future.

What is it like in India for leftists? I understand class in America is very different. We have this belief that everybody’s equal except we know that that’s not true. Can you talk about the class structure and what it’s like for leftists?

[00:11:51.490] – Sen

Well, capitalism extends itself to almost everything, but there are some spaces that are not capitalist, like the home, right? So, you’ll have those spaces. There are also some spaces that are very essential to living, like the gift economy, which are fundamental to how people live but, of course, are not necessarily completely co-opted within capitalism.

That being said, you do have people in fundamental class positions like the peasants, the working class, and they are producing value. And you do have capitalist forces who are expropriating that value. There are very major feudal elements, of course, and not all of these class relations are capitalist in the way that you would imagine.

For instance, there are people who will derive free work or pull free work out of you because you owe them money, for example. That could happen. But there’s also the gift economy where people will give you zero interest loans because you are their brother or sister. So, it is a capitalist economy in every sense of the term. There are non capitalist spaces which, essentially, hold the economy together.

And, for leftists, unlike in the US, where there is a chance where you can possibly wait for the revolution, but in India you can’t wait for the revolution. Most of your country is in dire poverty. Even your middle class is one hospital bill away from starvation, right, or from destitution. So, you have to do something. There is no way out for activists to not do anything, and, therefore, we seek policy change.

One very important agitation is for the right to information. Another is for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and to universalize it. Just recently, the farmers have been protesting against the corporatization of agriculture and the repeal of three major farm laws, and it was possibly the most successful agitation against the government as of yet.

So, leftists have to do something. That being said, we’ve had communist parties and they’ve actually been in government in West Bengal, in Kerala, and they have a very peculiar relationship to the broader neoliberal environment that they’re operating in, being communist parties. And of course, sometimes they also get co-opted or give in to neoliberal forces to the extent that the CPI [Communist Party India] West Bengal even allowed firing on peasants to appropriate their land for corporates.

This was before I just got to JNU. So, I remember this happened. So, yeah, activists get co-opted. And activists aren’t always the great heroes fighting against capitalism entirely. But, at the same time, you have an active civil society. Even now, we have several civil society activists who have faced imprisonment for standing against the government and standing against the government’s bulldozing civil rights.

Umar Khalid is currently in prison right now. Sudha Bharadwaj was in prison for several years just fighting for the rights of ordinary people, of Adivasis, of Dalits, of women. And these are, I guess, the heroes. But there are others.

[00:15:41.050] – Grumbine

You focus heavily on feminism and feminist theory and understanding the role economics plays in women’s lives and, in particular, the job market. You talked a little bit about how society is there. But tell us, what is it like being a woman in India?

[00:15:59.470] – Sen

Steve, you are asking me about my favorite question. It is very tough and it depends – it’s different across the class spectrum. Just yesterday, actually, a friend of mine, she works as a cook in my neighborhood. And I depend on her because it’s almost impossible to look after a child without paid childcare and paid help.

And when I finally met her, she said that she couldn’t come because she was facing low blood pressure. So, I probed a little deeper saying that you are suffering from a health issue. What happened? And she told me that her daughter had been drying out the laundry on the terrace when she faced sexual harassment within the neighborhood.

There was some neighboring boy who came and sort of threatened her and he’s also been stalking her. And she got so scared that she couldn’t leave the house. And because she was terrified her mother couldn’t leave the house either. So, when you start seeing this declining labor force participation of women, a large part of it is also just the general atmosphere of sexism, the fear of something like assault or harassment happening to you, the fear of being stalked, which is something that most women in India can relate to.

And, meanwhile, there is very little support for women who are also trying to earn a living, like, say, my friend. If she doesn’t get to work, she cannot pay tuition fees for her kids. But, at the same time, it’s very difficult for her to come to work if her daughter is being harassed at home. So, it is a very, very tough reality with this threat of violence and also this constant burden of taking on unpaid work.

Just to give you an example, as you start seeing an increase in prices, as you start seeing a withdrawal of government from providing subsidies or fuel, then women can no longer use cooking gas. So, they go around and they pick up wood and they, then, make their rotis, which is a type of bread on the chulha, which is basically a wood-fired oven.

And I know in the US wood-fired oven, you’re already thinking fancy pizza but, no, not fancy pizza at all, although chulha bread does taste nice. But the point is that just spending hours in front of the chulha, it takes up so much of their time, of their energy and it becomes very difficult to also participate in paid work after that.

