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The tax rebate for Senior citizens & women are 1446 & 2121 Crores only then why these should not be rationalized so that there is more money in the hands of the Aam aadmi & all inclusive growth is ensured.

The Worker's Nightmare

As a report brought out in the mid-nineties by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) puts it aptly "in these 'free' trade zones, it is the employers who run free - like a fox in a henhouse".

Many of the worst of these so-called 'free zones' allow employers the freedom to exploit without restraint but restrict basic workers' rights to "freedom of association." In the Indian context the EPZs of old were supposed to comply with local labor laws and there was no relaxation of these laws allowed as such. With the new SEZ Act, 2005 the zones have been declared a 'public utility service' a categorization that imposes restrictions on workers going on strike.

Challenge to National Sovereignty

As the ICFTU report puts it, "The zones are seductive to investors precisely because they are an enclave, in other words because they are physically, economically and socially separate from the rest of the country. This 'apartheid' explains why the advantages offered to foreign investors - freed from the burden of bureaucracy, taxation, lack of infrastructure and the application of the labor code - do not necessarily translate into corresponding benefits for the host country."

This is not very different from the kind of special, privileged enclaves that western powers established in the early colonial period to facilitate their 'trading activities' which, resulted in their gobbling up entire continents.

Land Grabbing

One of the intriguing aspects of the new SEZ Act is its insistence that the new zones have at least 1000 acres or more of land at its disposal. This is very surprising, because the experience of the much smaller EPZs in India so far shows that most of them are still under utilized.

One of the obvious reasons for allocating such large portions of land to the new SEZs is that they are in fact meant for setting up real estate projects which today have much larger returns on investment than manufacturing.

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* Contributed by: -
Rarul Abrol & Saurabh Nanda,
MBA - IInd Year,
Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad.