Two-and-a-half years after the completion of a new $17 million terminal building, the airport in Jaisalmer, a small and remote desert city in Rajasthan, stands empty. As reported not a single passenger has passed through the gates of an airport big enough to handle more than 300,000 travellers a year, with parking bays for three 180-seater narrow-body jets.
In what has been termed as the Ghost Terminals of India, “India has spent more than $50 million since 2009 on eight airports that do not receive scheduled flights. Across India, more than half of the 100-odd domestic-only airports operated by AAI have not seen a scheduled flight this year.”
In what has been termed as the Ghost Terminals of India, “India has spent more than $50 million since 2009 on eight airports that do not receive scheduled flights. Across India, more than half of the 100-odd domestic-only airports operated by AAI have not seen a scheduled flight this year.”
However similar trends could be noticed in other sectors as well.
Nearly 60% or 160 out of the overall 255 malls currently operational in top seven Indian cities are facing an uncertain future as customers have deserted them for various reasons, as reported by DNA.
“Across India, many of the nation’s more than 300 malls have been struggling with weak sales and high vacancy rates. Developers over the last decade built more than 250 shopping centers, according to JLL’s Indian arm, to tap into India’s burgeoning consumer culture. But while some analysts had estimated India’s middle class would swell to more than 400 million people, it turns out that only a sliver of them—less than 10 million by McKinsey & Co.’s estimates—have enough disposable income to make them steady mall goers” reports the Wall Street Journal.
At the same time if you happen to travel through the suburbs of the Indian capital, Delhi, you will see miles and miles of built homes with nobody living in them. Even as the country faces a shortage of 19 million houses, around 10.2 million completed units are lying vacant, says property consultant CBRE.
“According to the Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation (MoHUPA), Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat constitute about 76 per cent of this urban housing shortage.”
Government of India collects many statistics every year on everything and anything except on the displaced people from the resource rich forests or river banks or fertile lands. None in India in government circles have any figure for the number of people that have been or are being displaced by big developmental projects or sacrificed on the altar of Developmental Mantra by every national government.
Where do these displaced people go?
Eventually they end up in slums of urban centers on government lands or on disputed lands. They become vote bank for urban political parties. In most cases once the land title is allotted these slum dwellers are uprooted from these slums so that big corporation can build shopping malls or apartment complexes for the development of the nation.
Various courts in India including the Supreme Court are either silent on this human tragedy of forcible displacement or in rarest cases sided with the government and big MNCs in pursuing their agendas. In many cases even if there were no environmental clearances for such huge ecology damaging projects like Tehri Dam or Tata and POSOCO or Vedanta, still they went ahead grabbing the lands of poor and destroying the ecology for MNC interests.
It would appear as though these problems are just the result of bad management, planning and a general lack of oversight and holistic perspective. However true that maybe it is just the partial truth. Upon a closer observation infact one would find that these problems are not the result of mis-management, instead they are the results of a very systematic and strategically charted out policies in motion through a very long time.
Most of these above mentioned displaced people are from virgin forests from where coal to diamonds, rare earth metals to gold could be hauled out at throw away prices, which would be used to make high technology cutting edge products again to be sold to India at 10,000 times more profit than the actual cost of the materials/products hauled out.
MNCs want these tribal Indians to go away from their resource rich lands sometime like yesterday. But they are afraid just like the East India Company, that such evacuation (read rehabilitation) may create revolt among people. To avoid such inconvenience MNCs are now using the very democratically elected governments to do the eviction of population in the guise of protection of wildlife and sustainable development.
A massive such eviction is taking place in the State of Andhra Pradesh from the virgin forests of Nallamala range for the exclusive benefits of De Beers, a diamond mining corporation that wants the kimberlite or diamonds from the forest. But that is not the only thing De Beers is after. What De Beers is after is the buried wealth of Vijayanagara Empire to be hauled permanently into western fold.
The efforts of De Beers started at least 13 years ago when it was told to us that “they realized the massive diamond, gold and granite deposits in Mehaboob Nagar and Kurnool districts of Andhra Pradesh”. These deposits are spread under the thick jungles of Nallamala Forests. These forests needed to be cleared first for the diamond mining or De Beers should have to resort to the latest technology called horizontal drilling under the forests.
Now here comes the kicker. East India Companies when they ruled India tried to locate these kimberlite mines and declared that they were all exhausted and thus shifted their focus to South Africa. In South Africa they found diamonds and set up African gold and diamond mining companies under the ruthless exploitative ownership of Openheimers, who were one of the owners of the East India Companies. It is these Nallamala diamond mines that were the source of the riches of all the kingdoms of India including the Vijayanagara Kingdom, which at its height sold diamonds on streets not in carats but in kilograms. This fact was recorded by Portuguese, Russian, French and other chroniclers who had business and diplomatic ties with Vijayanagara kingdom. Every crown jewel of every European kingdom in those days came from India and from these mines along the banks of Krishna or Tungabhadra rivers.
For a detailed understanding kindly read our research report The Hunt for the Treasures of Vijayanagara Empire.
In the year 1600 East India Company was formed and given exclusive right to trade with India and South East Asia by the British Monarchy under the concept of Free Trade and Globalization. It was also given the right to civilize India. In the year 1965 the Club of Rome (top industrial houses-real owners of EICs or MNCs) divided the world in 10 economic segments and gave unbridled authority to ruthlessly exploit Segment 9 (India belongs to this segment 9), a group of mineral (diamond, gold, uranium, life saving medicinal plants, organic food and drinking water) oil and natural gas rich South East Asian nations consisting one third of the population of the world- under liberalization (liberalize domestic economy to globalize its owners) and privatization (privatize so that Free Trade can further control domestic economy via global owners) to a group of MNCs.
Commenting on the mercantile political economy, Mayer Rothschild (one of the owners of the East India Company) once made a historic comment which is resoundingly true even after centuries – “give me the control of the currency of any nation and I care not who rules it…”
Liberalization and Privatization were the tools of the mercantile world in the long history of 400 year struggle to dominate resource rich Asia in general and India in particular. Since the beginning of liberalization of Indian economy for the supposed ‘development’ of India many Indians within the border of India became second-class citizens or non-citizens in their own native lands, country and cultural settings. They became the Helots of India, a derogatory term used by the Romans to indicate non-Romans in their country, intermediate in status between slaves and citizens. However still for whose sake is this development, is still not yet answered as it is tacitly understood that it is for the western countries to continue their geopolitical fight with their yester year cold war adversaries.
It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that in the name of development India is now run only for the profit maximization of giant western Multinational Corporations (MNCs) which are in their latest avatar from the erstwhile East India Companies (EICs). In fact all the owners of current MNCs are the grand children of the previous East India Companies, in lineage, spirit, methods, tactics and business policies (read Business Intelligence).
For a detailed study of the origin of these EICs, their motives and the motives of MNCs along with the commodities EICs dealt with and MNCs plan to deal with or are already dealing with; along with the elusive owners of these MNCs tracking them back to their East India Company roots kindly refer to our East India Company Series – Part I Noble Motives.
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