Dr Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay -CGR Deputy Director and Senior Lecturer in Economics at Queen Mary’s School of Business and Management – appeared yesterday on Channel 4 news, commenting with Paul Mason the visit of India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to Britain.
Modi, who has arrived today in the UK for a three day visits, has been in office since May 2014. Previously he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014. Narendra Modi has been credited for Gujarat prosperity during these last 12 years. A track that, according to the Financial Times, fuelled his electoral campaign with the hopes that he could do the same for India. However, his tenure as Gujarat Chief Minister has been also shadowed by his associations with Hindu supremacism and accusations of state inactivity or even complicity during the 2002 anti-muslim riots in Gujarat.
In his report Channel 4 Economics Editor Paul Mason’s pointed that for “Modi-nomics” progress has been slow, with a strong success in taming inflation but with exports taking a plunge. Mason, asked Dr Bandyopadhyay about the winners and the losers of Modi’s economic policies, with Dr Bandyopadhyay outlining the distributional consequences of “Modi-nomics”:
“The winners are the entrepreneurs, the big business, and small business, start-ups, everybody who wants to start a new firms. The losers are India’s poor, so we have about around five hundred million people who are under the poverty line or just above the poverty line, and these are the people who are being affected the most because Modi’s economic agenda does not have enough funds for poverty alleviation programs”
Dr. Bandyopadhyay has a strong record of research on inequality and poverty, organising the “Annual workshop on the Theory and Empirics of Inequality, Poverty and Mobility”. She has previously published about inequality and development in India on the Scottish Journal of Political Economy or Economic Letters, you can also read a snapshot of this research in her LSE blog post explaining “Why is Economic Growth across Indian states uneven?”
Watch Dr Bandyopadhyay intervention on Channel 4 News.
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