VOX POPULI

by

 Aam Admi

Issue: 157                            Date:  27.06.2016

Contents:

1.       NSG-GST

2.       Dals Rising!

3.       Urbanisation As Poverty Alleviator?

                                                       NSG-GST

The bogeys in Narendra Modi’s head are GST and NSG, both three letter abbreviations, which are haunting him. In the NSG initiative, he has yet come a cropper even after almost going down on his knees to President Xi of China to seek their approval.  Why NSG, some may ask? And why are USA & France supporting India even though we have not signed the NPT – Nuclear Proliferation Treaty? What happens to Pakistan if India gets into the NSG? The answer to these questions are firstly, India does not need the NSG since basically nuclear energy and its use for power generation are a big No-No considering India’s high population density and location of plants near high population centres. One accident will wipe large numbers of Indians which obviously is unacceptable. The accidents at nuclear power generation facilities in Japan and the US have proved this risk is real while accidents in Russia, UK and France have shown that accidents are well within the realm of reality. With no nuclear power generation there is no need for NSG. Second, USA and France want to encourage India getting into the NSG because of their business interests connected with the supply of nuclear power generation equipment that runs into billions of dollars or euros. Thirdly, both India and Pakistan have not signed the NPT which is mandatory for NSG membership. India may get through based on its track record of proven non-proliferation and peaceful uses of nuclear energy but Pakistan does not have the same impeccable credentials. In contrast, Pakistan are known proliferators of nuclear weapons and technology to the Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea. And with India in international affairs being always counterbalanced with Pakistan in strategic matters, admitting India into NSG means also offering membership to Pakistan, which fact is not palatable to countries like Switzerland who along with others want to go by the rule book – sign the NPT and then come into the NSG. These were the known constraints to even Modi but he preferred to go into overdrive and like in the chai initiative with Nawaz Sharif, fell flat on his face.

The GST is the other bogey that Modi currently carries on his back. It is a necessary evil but then the BJP does not have the numbers in the Rajya Sabha to carry the legislation through. This inspite of whatever little gains were made by the BJP in the recent Assembly elections and then somewhat reflected in the following Rajya Sabha elections. Thus here though there is a consensus among the States there is a numbers barrier to surmount. And then there is the canny Jayalalithaa who has been the bane of BJP bachelors, self enforced or otherwise,  like Vajpayeee and now Modi, who seems to want to strike a hard bargain saying that Tamil Nadu is a manufacturing State and should not have to lose out if GST comes into force. Anyway thus the GST path has still a few thorns to cross. The fight for the numbers in GST explains the obsessive emphasis on elections with this BJP leadership like now the focus is on UP and Punjab. Though Amit Shah is in charge of this exercise as BJP President Modi finds it hard to resist to take a plunge in it off and on.

Concluding one must say that the NSG and GST have been taking away valuable time from Modi who should have been concentrating on the nitty gritties of governance. Like getting into NSG will not bring down prices of essential commodities like vegetables and pulses or controlling inflation which is the first priority of the people now. Many people have started to ask – Where are the achhe din? – because the aching days is what we are in.

                                                           Dals Rising!

By the time the tomato was taking its seasonal ascendancy of price the dals or pulses were perking up with urad dal leading the pack, tur dal in its hot pursuit and the lesser dals stringing along the back like on a F-1 race track. The magic figure of Rs. 200/- per Kg. was what urad dal had breached almost a year ago which it was close to repeating now while the others were trying to scale up as much as they could. This was no good news for the government which again went into a huddle and announced that they would go after the hoarders and take measures to import pulses from overseas. Does this help the common man? Not in the least since while the government continues to do its acrobatics, he has to continue to eat the dal at Rs. 200 per Kg.

Let us for a moment trace what action the government took when urad dal breached the barrier of Rs. 200 per Kg. close to a year ago. We had the same flurry of meetings by the government with the promise to crack down on hoarders and arrange imports to balance and improve the availability in the market. At that point in time news was leaked that large amount of pulses to the extent of a lakh tonnes was seized from hoarders and that additionally imported pulses had arrived at the docks which would normalize the prices further. These measures one must say worked to some extent and the prices of dal dropped to Rs. 140.  Additionally to encourage production of pulses in the country the government raised the support prices of a host of pulses. This was with the objective that in the long term, have farmers stop from taking up other crops and increase acreage for the cultivation of pulses. This happened only about 6 months back. But then the prices of urad dal ignoring these measures started once again on its climb up the price ladder. Thus a couple of months back the government decided to enforce a ceiling of Rs. 120 per Kg for urad and tur dal. This holy resolve remained on paper only except for some limited sales at that price from centrally regulated stores in Delhi. And then once again in the last three months the price rise started again to its present culmination back at the magic figure of Rs. 200 per Kg.

