For more than sixty years, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank together with their partner regional development banks, various ODA's and export credit agencies, have used international finance capital to exercise control and restructure a country like India and the societies of the South to serve the interests of global private corporations and the economic and geopolitical agenda of the few powerful nations that control these institutions.

These 'terrible twins' typically play the Good Cop, Bad Cop comedy on poor nations and their people in a pincer like move, whereby the Bad Cop (IMF) first imposes conditionalities on its loans that chokes social sector and other welfare activities, and the Good Cop (World Bank) steps in through Social Safety Nets, poverty alleviation and other prescriptive loans to throttle nations in spirals of debt, with accompanying loss of sovereignty.

Attempts by global financial institutions to synchronize their policies on developing nations threaten to further entrench a one-sided approach to development, fuel instability and widen the gap between the world's rich and poor.

The resulting effects on people's lives, on communities, on the environment, and on the economic as well as political structures in the South have been profound and over the years have generated numerous resistance struggles against these institutions.

Download Transcript   (Acrobat Reader required)