[00:18:43.810] – Grumbine

We talk about the job guarantee as a central theme to Modern Monetary Theory, which I definitely want to touch on. I want to talk about marriage in India. Do women have a say in their futures? Explain to me the rights of women in India as it pertains to making those kinds of decisions.

[00:19:04.450] – Sen

Steve, there’s a new book by Rukmini Srinivas on data, and I’m talking about it because she just says, what does data tell us about how India thinks or marries or loves? And she found, actually, that majority of marriages are arranged marriages and most of them will be within the caste group. So, it’s actually quite common where young couples elope across caste lines or religion lines and their families crack down on them in the worst possible ways.

Sometimes they will register rape cases against the boy, sometimes they will kidnap the girl back. There are many instances where these young men who have married outside their caste or religion, they have been murdered. So, overwhelmingly, most marriages are arranged marriages and love marriages do happen. I know it’s a funny thing to call it love marriage, but this is the term we use for people who marry for love, and they do happen. They also typically tend to follow a particular pattern, a very Pride and Prejudice world in a way. So, yeah, that’s how people marry.

[00:20:23.110] – Grumbine

Can you describe the caste system?

[00:20:26.590] – Sen

Oh, that is so interesting. Well, I haven’t read as much on caste as I would like to, but it’s something I’ve grown up with and it’s so common here that it’s almost impossible to imagine a world without it. And one day we have to fight for a world where this caste system is abolished. So, I sat down and I read the ancient Hindu scriptures in English translation. I read the Manusmriti.

And the way they describe it is that there is the Brahmin Caste, which basically makes policy decisions. They are in charge of worship, but worship is many other things apart from worship. There is advising government, there is policy, there’s education. They also have a monopoly over education. Then you have the ruling classes, which depends on the Brahmins to advise them.

You have the business classes, which basically take care of all the trade and commerce. And then you have the classes which essentially do all the work in society, which is the Dalits. And all of actual labor, like the task of cleaning, sanitation work, the task of leather work, and several other kinds of actual production, which is really value production in an economy, this is being done by the Dalits. And today the Dalits are demanding independence.

1. R. Ambedkar, who drafted the Indian Constitution. He was the activist fighting for the rights of Dalits to basic human dignity. And B. R. Ambedkar also has a really interesting US connection. He was fascinated by movements for the rights of black persons. In fact, I think in Amherst, there is still an archive of Ambedkar’s letters to Du Bois. So, the US has played a very important role in India’s fight for equal rights and basic human dignity.

[00:22:27.430] – Grumbine

Let’s go back to the end of Rome. The class system being born. It was those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. And then you have a fourth class, the merchant class. Does that occur within this caste system as well? Is there a parallel there that branched out from that, or has this been there since before those class structures existed?

[00:22:52.510] – Sen

I’m not an expert. I try to read many of the scholars who’ve written on this. There’s a movement not to read them in India. The regressive movements, they don’t want us to read them. For example, there’s Kancha Ilaiah. There is Wendy Doniger. They’ve all written on this. There are so many interesting theories. Many western scholars, they also often talk about India as an image of what Europe was before enlightenment.

And Marx definitely does, also, go with that. And of course, that idea is, as I pointed, somewhat problematic because India also has dynamism roles. And it would be incorrect to say that India is an idea of how Europe was. But at the same time, there is the Aryan Invasion Theory, which says that the Aryans came from across the Indo-European region and cross the Hindu Kush Mountains and subjugated the natives who were living in India at the time.

So, it’s possible there was a parallel, because the Aryans are the ones who brought in many of these systems, like dowry, like the Manusmriti and so on. So, it’s possible. You might be right there, but I’m hardly the right person to comment on this. I’m still informing myself.

[00:24:15.370] – Grumbine

Well, that’s part of the beauty of this journey is that we don’t know everything, but we try to explore. So for me, this is all added information that I’m trying to bring forward. And you’re helping, by the way. So, as an MMT scholar, what is the state of monetary operations within India? How does that function?