Let us analyse this case now and see the fine difference between intent and implementation. Firstly, you cannot fault the government since they were aware and well-informed of the problem. They took action against hoarders to increase immediate availability. But unfortunately the government, more State than Centre, was hand-in-glove with the hoarders and probably told the hoarders to forsake some of their stocks to the seizure and probably told them that after the present heat dies down, that they could take advantage of the market once again. Secondly, the efforts at imports were well meant but immediate shipment is always difficult in such commodities since forward contracts come into play and stocks are almost always committed. To add to this the countries producing pulses like in Africa and in Turkey had relatively less production making the market more difficult. Another thing that happens in international markets is that when large buyers like India come in then there is cartelization and prices are jacked up. Thus without a strategic and deliberate long term plan commodity buying is an extremely difficult exercise. India had seen this couple of years ago when it moved in to buy wheat internationally and prices had been raised to such a level by sellers that it was completely unviable to import. On the pulses front, the third effort was that the government was thinking of growing pulses by contract farming in places in Africa like Mozambique. This is a good initiative but action has to follow to make this happen.

We have seen these random escalations in prices for vegetables, pulses as well as sugar which points to an intrinsic deep-rooted problem. None of us would mind paying the high prevailing prices if we were sure that a large part of the increase goes into the farmer’s pockets but the unfortunate part is that these machinations of price variations are orchestrated to fill the pockets of the distribution chain, both wholesalers and retailers, who are getting fatter day by day which is disturbing. The BJP has for long been known as a traders party and sympathetic to the trade which reputation it should forsake by taking action to bring a reasonable regulation of prices. Concluding, the government is best advised to review why prices of pulses went up again within a year despite its best intentions to limit it, plug those loopholes and then embark upon a long term structural plan to build availability for food irrespective of the vagaries of the monsoon. This is important since the executive in its wisdom has passed the Food Security Act which should not collapse because the government has no food to distribute to those it had promised.

                                                Urbanisation As Poverty Alleviator?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi while inaugurating the Smart City program at Pune on 26^th June 2016 spoke on urbanization being the process through which poverty alleviation can be achieved. One does not know whether this argument was made as part of the common rhetoric that Modi is known for to justify the Smart City program or whether the man really means it. If it is the former then there is not much of a problem but if it is the latter then we are seriously in trouble.

India is a country where more than 60% of its people live in rural areas. We are also a predominantly agriculture based economy with a majority of our people involved in agriculture. Anyone with a little knowledge of economics and sociology will tell you that it is best that people are allowed to remain where they are and provide them gainful employment at their place of existence. The present position in the Indian context is that people migrate to urban centres from rural areas primarily because of agricultural activity being dominated by the monsoon and in bad monsoon or drought years there is no choice with the rural folk but to move to cities to keep body and soul together. The fact that even after seven decades of independent India we do not have an organized irrigation system across the country to deliver desired levels of agricultural output and that we have to continue to depend on the rains every year to get a good harvest is a shame. But that is not the subject of present debate, though some may say that if we had an efficient irrigation system then migration to city centres would have been reduced. There is nothing wrong with migration but it should be voluntary, personal-need based and not be driven by want and despair as it is happening now. The people are moving into cities looking for jobs. And these people are not skilled and are the kind who work under the MNREGA program like digging canals, clearing land etc. which are the most menial jobs. There are also women who come across to the cities as part of their families who seek work like being domestic helps. Thus effectively by encouraging urbanization we are transferring poverty from the rural areas to the urban areas.

There are no jobs even in the cities and there is this incoming class of people who are competing for the lowest level of jobs which creates tension within the communities. They are also exploited by the employers leading to a situation of bonded labour through the process of deprivation and want. The migrating people arriving at the cities take over common public areas for living and/or add to the existing slums.  Thus city dwellers are deprived of common spaces. Moreover the lack of jobs and the fact that these people are almost at the point of starvation leads to increased crime. Thus overall it is best that the rural people remain where they are that is in the villages.

