There are various aspects of market-oriented economic liberalisation and globalisation that are known to be adverse for working people. But even apart from these, it is increasingly being recognised that some of the economic and social processes unleashed by markets also have other adverse consequences. In particular, they generate or accentuate tendencies of fundamentalism, sectarianism and related conflict and violence, especially towards women.
 
Let us consider the mechanisms whereby this occurs more specifically in the Indian context. The past decade or more has been the period during which the Indian economy has been thrown more open to market processes than ever before, and such markets have been regional, national and international. This period has been associated with a tendency towards privatisation of state assets, reduction in crucial government investment, especially in infrastructure areas, reduced per capita public spending on health, reduced public expenditure in the rural areas generally, deregulation of and a number of tax benefits and other sops provided to large domestic and multinational capital, trade liberalisation which has affected the viability of small scale manufacturing units and agriculturalists.

These policies in turn have already had substantial detrimental effects on the economy, and more particularly, on the lives of ordinary working people. The most evident negative feature is the collapse of employment generation, especially in the rural areas. The rate of growth of all forms of rural employment, including casual and part-time work and self-employment, has slumped to less than 1 per cent in the 1990s (regardless of whether one looks at the National Sample Survey data or the Census data). This is not only the lowest recorded rate since Independence, it is also much lower than the rate of growth of rural population. This means that the absence of productive work opportunities has become the single most important problem for large sections of the rural population.

Even those who are self-employed as agriculturalists are facing huge problems of viability as cultivators because of the combination of threats from highly subsidised imports which are keeping prices down, and rising costs because of withdrawal of subsidies. The growing crisis in agriculture combined with the lack of employment generation have created much more basic economic hardship for the majority of rural residents.

In the urban areas, the rate of overall employment generation has been slightly better, but not in the formal sector, where employment has barely grown at all. There has been some growth in services employment, and especially in IT-enabled services that has reduced the rate of educated unemployment. But even in the urban areas, the problem of lack of sufficient employment for all those who need to work, remains significant. For less skilled workers, and especially women, the problem of access to productive work is especially acute. Women are being drawn into the paid labour force in some more regressive ways, in the form of home-based work as part of large chains of production organised by large capitalists, or as low-paid and exploited service sector workers.

In addition to inadequate aggregate employment generation, there is the problem of reduced security of work and of incomes generally. Of course this is most marked for wage workers in less skilled and more unstable occupations. But it is ironically true that even in the higher ends of the job spectrum, employment has become more volatile and fragile, and the earlier security that was implicit in formal sector employment has all but disappeared in the new contracts. In addition, even non-wage incomes are now less secure and more volatile, simply because many markets, and the income accruing from them, fluctuate much more wildly than they did in the past.

The overall depressed conditions of employment generation and greater insecurity of incomes have in turn been indirectly expressed in other negative features, notably food consumption. Foodgrain availability per head of population for the economy as a whole has been lower on average in the past few years, than even thirty years ago. And this is combined with a mountain of "excess" foodgrain stocks being held by the Food Corporation of India, raising the appalling contradiction of continuing starvation amidst apparent plenty. Per capita calorie consumption, even for the poorest forty per cent of the population, has also declined. This is almost unbelievable in an economy which was supposed to have been growing at more than 5 per cent per annum and where the official statistics are now being manipulated to announce that there is a significant decline in the extent of poverty!

As if the reduced access to food and lower calorie consumption were not bad enough, there have also been evident declines in the availability of basic public services in the areas of health and sanitation. The decline in public expenditure investment has not only meant that the rate of expansion of much-needed health facilities has declines. The cuts in public expenditure have also meant that maintenance and repair of such facilities, as well as basic running expenditures, are not provided, so that the actual quality of and access to public health and sanitation facilities has declined. This has affected both prevented preventive and curative health care in the public sector, which in turn means that even poor households are forced to undertake much more expenditure on private health care, even when this cuts into the incomes necessary for sheer physical survival. Naturally, this tends to affect women and girl children more adversely, and compounds the effects of gender discrimination in nutrition as well.

Along with this, the growing emphasis on markets has implied the commoditisation of many aspects of life that were earlier seen as either naturally provided by states and communities, or simply not subject to market transaction and property relations. Thus, the inability or refusal of the government to provide safe drinking water has led to the explosive growth of a bottled water industry. A whole range of previously services and utilities like power distribution and telecommunications have been privatised. Even the growing recognition accorded to intellectual property rights marks the entry of markets into ever newer spheres.