[00:24:37.450] – Sen

Well, I was actually thinking, before I met you today, would I call myself an MMTer? I’ve been to UMKC, so, I can say I’m MMT-informed. I might not call myself, strictly speaking, an MMT scholar just because I’m also a little wary of the camp approach. Otherwise we all end up fighting: “No, your MMTer said this.” “No, your Marxist said that.” “No, you guys said this.” And I find all of that causes more heat than light.

[00:25:10.130] – Grumbine

You’re a heterodox economist.

[00:25:12.830] – Sen

Yeah, I think that’s fair enough and broad enough for me to stretch my elbows and my toes. So, I like broad categories.

[00:25:22.550] – Grumbine

I like that too. I’m with you.

[00:26:01.810] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin and Instagram.

[00:26:27.790] – Grumbine

Describe the state of the Indian economy. Help me understand how does credit operate? Give us an understanding of that operation in India.

[00:26:38.710] – Sen

It’s pretty much the same. There isn’t much difference. We have the central bank. It’s the Reserve Bank of India [RBI]. I like to think there is consolidation between the RBI and the government and of course there is. And it functions pretty much the same as any central bank in that sense. There have been some interesting monetary stories. I’m sure many of your listeners would have heard about the demonetization shock.

[00:27:08.170] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:27:09.250] – Sen

There was one MMT scholar, actually, who put it very well. He said, you shouldn’t call it demonetization. Rather, it’s more like de-cash-ification. So, Mr. Modi, one fine day at 8:00 P.M., comes on national television with a big announcement, and he just decides that there are certain currency notes, like, say, the RS500, which will no longer be accepted as legal tender.

And that was, as Amartya Sen also said, and many progressive economists said, that the idea that the government just decides, okay, this is not my debt anymore. And I, of course, found this was very interesting because, in part, it’s also a validation of the idea that money is a creature of the state because the state actually can disown it and has.

So, for a while, I found that really interesting. And then, of course, the geeky excitement about your theories being validated falls apart when you see the kind of suffering that it causes. And I was aghast at the kind of suffering that happened. Several people lost jobs, they lost livelihoods and I don’t think we’ve ever measured it accurately as to the kind of loss that the Indian economy suffered because of this approach.

Just as a small aside, I lost at least RS5000 because I had been sitting on it to pay for cab fare from the airport to my parents’ house when I would go back. I was in the US at the time, and all that money evaporated.

[00:28:50.830] – Grumbine

Oh, my goodness. I didn’t even think about that. Yes, and I remember hearing about this. If you’re holding cash, you just totally lost out.

[00:28:59.650] – Sen

It would be the same as in hyperinflationary scenarios where you have these old pictures of people rolling their tobacco in their currency notes and smoking it. At that point, I could have used those RS500 as toilet paper.

[00:29:16.190] – Grumbine

You bring up a great point, though. The paper is toilet paper. Unless it’s backed by the government and the obligation. And when the government says that’s no longer my unit account, it’s kindling for the fire.

[00:29:28.970] – Sen

Yeah and there was all kinds of confusion at the time because there were dates given where you could exchange your old currency notes for new ones. But there were long lines in front of the banks and there was also immense talk of nationalism. So, It’s really interesting how nationalism comes into all this. You have people waiting in line and cursing and saying, oh, no, this government.

It has done this unnecessary thing and now I have to spend a day which I could have spent earning money standing in this line and people would tell them, don’t be selfish, think about your nation. We will end corruption by getting rid of these bank notes, where, I guess, it was imagined that people were storing their tax evasion currency in those notes or something. So, it was really interesting how nationalism came and interacted with this story.

[00:30:22.550] – Grumbine

What is the population of India, roughly? In the US, we got 330,000,000 people. What is in India?

[00:30:30.770] – Sen

We have over a billion. In fact, I was just having dinner with a couple of friends and we were comparing just how many countries… Uttar Pradesh, which is just one state in India, would have more people than – actually, has more people than most of the countries in the world. If it were a country, it would be in the top six or something.

[00:30:54.110] – Grumbine

I guess that brings me to the point. When I think of MMT, even though I know that you would, like, say you’re MMT-informed economist – the nation’s unit of account, whatever that nation is, they can’t go broke on debt denominated in their own currency. And to quote some of the other great economists of the past, if we can think it, if we can resource it, we can afford it.

These are all truisms. However, does India have vast natural resources? Is it a food sovereign? Does it have energy sovereignty, that it could survive without imports? Or is it heavily dependent on other countries to give it what it needs to stay afloat?

