The champions of digitalisation claim that “India is upgrading – from an offline, cash, informal, low productivity economy to an online, cashless, formal, high productivity economy.” In fact, the manner in which digitalisation is being imposed on various sectors of India’s predominantly informal economy does not bring about true formalisation or raise the productivity of the vast majority of working people; rather, it serves to enrich the corporate sector, including global corporations, at the expense of that vast majority.

The decade of ‘peak digitalisation’ has witnessed depressed consumption, stalled investment, retrogression in the pattern of employment, and falling real wages. Meanwhile the digital economy has grown as an enclave, increasingly disconnected from the rest of the economy.

Tax revenues have stagnated, and grown even more regressive, during the decade of digitalisation. Claims of huge savings due to digitalisation are not only false, but hide a grim reality of violation of rights.

The Government and the RBI have been propagating the notion that digital lenders can complete the unfinished agenda of ‘financial inclusion’, and even replace traditional banking in the near future. This ignores the actual financial condition of the majority of people, which is grim and insecure, and their level of financial awareness, which is low. The RBI, in its eagerness to promote digital finance, has restricted itself to ‘light-touch’ regulation, or even left firms to regulate themselves, thereby allowing predatory and usurious practices. It appears that the last remnants of the developmental agenda for the use of credit have been buried. The promotion of artificial intelligence for ‘credit scoring’, and thus credit allocation, is a striking example of this.

The Government’s project of digitalising India’s agriculture is premised on a distorted understanding of both private corporations and the mass of India’s peasantry. On the one hand, it treats the vast mass of India’s peasantry as profit-maximising units, along the lines of private firms; but it does the opposite for private corporations, treating them as promoting public welfare.

The actual outcome of the digitalisation project in India’s agriculture will take place within the constraints prevailing in India’s agrarian sphere. Neither will the present problems of India’s agriculture be magically overcome by digitalisation, as the proponents of digitalisation claim, nor will the complete corporate takeover of agriculture, and the ejection of the vast peasantry, be easily achieved. What may change, to one extent or the other, is that corporations may use the latest information technology, and their greater access to data, to exercise greater control over the entire structure, and step up their extractions from it.

Examining India’s digital sector in relation to the world economy, we observe the following: (1) the creation of an international division of labour in the digital economy, whereby cheap labour power in India is used to raise the rate of profit of imperialist countries’ firms; (2) India’s continuing dependence on imports for hardware in the telecom and information technology sectors, and the large drain on this account; (3) the domination of India’s market for digital goods and services by firms of the imperialist countries; (4) the capture and control of data, as a raw material, by these firms; (5) the use of foreign investment to capture economic territory in India; (6) the use of political influence to shut out rivals, if necessary even by war.

The present peasant movement in the relatively developed regions is not a sudden development, but the product of a long-festering agrarian crisis, much before the recent Farm Acts. That crisis had its roots in the pattern of agriculture after the Green Revolution, and later under the post-1991 neoliberal re-structuring of India’s economy. The underlying questions have been simmering, and at places breaking out into organised struggles. It was against this background of intensifying crisis, desperation and struggle, that the Farm Acts – an attack from without – sparked an upsurge of protest among the wide spectrum of land-owning peasantry in Punjab.

The Farm Acts spearhead the winding up of public procurement of foodgrains, on which the Public Distribution System is based. If procurement is undermined or dismantled, the PDS will necessarily be wound down further, with grave consequences for all working people across the country. Thus the present demand to scrap the new anti-peasant laws is in fact an immediate demand of India’s working people, not only a demand of the peasants from the surplus grain producing areas, nor only of the peasantry as a whole.

Key provisions of the measures the Modi government announced in May 2020 as part of its ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (‘Self-Reliant India’) package were in fact were in fact spelled out in a World Bank document of August 1991, India: Country Economic Memorandum, vol. II.

The report of the Committee for Long Term Grain Policy, prepared under the Vajpayee government in 2002, gives us glimpses of the calculations and lobbying of private firms. While the Committee demolished the private firms’ argument for winding up procurement, the same arguments have been revived with the report of the Shanta Kumar Committee of 2014 and the Farm Acts of 2020.