It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that they get proper facilities there in terms of generating earning power and living happily rather than add to the urban mess. We have examples in India itself of agriculture communities doing well like the farmers in Punjab. This should be replicated across the country so that the people in its villages and small towns see no need to look up to the big cities. Essentially agriculture growth is to be fostered which will serve the twin objectives of providing food and also keep the rural people in their own villages. Let us provide them the latest facilities like Internet etc. so that we have lesser of a divide between the agrarian and the urban communities. In fact with saturating markets in urban centres the consumer and durable goods industry are looking towards the rural markets for extra growth. Let us not therefore pursue this Western model of urbanization with its known pitfalls of creating ghettos, slums that put increasing stress on basic services delivery and generation of inner city crime. We have seen this happen in our own cities like Mumbai with Dharavi as the largest slum in the world. The same problems have been seen across the world where disparity in incomes has driven migration to cities like Dacca – Bangladesh, Rio de Janeiro – Brazil, Mexico City – Mexico among many examples. Let us not follow them and get into the same problems.

As for the Smart City program it is not that it is without merit but unfortunately it is all the same programs of delivery of basic services like power, water, health, transport, solid waste handling etc. which our cities are struggling with apart from the focus on some new things like Internet access etc. Thus it is nothing but old wine put in a new bottle. Again calling a city smart does not add value to it or elevates its reputation. A city should become smart by showing its performance and earn that label. That is what would make the tag smart, durable and more sustaining.  Considering basic services is what every city has been working on, they should have been asked to achieve certain benchmarks of delivery comparable to international standards on these aspects and show that they can achieve these standards over a period of time and hold onto them. Then with added parameters on the new-fangled or modern services they should have been asked to earn the label of being a Smart City in a competitive manner. This would have been a better way of achieving an improved standard of living for people in cities which is starting from the grassroots rather than top down. Thus urbanization or its evolved status in the Smart City program does not increase income of the people living in the cities except for the consultants, contractors and decision makers involved in the projects. The average city dweller is the user and is looking at the Smart City program to make his life easier and more comfortable. But for that over time he will be forced to pay through his nose for services like power, water, garbage disposal and every other service that he needs in the city. Maybe at one point of time he would consider moving back to the villages, in a sense that reverse migration would happen because he finds no meaning in paying extra for services in the name of Smart City while the quality of delivery has not changed for the better.

On the Smart City program if you see the list of first 20 cities in the 1^st phase, you have cities like Chennai and Delhi cheek by jowl with Warangal and Davangere. There is a problem of scale here. The difficulties for a big metro are very much different from a smaller city simply because the population scale is different.  If we were interested in improving our cities we should have made a list of cities of similar levels of population and standardized to the extent possible the delivery of basic services and set benchmarks for each service. This method would have helped standardize and cross-share the implementation among different cities and get them to develop together and to the same uniform standards. What we are doing with the Smart City program as it is now is perpetuating the problems that we have existing. If you look around India, wherever urban centres exist in States there is a skewed distribution of population in these places with one massive metro city and followed by another urban centre with not even 20% of the population of the big city. And then the next city or town drops a further one-fifth or one-sixth in scale. Take Maharasthra for example where after Mumbai you have maybe Pune or Nagpur which in terms of population are lagging far behind. Same is with other States like West Bengal where after Kolkata you have Asansol which has just 1/6^th of Kolkata’s population. Thus the Smart City program for whatever it is worth should be applied to these Tier – II and III cities and allow them to grow so that in each state we have at least 5 to 6 cities or towns that can aspire to be metros. The problems of the Metro cities will continue to exist but they can be handled at a different level under the urban rejuvenation programs.

Concluding one would thus have a happy and prosperous India who are self-sufficient in its villages, towns and cities and no citizen except for his/her own personal reasons should be compelled to move across these locations for either want or under duress. The plans of Narendra Modi are packaging existing necessities into programs giving a catchy and contemporary label to them and hoping that they will get accepted by the people and in that process bring credit to him and his party, the BJP. This is all déjà vu, where the BJP seems to have not forgotten their days of India Shining which made them lose their seats of power. There is a growing disconnect again between the BJP and the common man which will be detrimental to the party. It is unfortunate that the BJP is succumbing to the drum-major tactics of Narendra Modi and falling in line behind him little knowing that like Pied Piper he is going to take the entire nation to the edge and maybe even over the precipice.

