Corporate foundations deploy a small fraction of accumulated wealth to fund universities, NGOs, and the arts, which lets them shape intellectual agendas and buy social legitimacy while deflecting scrutiny from how the wealth was extracted. The gift functions less as redistribution than as a mechanism to defang dissent and set the terms of acceptable debate.
Foreign-funded NGOs convert what might be organized political resistance into salaried, professionalized, grant-dependent activity, turning citizens into beneficiaries and movements into deliverable projects. This depoliticizes grievance by making its expression conditional on donor priorities and reporting cycles rather than on confrontation with power.
Mukesh Ambani's 27-story Mumbai residence, Antilla, reportedly cost around a billion dollars and employs some 600 staff, standing in a city where a large share of the population lives in slums. Roy uses this single building as a literal and physical index of concentrated wealth beside mass deprivation.
National GDP and growth statistics can rise while specific populations, displaced farmers, tribal communities, slum dwellers, are erased from the count entirely, so the aggregate measures prosperity by omitting its own casualties. Looking at who disappears from the numbers reveals that the headline figure and the human ledger are describing different things.
Capitalism's gains rest on costs that are deliberately kept off the books: the dispossessed, the suicided farmers, the poisoned rivers, which haunt the system as a 'ghost' that official accounting refuses to register. The metaphor names an accounting practice in which the extracted and displaced become invisible precisely so the story of success can be told.