Save the poor

If any things that the left has done to Indian poor during the last five years the following are. 

• “The Left prevented at least four initiatives which, we think, were very important in protecting our country from complete devastation. One, we blocked the capital convertibility of the rupee that they wanted. Second, permission to foreign banks to raise their equity in Indian private banks and to have directors in proportion to that equity. If that had happened, with the foreign banks collapsing, many of our Indians banks would have gone down the same road. Third, preventing privatisation of pension funds. And lastly, ensuring that FDI caps in insurance were not raised. These steps provided strength to the economy.
  
• Once you allow FDI (in retail), millions of people will lose their jobs. And we said that no FDI can come to India that will reduce jobs”.

State is a “weak substitute” to Market…..

Almost, Mr TCA become a bogus analyst with horrified mind said a friend of mine. 

Well, if any one I wanted to call notorious in the analysis of Indian economy it will be “Cornell economist Kaushik Basu”. 

Mr Basu said in his Sage - Madras School of Economics Endowment Lecture (2007) “one undeniable factor is that India’s savings and investment rates had risen sharply from the late sixties to the late seventies. What caused this? Clearly, the nationalization of banks in 1969, with the state-owned banks being forced thereafter to open branches in remote areas of India, and the start of Unit Trust of India in 1964 were key factors in boosting the savings rate, which in turn was the first impetus for rapid growth”. 

Nonetheless, the question is important Mr. Basu “once asked why everyone held an opinion on economics but not on aircraft design. He was arguing that economics was a specialisation requiring technical skills that were no less rigorous than those required of an aircraft designer”. 

Some time back Mr TCA seems to be good analyst of economics and politics but now I realised that he also misdirected his readers. He simply scraped the India’s reforms of past 15 or more years. “….This was a big intellectual leap, made largely in the 1980s, which became mainstream faith in the1990s and in this decade. Its consequences confront the world now in the form of the financial disaster it has caused”. 

No doubt, I agree with at least this point that “It was that if you got the market design right, the danger of market failure was almost nil. This assumption led to the influx of engineers, scientists and physicists into a domain that superficially looked like their own but contained, alas, humans also, with all their foibles”. 

No matter how many business analysts, journalist, and other “…..harking back to Keynes now but nowhere did he say that the taxpayers should pay the price of private folly and greed via bailouts What he said was governments should buy goods and services when private demand fell short of what installed capacity could provide. He was treating a different problem, namely, the survival of the poor, not of the rich”. 

Our academicians including the economics departments of Indian universities are in deep sleep. They cannot back to Keynes nor look forward to Hayek or anyone else. 

It is no less folly to blame only “private folly and greed via bailouts”. Election after election, schemes after schemes, law after law, Acts after Acts, rules after rules, etc goes with publically announced “bailouts” in the name of “poor”  without mining whether it reaches or not. 

What remains a big mess is the Constitution of India which becomes focal point for everyone to speak but not to adhere, morally, mentally and physically and be responsible when get elected by people of this country.

Oprah talks to herself, did Mr M K Gandhi also talk now?

In The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord re-opens the idea of Mr M K Gandhi. 

• “There's something to be learned from Mr. Gandhi, something capitalists everywhere in America should seriously ponder. They are being targeted today just as surely as were the citizens of India all those years ago. Gandhi taught his fellow citizens to think outside the box, to simply refuse to cooperate with their persecutors. 
  
• From urban street corners to suburban malls to lonely outposts in the rural plains, eventually it dawns on a startled populace. There are no trucks out there hauling American products or, for that matter, products from anywhere. The truckers too have kissed off the Obama bureaucrats who want to raise their gas tax and tax them by the mile. And so, they simply stayed home or, caught on the highway, pulled to join the lengthening train of motionless trucks forming a peculiar guardrail for passing cars. 
  
• Accessing a mostly frozen Internet is done by the pulse of dying, un-rechargeable batteries. There is no Fox, which makes liberals chortle, until they realize there is none of anything else on the nation's suddenly blank screens”. 
  

It is worth to read but at least it is not fully clear to my mind that what could be the way or method to bring those hard or core change to masses when classes determine the fate of those masses. 