                                                    ***************************

VOX POPULI

by

 Aam Admi

Issue: 155                          Date:  13.06.2016

Contents:

1.       Hilary Clinton On Her Way To The US Presidency

2.       Where Is The Truth?

3.       Should Our Stock Exchanges Not Reflect India’s Economic Performance?

                      Hilary Clinton On Her Way To The US Presidency

With Hilary Clinton becoming the presumptive Democratic Party candidate for the 2016 US Presidential elections after winning the requisite number of delegate votes in the primaries, women’s liberation votaries among the female gender should be at an all-time high. After getting the endorsement of the incumbent President Barrack Obama, Hilary’s campaign has got a further boost in the opinion polls and now it seems that there is a definite chance of a woman making it to the White House and sitting in the Oval Office. From the bra-burning days of Germaine Greer, who has mellowed since, and others who fought for the equality of women in all spheres of life around the world to the likelihood of Hilary Clinton holding the most powerful office of the world has been a long journey for women in general. They had to fight all the way in different spheres of social and business activity to rise to the top. There have been other women heading their governments like we have had in South Asia itself, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka to Indira Gandhi in India to Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan to Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. In Europe we have seen Margaret Thatcher in the UK to Angela Merkel in Germany, the latter being in her second term, and there being many other examples in the rest of the world but holding the Oval Office with the world’s most powerful democracy at your command is a completely different story. With America surely not going to elect a ‘glump’ like Trump to the Presidency, Hilary Clinton by all present indications should become the President of the United States of America. For all the grit and determination that Hilary Clinton characterizes she is known to have a furious temper and a stubborn attitude which she did manage to keep under check during her stint as Secretary of State in President Barrack Obama’s first term barring minor indiscretions like using private servers for email on State issues. That is why many are talking that the label of ‘Iron Lady’ made famous by Margaret Thatcher would suit Hilary well. All said and done after the first black President, USA deserved another first in the form of the first woman President which is well its way to be happening with Hilary Clinton having made a head start.

                 Where Is The Truth?

Lately we have seen in our Indian polity that the habit of taking intractable adversarial positions has come to the fore time and again. The concept of the national good is given the go-by at this time by the opposing parties and they concentrate on raising the pitch of clamour and discord to seemingly absurd and meaningless levels. If the issue is bipolar, that is in between two parties, then this is what happens but in case three parties or more are involved then the issue completely spins out of hand and takes bizarre turns begging the limits of one’s imagination. In all these situations the emphasis on maintaining law and order or trying to solve the problem is the last resort of the involved persons/parties. What they desire to achieve by this is not understood since apparently no purpose is served. Examples of this abound like the JNU video case involving Kanhaiyya where he was booked for sedition. Sometime back with conviction it was said that the video was a ‘fake’ and maybe it formed the basis for Kanhaiyya and his co-students getting ‘conditional’ bail. Now it is being said that the video is genuine. With these changing positions where does the truth lie? This case is a straightforward since it is bipolar that is between Kanhaiyya and the authorities or the BJP. Consider the Dadri lynching of the Muslim gentleman on the suspicion of them possessing beef which was at one point of time said that the offending meat found in the victim’s house was not beef. But now it is stated that it is beef after having gone through forensic tests while the earlier comment was made based on visual examination. The spin being given by the Samajwadi Party (SP) which is in power in UP to this incident is that the meat now stated to be beef was not the one found in the victim’s house. Thus again the question arises as to where is the truth? And for this doubletalk the town of Dadri has developed communal tension.  Here again notice that if it were a bipolar issue between those involved and the authorities the matter would have seen action but with the SP stepping in to defend the victim and project their secular image the matter is turned on its head. There are many examples like this where matters are twisted which makes it extremely difficult for a rational person to unravel them with the intention of getting at the truth.

                Should Our Stock Exchanges Not Reflect India’s Economic Performance?