[00:32:15.160] – Sen

Well, our problem is energy. We are energy deficit. So we need petrol and we need crude oil. Actually, my dad worked in oil. He was a geophysicist, and he spent most of his career running around looking for oil in India. And he found some, too. But, yeah, pretty successful career, but clearly not enough for the needs of this population. We’re definitely energy poor.

Food wise, we have not always been food sovereign, but, generally, it’s understood that we have to do  Whatever we can to uphold food sovereignty. And we have systems like the public distribution system, which tries to solve the hunger problem, tries to ensure that people would get basic rations of food. But it is not a universalized system.

It’s targeted. So that means that it’s nowhere near as effective as it would have been were it universalized. So, I don’t know how to say that we are food sovereign when there is so much hunger in our country, but it is recognized as an important policy objective.

[00:32:55.310] – Grumbine

In India, it seems like somebody would be able to figure out if we got food sovereignty here, we should be able to take care of our people. How does a country take care of its own to ensure fresh drinking water, food, shelter? Then it sounds to me like there is no assurance in India of those things. Talk to me about the austerity that exists in India. Clearly, they’re a monetary sovereign. What drives the poverty in India?

[00:33:28.970] – Sen

Well, it’s a long story. I think the theory that I’m most comfortable with actually comes from the work of economic historians like Amiya Kumar Bagchi, where he points to deindustrialization that happened in the Gangetic Plains on account of colonial policies. So, poverty is essentially a result of the pushing of capitalist relations onto our population. Not to say that there was no hunger before.

I wouldn’t know how to go there and I’m not a historian like that. I don’t know enough to say that. But, definitely, there is enough work on economic history to say that when the British came, when they started their rather selective tariff policies in terms of Indian textiles, they pretty much decimated the artisan population in the Gangetic Plains and destroyed much of local industry.

And that resulted in large bodies of people who were dispossessed and they had nothing but their labor and they became the proletariat. And I think it’s pretty fundamental to how colonialism also works because you need general labor ready bodies to do the work, to produce the exports that your home country needs, to produce the wealth that your home country will drain away.

And such processes continued. There were takeovers of land. There were forced conversions of agricultural land to cash crops. And there were conversions that weren’t forced. But because the British were willing to pay for Indigo and cash crops, many people did take land away from food crops to cash crops. And that means that, if you have your vegetable garden that would support you, it can no longer support you.

So, you do see a lot of poverty arising there. So, it’s historical and it was created that way. There is very little consensus on poverty, and there was, in fact, the great Indian poverty debate which debated whether poverty has increased or decreased between 1990 and 1999. Generally, it has been recognized that calorie intakes have reduced, but many people say that quality of life in terms of goods accessible has improved, but there is very little empirical consensus on these issues.

What we know for a fact that you are absolutely right, that there is no guarantee from the state that people will be taken care of. And what is worse, over the neoliberal period, the state has also been withdrawing from its responsibility of taking care of its people. And that has placed the burden heavily on the only welfare system that India has ever had, which is the family.

So, families are supporting one another. If somebody has to go to work in the city, in fact, you can just see it in the migrant crisis. Again, this was a sudden policy where the Prime Minister says there’s a national lockdown, and then you suddenly see this exodus of internal migrants gathering at bus stations in Delhi, Chennai, Pompeii trying to go home.

And the one and only demand is, let me go home because that is the only way in which I can sustain my family. And that also points to the only welfare system that really exists is the family and the village back home. And that puts a considerable portion of the burden of social reproduction on the women of that family.

[00:37:26.790] – Grumbine

That is intense. In China, the government has invested heavily on infrastructure. In speaking with Chinese economist Yang Liang and Vincent Huang, they talked, extensively, about how China has invested in both public schools, healthcare. A lot of it is because they have an industrial base. Does India have a good industrial base because it seems like this is a political issue more than a real resource issue?

[00:38:01.650] – Sen

Yeah, you’re right. It is definitely political more than anything else. And, to some extent, people do recognize the role of the state. I think that there is a tendency to take for granted the systems – well, even if someone is completely destitute, the person isn’t dead yet – and that would be the family. There is a tendency to take families for granted, to take these village systems, subsystems for granted.