It freedom sense, it is crime, to do so, but our rulers did every year after the independence. 

We are still patient waiting for a good doctor to cure the ills created by our own home grown political pundits (including some foreign origin). 

If at all I agree with Mr Nandan Nilekani‘s argument of “the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster”, it is this sense that the young age population which goes with criminal politicians during election rally, unwanted strikes, party mobs, etc without mindfulness of their business which obviously become “a demographic 'disaster” for the country which is often said ‘young’. 

Thanks to politicians for making folly of this young population otherwise mind their business in life even if they don’t bother to listen, their parents or elders advice, or teachers etc.

Final chance for (to) whom…..?

Now, Mr Nandan Nilekani is a gust blogger and he says how wrongly-it seems to be cut short vision. 

The Indian economy is going to play a major role- no matter how the ups and down. No doubt few will play like a king maker-and the blood shade will make easer for pink newspaper editor for their head line news. It does not surprise to me at least who is going to be terrible, good or bad policy maker for at least next five years. Many elections came and gone. History has shown how many representatives have had voted Bills which are not in interest of people who have elected them. 

What is called prime resource now was called walking dead bodied at least a few years ago. I mean the population in general and the young age population in particular. No doubt the truth will triumph with its own time. Those who have questioned wrongly about the unproductive population now premise to save or attempt to make them productive. I mean the “demographic dividend”. 

Mr Nilekani says in front of the coming general election “Without quick action the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster'. The next five years is our final chance”.

I do aware that nowhere Mr Nilekani said population is a problem including in his Imagining India book, which I read this January. 

Four years ago my M.Phil theses professor said during one of our class discussion. I said many studies have shown that the Public Distribution System is dysfunctional in India. And only 10 or some percent of ration reaches the poor people or targeted ones. The rest is smuggled in between politicians and government official hands. He said the 10or some percent is great achievement of PDS system we should welcome it! 

So this is how the UPA has given Job guarantee scheme which is unproductive, in the last five years, many have already questioned the UPA government achievements. Mr Nilekani put it differently “….they have in essence, done everything short of what is truly necessary” and ….”We have stumbled badly in the last several years when it has come to creating organized sector jobs and expanding access to education and skills training to the people who need it”. 

It is also true that when we all looking election after election what our government can do for us from unimagined taxes that it collects from us but we all failed to realize what it can not do, really. Indeed. The world has shown us the several other alternatives to development good society. Are our elected representatives ready to learn? The answer is no as the history has shown. 

In sum, there is no such thing as a “final chance”. Instead we must believe that every criminal who got elected in our democratic system should get no more chance to fool us. In other words, we must make fool of them not as business but in every walk of life. When I say this I stuck with the kind of police and court system we have now, will that save our life or the criminal life? 

Voting system will never tell that but everybody hope for that day and say look our democracy is living here.

The Povertydog

Jug Suraiya writes in the TOI “Poverty, like AIDS, is not shameful. What is shameful is that more than 60 years after independence poverty continues to exist in our midst, in the midst of India Shining, and India Winning, and India Rising, like a curable, or least preventable, but chronically neglected disease. The reaction against Slumdog Millionaire and other works of its kind that have shown us the face of our disowned poverty is rooted in a misplaced sense of shame. What we are or ought to be ashamed of is not our poverty but of our attempts to wish it away, to sweep it under the carpet, to decry all depictions of it as commercial exploitation and social and cultural voyeurism”. 

Thanks to dismal science of economics

When every body talks about big spending including in India of course these people don’t understand all other alternatives to revive the economy, and some suggest that the only way left us is to continuously remind them. So that in the course, they will start thinking what has been told and untold to them. Here liberal economist Christopher Lingle writes in The Japan Times “Once again the laws of men are being implemented to supersede economic laws that require much price and wage adjustment during a recession so that markets can clear. This clearing serves the best interests of the overall community by enabling unemployed labor and misused capital assets to be put to productive and profitable use. Only then can there be a sustainable economic recovery”.

 

What is look more strangely is the children and student who try to learn economics with open mind, but taught all dismal side economics without showing the alternative method to think.

 

West loves Indic culture

Yes, its not new but west loves Indian culture.