Revisiting Smart City SEZ 1. Government is deliberately making development a vertical process - by focusing and investing on a sector that by itself is most wealthiest - which is a deviation from existing exercise whereby development was conceived to be a horizontal process, through which all sections of society could make gains.
2. Citizens in Kerala are kept in the dark about the fact that Smart City is an SEZ. More than not being transparent, the government also has allowed itself to be anti-democratic by (a) not allowing a debate to be raised on the issue where citizens finally get to know the pros and cons and (b) not allowing the citizens to decide on the issue - which has far reaching consequences for all the citizens in the state. 3. Dubai is a private property of the rulers there, who could do anything there including creation of an Internet City. The case is not so with Kerala, where the state belongs to all Keralites. The Government cannot indulge in pledging the sovereignty of any part of the state without getting the concurrence of the citizens, after initiating a debate on the issue. 4. The state has behaved like an entreprenuer who enters into an alliance or agreement with another private entreprenuer - which is not its constitutional obligation to the citizens. Here they appeared to hijack and exploit an inherent weakness of democracy. By indulging in such an act, the government is distancing itself from known and accepted principles of democratic norms - whereby it should have allowed people to decide on such matters relating to resource allocation and utilisation. 5. Wealth creation in the information technology sector is not merely accumulation of labour. Its also based on exploiting international draconian legal framework of patents and intellectual property rights - whereby revenue is generated multiple times from a single labour. Thus, what should have essentially qualified to be taxed higher, is left as such - and in this case in Smart City SEZ in Kerala, they are given additional sops of a 10 year tax-holiday and concessions in other forms of tax. This is anti-socialist in its outlook and hence anti-constitutional. 6. Smart City SEZ in Kerala is labelled an IT infrastructure project - a sector which cannot just grow with provision of exclusive space, because of its strong inter-linkages and connections with other sectors of economy. The extreme result would be attraction of another section of the sector from alien place - even then, the Government's claim of it being *new opportunities* do not hold water - because there is no significant change being effected by the Government in other sectors of economy that consume services from IT sector. Thus an elected government has fooled its unemployed youth into believing a piece of fiction even as it has allocated away precious land to a foreign entrepreneur. 7. Smart City SEZ claims to provide 9000 jobs per annum to unemployed youth for ten years. The no of people who cross tenth standard after getting exposed to Free Software reaches to 6 lakh per annum with the State Syllabus. The CBSE and other central boards may have another 3 lakh per annum. That makes it around 9 lakh per annum for ten years reaching not less than 90 lakh youth. 90000 for 9000000 is just 1 percent of the population who is given this wildest of the dreams to cheer about. The rival parties (Prof KV Thomas) have already raised voice that a *global tender* should have been floated - which means in the coming governments we are more likely to witness the entire territory up for sale - to foreign institutions and investors !! If one goes by the Federal Commerce ministry's site sezindia.nic.in, we may even have to swallow if the entire state is part of SEZ because one of the main argument in that link is that agricultural land accounts for nearly half of India! 20000sq km of Kerala's territory still won't make anything substantial for SEZ. What a neoliberal age are we going through !! CK R --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala run by Global Alternate Information Applications (GAIA) To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