So that’s probably why we still have social reproduction at very low wages, because these non-capitalist systems manage to keep the wheels turning. There’s definitely a decline in the idea of what the state needs to do to protect its people. And I think people have also, to some extent, stopped holding states accountable.

But partly, of course, that has to do with the kind of propaganda that the state is capable of and what it has been able to get away with. But there is still resistance. An attempt to tell the state that, look, what you’re doing is not right, and that is through the civil society activists and several prisoners of conscience.

[00:39:19.590] – Grumbine

We’re facing an existential climate crisis right now, regardless of whether our governments acknowledge it or not. You’ve mentioned about internal migrants. Discussing with Fadhel Kaboub and Ndongo Samba Sylla about migration as a result of climate, there’s even more potential for war and pain and poverty.

India and Pakistan, who are not exactly best friends. But with climate crisis creating climate refugees, I wonder what is India’s take on the environment? Do they recognize the threat? Are they taking steps to mitigate it? What is their response to this?

[00:40:05.310] – Sen

Well, the response is, as we’ve seen in how they responded in the COP conference, the response is to keep pushing away the deadlines to say that we will try to reduce our carbon emissions but only by 2070. And several journalists, several commentators, several climate scholars, they have said that no India can do this before and pushing it to 2070, it’s too convenient.

It is, in a way, washing hands of the responsibility. That being said, this is where the idea of taxation, I think, could be very useful. We need a tax on carbon. We need taxes against diesel cars that people are driving. We need better public transportation which is safer for women. And it is really time for us to start thinking about an economy that will reduce carbon and at the same time guarantee safety and greater mobility for women.

[00:41:17.850] – Grumbine

As you talk about women, I want to hearken back to the idea of pushing all the social production down to the village, down to the family. How might that play into a job guarantee? Understanding the MMT prescription for a lot of these problems is the job guarantee. What might that look like in India? Is it even something people would consider?

[00:41:45.390] – Sen

Well, I’m just talking about what I would like to see, but I shouldn’t misrepresent Indian scholarship. We do have good amount of research both on the NREGA [National Rural Employment Guarantee Act] and on an urban job guarantee. So, there is really good research there. But just talking about what I would like to see, I would like to see a job guarantee in care work, particularly women who need help caring for their children can rely on employment guarantee workers, job guarantee workers to run good daycare centers.

And run them as cooperatives within the locality where parents have a voice in how their kids are being treated in daycare and these workers are trained well. And I’ve seen it. It can be really empowering having a chance to earn wages, make your own money and have the kind of work that you do at home anyway, which you’re not paid for, be validated and be paid for it.

And partly also because we have such a large demographic which is young and which requires care in that sense. So, I would like to see a job guarantee in early childhood education, early childhood care. So many women are required to make these schools and make these colleges run. Similarly, I would also like to see at higher skill levels where people pay more money for mental health care workers.

In healthcare I would like to see more nurses and better paid nurses. I would like to see more teachers, better paid primary and secondary school teachers. And, to some extent, some governments are doing some work there like the Delhi government has made significant advances in school education. So, on these lines I would like to see more and better paid teachers and better healthcare workers in these schools and colleges.

And that would take a large part of the burden of constantly caring for children off women’s hands. And it would enable us to also do other things like read a book on occasion and get some leisure. We’ve just recently started seeing time-use data. The government has released its own time-use surveys and there is a private company, the center for Monitoring Indian Economy.

They’ve also brought out some time-use data and I still haven’t done it but I would like to see just the leisure gap between men and women versus the housework gap. In the US, women do twice the amount of work that men do. In India, women would I guess to around thrice, maybe more, thrice the amount of work that men do.

So, I would like to see a reduction in this gender gap in unpaid housework and women being recognized for the work they do anyway by being paid for it through the job guarantee.

[00:45:08.550] – Grumbine

You spoke about women being in fear and the kidnapping of wives that get married out of love. Is there any push to protect women in Indian culture right now? Is it getting better or is it getting worse?

[00:45:25.230] – Sen

I’ve been trying to answer this question since 2013, Steve. I have no idea. Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? I also can’t tell you because I have changed, right? And, at that time, I was a young woman, I was single, so the world I experienced was different. Now I go everywhere as a mom, and moms are apparently, supposedly, respected but on grounds of proximity and not on grounds of their humanity.

