Economics Curriculum

On its golden jubilee, I would like to heartily congratulate the EPW and its team for providing society with a balanced view of the world, both academic and practical. A majority of newspapers, research journals and magazines present a highly biased view favouring capitalists and free-market economies and all the institutions and processes that help in the growth of this ideology. All these years the EPW has been a voice of the vital socio-economic and political issues and of the marginalised and oppressed.

Against this backdrop, I would like to mention that there is an urgent need to correct a universal distortion that exists in the economics curriculum across all programmes, traditional and professional. Economics courses are heavily biased in favour of the capitalist view of society. There seems to be a well-designed strategy to undermine the role of the government and cooperatives and to call for greater liberalisation and privatisation of the economy. A privileged few benefit out of this system to the utter neglect of the majority who are made to succumb to the dominance of the elites managing this system. Other social ills like terrorism, declining moral standards and environmental degradation too are largely a hazardous by-product of a market-driven system.