Relevance: GS-3: Inclusive growth and issues arising from it; Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization of resources, growth, development and employment;

Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

Key Phrases: Inequality Kills 2022, Oxfam international, economic, gender, and racial inequalities, Amartya Sen’s capacity framework, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, MNCs, Progressive taxation.

Why in News?

• Oxfam’s report, ‘Inequality Kills 2022’, released in January, revealed some shocking facts about the growing gap between the rich and poor in India and the world.

Key Points:

• As per Oxfam’s report, the 10 richest men doubled their fortunes in a pandemic while the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity fell.
  • The report also claims that 98 Indians own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 55.2 crore Indian citizens.
• The report suggests that this widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities—as well as the inequality that exists between countries—are tearing our world apart.
• Many experts argues that an individual’s wealth is a function of their hard work. It is a dangerous assumption and a false equivalence that must be expelled.

Inequality and Human Rights:

• Inequality as a sociological concept is an unequal distribution of wealth, resources, opportunity and rewards.
  • These inequalities precede us because individuals, are born into unequal conditions — differentiation in levels of power, status and wealth, which is a reality of any society.
• In contrast, there is conscious and intentional planning to create equal opportunities as a means to offset inequality of conditions.
  • This is done by budgetary allocation on social spending — education, pension, rural job guarantees to name a few.
• While the report begins with stating the wealth inequality, it later dives into societal conditions of healthcare, education and nutrition levels.
  • The inaccessibility to these creates suffering and precipitates inequality of this magnitude.
• One way of equalising these basic conditions would be to follow Amartya Sen’s “capacity framework”.
  • It focuses on giving individuals actual opportunities (argued in the report as imparting quality education, better healthcare by reducing out-of-pocket expenses, access to adequate food) so that they have the freedom to pursue the life they want — the outcomes of life.
• That is why the report emphasises the basic levels of living and well-being for individuals to have control over their lives.
  • This is the fundamental inequality we need to recognise before blindly reading numbers.
  • This should also help differentiate individualised “hard work” or “talent” from a socially structured spectrum of socio-economic conditions.
  • We are trained in the system of meritocracy (progress and success are based on ability) where the markers of the latter are invisibilised or erased.
• Human rights discourse began in the post-war period when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.”
  • As the world was moving towards a system of self-regulating states these norms and practices were conceived to protect every person from threats by the state.
• In 1966, the aspirational goals of this Declaration were turned into obligations by two Covenants i.e., International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
  • The former includes the right to work and to just conditions of work, participate in trade unions, to social security, adequate standards of living, health, education, leisure, etc and
• The latter refers to “right to life, liberty, and security of the person; fair trial and equal protection of the law; the right not to be subjected to torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; not to be subjected to slavery, servitude, or forced labour; freedom of movement, thought, and conscience; the right to peaceful assembly, family, and privacy; and the right to participate in the public affairs of one’s country.
  • The Declaration with the two covenants constitutes the “International Bill of Human Rights”.
• This is significant because India has ratified it and in its own constitution endows each person with inalienable and indivisible rights to work, wages, education as elaborated in the report.
  • The state is obligated to ensure that these rights are met.

Concerns with rise of MNCs:

With the liberalisation of trade activities and privatisation throughout the world, people had to be protected not just from the states, but now also from businesses and corporations.

• These private entities by means of foreign investments and seamless communication were/are deepening their spread in the remotest corners of the world, across territorial borders.
• They are functioning as legitimate non-state actors across the world and these operations have both positive and negative outcomes.
  • The positives in the form of job creation, competitiveness, choices of products and innovation.
  • But not many are willing to see — primarily because of dissociation of the wealthy and their wealth by a network that is well masked under names and entities that takes 11.9 million documents (the number of leaked documents in Pandora Paper investigation) — to connect the dots for a handful of ultra-rich.
• This is where governance issues – both at the national and international levels – crop up.
  • The rights of MNCs to operate across the border and expand their profit-maximisation is surging, but the domestic laws and regulations protecting people have not kept up.
  • The adverse outcome on the environment, communities that are ecologically sensitive and resist its exploitative use — this impinges on climate change as well — remains undiscussed.
  • The power and actions of these MNCs are outside of what domestic governance was imagined to tackle and this gap has been recognised by civil societies.
  • The wealth inequality in some ways is an accrual of this unchecked sustained exploitation that fails to be recognised as adverse or negative.
• A crucial point to remember when reading the list of top 100 wealthy Indians is that every individual in it (nearly all men) is the face of a thriving multinational business.

Way Forward:

As per the report, it is the responsibility and duty of the state and the wealthy who run the MNCs to start undoing the gap and restore the rights of people.

• Progressive taxation is definitely a recommendation that should be actualised but both global and local businesses need to be regulated without further harming human rights.
• People ought to be educated to learn about how businesses - and the fortunes of certain individuals - are growing at this exponential rate.

Conclusion:

• Equality is about access to opportunities, wealth, resources. It’s about human rights enshrined in international conventions. The lack of recognition of these human rights has globalised inequality.

Source: Indian Express

Mains Question:

Q. Rising Inequality around the world is linked to lacking opportunities and violations in human rights. Elaborate.