There was a time earlier to the 1960’s that investing in the stock market was considered akin to gambling and was socially equated to betting at the horse races. The phrase used for such activity was - ‘playing the stock market or playing with shares’ - suggesting that it was nothing but gambling. It was somewhat looked down upon until Reliance led by Dhirubai Ambani made owning shares somewhat respectable and broadened the base of shareholding in companies. Later it was the infamous Harshad Mehta in the early & mid – 1980’s who showed that by investing in shares one could really make money on a regular basis, though you could lose as much. By this time putting your money in shares had gained acceptance and the common phrase now used was  ‘investing’ in the stock market, rather than playing though this phrase remained for those who were more adventurous or specialists like day traders. With more and more Cos. going public one could say that the 80’s were the boom times for stocks in India.  The Rupee was not convertible then and the Indian stock market remained relatively insulated from the ups and downs of the foreign stock markets be it in the West or the Far East. Thus one would say that India emerged relatively unscathed from the crash of the stock markets in 1997 which started from Thailand moved to the Far East and then hit the markets of the West. Compared to the tsunami-like hit that the economies of Thailand, Japan and South Korea took, India was buffeted by a mild impact as one would experience gently moved by the waves if you go out a bit into the sea from the relatively safe position on a beach. Then the Rupee was made partially convertible about a decade ago. By this time the stock market had became the alternate income earner for a large number of investors, if not the only income generator for some. The Indian economy was also going through its cycles of normalcy with the Hindu rate of growth, since revised to 6% from the earlier 4%, and the sluggish trends when the monsoons failed. The stock market kept pace with these movements and was again relatively unfazed when the financial markets crashed around the world in 2007 though not to the extent of 1997. There was more of an impact of this ‘dot com’ bubble burst on India than in 1997. But lately if you see the BSE index, it moves more with the amount of money coming into or being withdrawn from Indian stocks from overseas like FII’s and on what the Dow Jones is doing or the FTSE is not doing or whether the Federal Reserve in the US is planning a rate cut or not. Thus in the last week the BSE went past the 27,000 mark when the news about the Indian economy was that the IIP which is the Indian manufacturing index was in the negative and that Raghuram Rajan, the RBI Governor was unlikely to propose a rate cut. Thus one is compelled to ask does the Indian stock market reflect the Indian economy, its manufacturing and services industries or whether it is like the tail of the kite of the foreign stock exchanges more New York than anyone else which it follows but with lesser pendulousness. Maybe those of you who will read this will say that I do not understand the stock market to whom I must say frankly I do not, but my question remains that should we not have a stock market that follows our economic trends rather like in colonial times play tag to Big Brother.

**********************

VOX POPULI

by

 Aam Admi

Issue: 154                                Date:  06.06.2016

Contents:

1.     M J Akbar On The Power of Regret

2. Banning Diesel Vehicles Capacity 2000cc & Above

3.  Donald Trump On His Way To The Republican Presidential Nomination

4.  GDP In Excess of 7%!

                     M J Akbar On The Power of Regret

M J Akbar has written in his column - The Power of Regret –about the greatness of Barrack Obama, the US President, more and to a lesser extent Justine Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister in having the courage and conviction to express regret either verbally or by their initiatives for some of the actions that their countries inflicted against other nations in the past. Obama culminated his visits to Cuba and Vietnam by visiting the Hiroshima war memorial in Japan while Trudeau expressed the regret over the refusal of immigration to Sikhs on the ship Komagata Maru sometime in the early 1900's. The column is well-intended but then the question is why do we always make heroes of people from other countries when we can have our own home-grown heroes. In this context why do we not have PM Narendra Modi expressing his regret over the 2002 Gujarat riots where even the Supreme Court had made a reference that Modi akin to Nero fiddled while the cities of Gujarat burned. Or do we have to wait for the cooling period of 50 years or more to expire as in the above two instances of the  US President and the Canadian Prime Minister. M J Akbar is a reputed and highly regarded journalist, there is clearly no doubt about that but after having joined the BJP, he is seemingly toeing the official line in his utterances and in his columns. This is a tendency on his part to be more aligned to be the mouthpiece of the party and apparently in that process surrender his rational analytical skills.

