Press Release: Reclaiming Ambedkar’s Economic Vision

Across India today, millions of workers, farmers, and small traders feel the quiet weight of an economy that no longer belongs to them. The promises of development have turned into headlines for the rich, while ordinary people are left negotiating higher prices, stagnant wages, and shrinking public support. The distance between India’s rich and poor has become more than economic — it is moral.

This widening gap is not accidental. It’s the result of a deliberate shift — a move away from the collective, people-centered economy that Dr. B.R. Ambedkar envisioned, toward a system ruled by corporate interests and private monopolies. The state, instead of acting as a guardian of social justice, has become an agent of privatization.

Ambedkar warned long ago that political democracy cannot survive without economic democracy. He believed that liberty must rest on equality of opportunity, not on the charity of the rich. Yet today’s India seems to have forgotten that lesson. Public assets are being auctioned in the name of “reform.” National institutions, built through public effort and sacrifice, are handed to a few who already control most of the nation’s wealth.

The Ambedkar Humanist Action Team (AHAT) believes India should abandon its present direction and re-embrace the egalitarian vision and strategy that Ambedkar proposed.

The drift toward hyper-capitalism is not modernization — it is moral regression. It replaces the idea of service with the logic of profit. It dismantles collective ownership and reduces citizenship to consumption. In this climate, Ambedkar’s economic vision isn’t just relevant; it is urgent.

Ambedkar’s framework of economic democracy was rooted in collective ownership and public accountability. He argued that political freedom without economic equality collapses into domination by wealth. What we witness now is exactly that: corporate interests shaping policy from the top, while the poor negotiate survival from the bottom. When sectors like energy, insurance, transport, and natural resources are reoriented around private profit, the public loses its say over essentials that decide life chances.

The country’s founding promise positioned the state as custodian of welfare, not broker for private gain. Selling national assets is not a technical fix; it is a moral choice. Every divestment weakens the social floor. Every subsidy to monopoly power tightens the ladder that people are trying to climb.

Efficiency is the slogan, but whose efficiency? If “efficiency” means shedding jobs, raising prices, and abandoning unprofitable regions, then the metric is rigged against the public. India’s railways weren’t built to please shareholders — they were built to connect lives. Public banks didn’t reach remote villages because it was lucrative — they did it because development requires presence.

Ambedkar anticipated these tensions. In his state-socialist proposals, he argued for public ownership of key industries, land, and insurance to block the emergence of private oligarchy. He saw that caste hierarchies morph inside markets unless the state builds countervailing power for workers, women, Dalits, Adivasis, and all marginalized groups. Economic democracy, in his hands, was not a slogan — it was a set of institutions designed to distribute power.

Reclaiming that vision today means drawing a clear boundary around strategic sectors — health, education, banking, energy, transport, and natural resources — and treating them as public goods. Private enterprise can flourish at the edges, but the core that determines life chances must remain democratically controlled. This is not hostility to business; it is loyalty to the Constitution’s promise of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Economic democracy also grows from below. Cooperatives, producer companies, self-help federations, and worker-owned firms anchor dignity in everyday life. When farmers own the value chain, when sanitation workers formalize into publicly backed enterprises with social security, when gig workers gain sectoral bargaining and floors on pay, we get the kind of freedom Ambedkar meant — not charity, but power.

The last decade shows the limits of trickle-down. Growth without redistribution is a headcount of winners and a silence around the rest. Inflation wipes out savings, precarious jobs erase planning, and privatized services push families into debt. None of this is “reform.” It is extraction.

A humane economy demands public investment in universal healthcare, neighborhood schools, affordable housing, and green transport. It demands mission-driven industrial policy that creates secure jobs and builds climate resilience. It demands taxing windfalls and closing loopholes that let wealth escape while workers carry the load.

This is the call: put people before monopolies, institutions before markets, and dignity before dividends. Bring PSUs back to mission, fund them properly, and govern them transparently. Create watchdog bodies with worker and citizen representation. Publish performance dashboards that track social outcomes, not just balance sheets.

Ambedkar’s dream was of a Republic where no person is reduced to pleading for their rights. That requires an economy designed for belonging, not exclusion. Reclaiming his economic vision means restoring public purpose to the center of policy and placing democratic control over the systems that decide who gets to live well.

This is not nostalgia. It is repair. It is the practical route to an India where democracy is more than voting, where the economy is more than markets, and where equality is more than a speech. Reclaim the public. Rebuild the social floor. Redistribute power. That is how we honor Ambedkar — not with words, but with institutions that put his promise to work.

by Kumar Gaurav and the Ambedkar Humanist Action Team