So, I wouldn’t exactly know. My experiences don’t count for much here because I have changed. So, one can look at data. There is crime records bureau data, but that’s a bit tricky to work with because of the way in which it is reported. And there’s household surveys. But right now, from what we are seeing from the National Family Health Surveys, just the percentage of women who report violence against them at home, it’s just too large for comfort.

So, I don’t know if things have gotten better but, yes, more people are talking about it. I think that was one of the productive results of the anti-rape agitation. And the other thing is there were some policy changes, but we don’t yet know about whether lives of women have got better or worse.

[00:46:57.150] – Grumbine

The conversation is happening now, at least. Education is key. But the power dynamic. Do women have any power in India? How do they claim their power?

[00:47:11.670] – Sen

To some extent they do. There was this wonderful paper in the 1980s by Deniz Kandiyoti and she talked about how women claim power for themselves even in patriarchal situations. And you will see families with the dominant mother in law. In fact, Kandiyoti says that women in classical patriarchy, they wait until they can have a male child, and that is what gives them power.

So, power is a complex question, right? And I think human beings also have a tendency to try to get agency and power, however bad their structural conditions are. That being said, yes, we have a lot of women in politics. They do face a good amount of sexism. They are very tough and they survive. And you have women in both the left and you have women in the right, and they are in politics.

Mostly women are missing from the economic spheres. So, participation in paid labor force is low. Educationally, just to give you an example, when I went to UMKC from JNU, I was used to spaces where even in grad schools, you have 50-50 ratios of men and women. And then I went to the US and I found that the ratio was mostly men and two or three women.

And another one of the many reasons why I left the US, I really missed the company of other women with the same kind of education.

[00:48:53.910] – Grumbine

Well, you said you’re a mom. What would an India be that you would like to see for your children to inherit?

[00:49:04.750] – Sen

Oh, well, my child is American. He was born just as I was about to leave grad school. And I remember some of my friends were teasing me about my anchor baby. That was during the Trump time. So, I was really terrified. And there was a whole lot of rhetoric about how birthers will not get citizenship. And I got worried, what if my child doesn’t get citizenship in the US and then I have to take him back to India, but he doesn’t get his passport then, so would he get Indian citizenship? I was really terrified.

That’s also why I like to do my research on immigrants, because it is really scary being an immigrant in the US. So, I don’t know. I have no idea what my son will do when he grows up. But I suppose he will live like many people do between the intersections of the United States and India. And, in a way, that’s one way to be well and truly global, you know?

The two countries are on different sides of the world. And I would like him to visit the US. I would like him to visit many of the people who I love and respect very much. So, that’s part of it. And I would like a United States, I suppose, which makes it possible for children to get a good College education, maybe free tuition and have a job guarantee where it supports its citizens.

And I would also like in India, where basic rights at least, are guaranteed because we can’t aim that high here, but we can aim at just basic rights being guaranteed.

[00:50:45.590] – Grumbine

Yes. It seems like no matter where we turn, there’s a lot of work to be done. And I really appreciate you taking me through India and the struggle women go through and understanding of the current events and current environment that we have. Can you please tell everyone where we can find more of your work and anything else that’s going on that would be of interest?

[00:51:10.970] – Sen

Well, there’s a dissertation. It’s searchable online. When I wrote my PhD dissertation, many people told me I will never get a job because it was rather adventurous and very unusual in academia to write something like that. So, you can search for that online. You could just type Ruchira S at Empire. It’ll pop up on UMKC’s space. And I’ve written for the Journal of Economic Issues on dowry with my colleague, Kalpana Khanal.

We love that paper. We really enjoyed writing it. It’s also a book chapter in, The Gift in the Economy and Society with Paolo Silvestri, Ioana Negru and Stefan Kesting. That’s my published work but I’m just at the beginning of my career so I’ll keep writing and you will see more of me as time goes.

[00:52:11.150] – Grumbine

Well, I hope I can have you come back on. I am sure that I will have even more questions next time. I really appreciate you coming on here with me, Ruchira. Thank you so much.

[00:52:21.820] – Sen

Thank you for having me, Steve.

[00:52:23.790] – Grumbine

It’s a pleasure. Folks, this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. My guest, Dr. Ruchira Sen, who is just getting started to look for big things from her in the future and with that, we’re out of here.

[00:52:59.850] – End Credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.