PAY just three paise for every hundred rupees you owe. That’s the National Company Law Tribunal’s order on Subhash Chandra in a nutshell. On August 25, 2026, the NCLT approved a plan under which the founder of Essel Group and Zee, will have to pay just Rs 6.25 crore to settle admitted claims of Rs 22,006.57 crore. A ‘haircut’ of 99.97 per cent. His lenders are not private speculators but institutions holding ordinary Indians’ savings – LIC Housing Finance, Canara Bank, Union Bank – with LIC Housing Finance's Rs 1,322 crore claim reduced to Rs 38 lakh.

Chandra’s wealth, assessed at Rs 40,000-46,000 crore in 2017-18, had allegedly shrunk to Rs 31.79 crore by the time of insolvency, with no asset-by-asset account before the tribunal. The plan was passed on 80.81 per cent creditor votes, overriding the opposition of LIC Housing Finance, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, Canara Bank and Union Bank. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, sold in 2016 as the instrument to end promoters walking away from debts, is in fact the instrument of their escape. This is not an aberration but the operating principle of the Modi government’s economic policy, dressed up as Atmanirbhar Bharat. Self-reliance for the corporate class means reliance on the public exchequer, public banks and public natural resources. For working people, it means fend for yourself.

TAXES, MINES AND STATES

In 2019, the finance minister cut the base corporate tax rate from 30 to 22 per cent, and to 15 per cent for new manufacturing firms – an estimated revenue loss of Rs 1.45 lakh crore in year one alone. BSE 500 companies’ effective tax rate fell from over 30 per cent to 21.2 per cent by 2023-24, saving Rs 3.14 lakh crore in five years; including other exemptions like revenue foregone in the Union Budget, the figure rises to Rs 8.22 lakh crore over a decade – a transfer unmatched in modern Indian history. Despite all this largesse for the corporates, manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from around 17 per cent in 2010 to about 13 per cent in 2023. Why, because corporations pocketed the windfall, paid down debt, bought back shares and distributed dividends. However, the revenue hole was filled by GST on the poor.

In July 2024, a nine-judge Supreme Court bench held that states own the power to tax mineral rights. Within two years, the Union Government nullified this through Section 9D of the Mines and Minerals Act, barring states from taxing mineral rights except on the Union’s terms, while expanding ‘mineral-bearing land’ to swallow adivasi territories with no resettlement obligation. A retrospective clause wiped out Rs 1.5-2 lakh crore in arrears owed by firms like Tata Steel and Vedanta, as alleged by whistleblowers To put it simply, defaulters are being rewarded while compliant taxpayers get nothing. For Jharkhand and Odisha, where minerals fund 75-80 per cent of non-tax revenue, this cripples their economies. In fact, federalism is being crippled.

DEBT, DEATH AND EMPLOYMENT

Banks wrote off Rs 9.95 lakh crore in loans to big businesses over twelve years. According to an RTI response, Central Bank of India recovered 74 per cent of write-offs from small borrowers but just 15 per cent from large ones – and refuses to name a single large defaulter. For the small debtor there is no NCLT, only the recovery agent and the revenue official. In November 2024, Nagpur farmer Ravindra Alone hanged himself hours after a finance company seized his tractor. In June 2026, Gunaji Pawar of Nanded consumed poison over debts. NCRB recorded 10,546 farmer and labourer suicides in 2024 – one every hour. Subhash Chandra settles Rs 22,000 crore for a mere Rs 6.25 crore; a Vidarbha farmer dies for a few thousand rupees. IBC 2016 has to be replaced by a robust legislation to punish the big defaulter and protect marginal debtors.

The MGNREGA Act has been replaced by the VB-G RAM G Act. Households getting work fell from 1.42 crore in July 2025 to 68.9 lakh in July 2026 – halved in a year. That is by design, through an ‘agriculture pause period’ which the Union Government decides. Meanwhile corporate incentives are expanded; Rs 1.97 lakh crore as Production Linked Incentive, Rs 1.07 lakh crore as Employment Linked Incentive, Rs 84,084 crores as Samudra Manthan Incentive, Rs 1.27 lakh crores under the Semiconductor Mission and Rs 62,500 crores for Mobile Phones Manufacturing. Outlay for the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme has been increased to Rs 40,000 crores. Under the PM Internship Scheme, against a target of one crore, only 3,417 internships were completed by January 2026. The claim is that capital, production and wages are all subsidised – yet jobs never appear, because the transfer, not employment, was always the purpose.

THE ENEMY AND THE TIMING

Students and youth are seeing through these sinister designs. Rattled by the successful protests at Jantar Mantar, the Prime Minister declared from the Red Fort on August 15, 2026, that the new enemy is the ‘dimagi naxal’. They are to be ‘identified and isolated’. Soon the Organiser defined these as people who ‘carry no guns but use labels like eminent historians or intellectuals’, calling their identification a ‘national duty’.

The timing is no accident. A government that has handed Rs 3 lakh crore to top companies, written off Rs 10 lakh crore in corporate loans, wiped Rs 2 lakh crore in mining arrears and halved rural employment knows it sits on a volcano. What Modi calls Atmanirbhar Bharat is accumulation by dispossession – public savings, revenue and minerals converted into private fortune; losses socialised, misery individualised. The answer is the united struggle of workers, peasants, students, youth, women and the marginalised against this corporate-communal regime.