Capitalism and the Production of Poverty

It is a privilege for me to deliver the first lecture on social deprivation in memory of Shri T.G.  Narayanan, who was such an eminent representative of socially responsible journalism before  Independence, well known for investigating and reporting on the Bengal famine; and who went on to  attain a highly responsible position at the United Nations in the years after Indepen- dence. The subject of social deprivation in India is usually treated in the context of our own society and its evolution; what this lecture attempts to do is to define the question broadly as mass deprivation and to situate it in the context of the dynamics of the global capitalist system of which India became a part long ago, and into which it is being increasingly re-integrated in the current era of  ‘globalization’.