                        Banning Diesel Vehicles Capacity 2000cc & Above

Many politicians have commented on the excessive judicial activism by the courts citing among many issues the example of the ban on diesel cars with an engine capacity 2000cc and higher claiming that new diesel engines have a lesser pollution signature than even petrol cars. The problem is that these politicians fail to see beyond the horizon. It is a well-known fact that diesel engines emit more particulate matter which is harmful for people no matter how advanced the engine is. Europe has banned diesel cars a long time ago on this count. In fact in these matters we should learn from countries like Norway who have decided recently to eliminate all cars using fossil fuels including petrol by 2025. In India if you ban the big diesel cars now then you have the opening to ban petrol cars with a bigger pollution footprint than the new diesel cars. With the problem on our roads being too many cars particularly in metropolitan cities which number is fast increasing by the day, the priority is to reduce the number of cars on the roads and also have smaller cars so that we have less traffic congestion. This will hopefully reduce the number of accidents and incidents of road rage that we see on our roads. This approach will also encourage people to use public transport more, like the bus, trams, underground rail networks etc. as relevant to the different cities. In this context the odd-even experiment introduced twice in Delhi lately needs to be commended since the issue is not how much pollution the scheme is reducing but the fact that a certain awareness about pollution is brought home to people, discipline is  enforced on the travelling public and as said earlier, it encourages people to use public transport. What is happening to traffic in the metros that we are seeing now will happen as we go into the future around us in varying degrees and extent where we live in urban surroundings in India. Thus the idea in banning the diesel vehicles is to curb vehicular pollution on a long term basis. Some of the ministers in the BJP government at the Centre have also claimed that banning diesel vehicles will mean production by some of the car manufacturers will stop thus affecting the growth of the auto industry. The minister seems to be a mouthpiece of some of the big foreign car manufacturers who have expressed this opinion like Mercedes Benz who have said that they will have to wind up their operations in India in the event of the ban in diesel cars coming through.  The issue here is that these foreign car manufacturers need to remember that the days when they could dump their outdated and polluting vehicles in India are over. What they cannot sell in Europe or the US or Japan cannot be sold in India. Moreover these big foreign car manufacturers suffer in a major way about their credibility what with Volkswagen which was caught fudging its emission parameters to comply with the US standards. In a similar way many of the other manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, Ford and others for one or the other reason has been calling back cars that they have sold in hundreds of thousand, if not a million numbers on counts of safety, pollution and/or engineering issues. Thus we should act in a manner that is good for India by rational judgment rather than be driven by the agenda of foreign car manufacturers. These are some of the disruptive or ground-breaking decisions that we need to take and say that by 2025 we will have only hybrid or electric vehicles on our roads. This will drastically reduce the number of vehicles on our roads  but at the same time we should boost up public transport so that people can reach their destinations quickly and comfortably.

     Donald Trump On His Way To The Republican Presidential Nomination

It seems that Donald Trump getting the nomination of the GOP for the US Presidential election of 2016 is a foregone certainty. With his reaching the magical delegate figure the Republican Party will find it difficult to refuse him the nomination or pursue the plan they were privately mulling sometime back to put up an official party nominee at the GOP Convention and refuse Donald Trump the nomination.  With Donald Trump closing in on Hilary Clinton in the opinion polls, which some agencies have stated is too close to call now, refusal of the nomination by the Republican Party becomes all the more difficult since they would be perceived as going against the pulse of the people and after all, the Republican party like it or not can claim the Presidency is theirs if Donald Trump happens to win. Thus you may say that the GOP is caught between the devil and the deep sea. But the situation that the world finds itself in  looking into the US is that they have gone back in time by about a decade and a half when George Bush was campaigning for his first term as President. George Bush had at that time the same kind of campaign howlers in terms of his complete lack of awareness of foreign policy, history as well as geography of the world. But then one has to admit that Donald Trump is more outrageous than even George Bush. If George Bush then beat the Democratic nominee, Al Gore by a very thin margin mostly because of the ‘stub’ count in Florida where his brother Jeb Bush was Governor, we may have Donald Trump still making it to the Presidency. If that happens it will be a disaster since then the US & the world will have to seriously introspect that in the 15 odd years since George Bush was made President of the United States of America whether the US has gone forward, remained at the same level or gone back as a country. But all said and done, the US Presidential elections always brings out the true America the way it is, absolutely open with no cover-ups and also without any apologies.

                                GDP In Excess of 7%!

The figures published by the government state that in the last quarter – Jan – March 2016, the Indian GDP grew by 7.9% which brought up the annual GDP growth figure to 7.6%. This growth figure set off the usual celebratory noises by the Centre that it was the highest growth shown by any country around the world and that we even beat China. However, we need to be careful with these figures since the manufacturing index has been down, agricultural growth has been negative and the latest figures show that services growth in the Indian economy has fallen for the first time in a decade. Thus when the main contributors to the economy have been sluggish, one cannot understand how the GDP reaches the commanding heights of 7.6%. If this growth is because of the change of indices that the government  adopted for reporting, then we need to recognize reality and calibrate our expectations accordingly. But if this growth is being shown by means of juggling the figures just so that the Modi government is seen in a good light then there is something seriously wrong somewhere. And the earlier we correct it will be better. It is said that the Oil Marketing Cos. (OMC) who get the LPG subsidy are adding back that to their revenue figures running into lakhs of crores which added to the GDP can show the growth. Similarly there are other instances where subsidies are being added back to show turnover or some such. This kind of sharp juggling of figures without actual matching output of goods will project a wrong picture of the Indian economy. The other question is that if the economy was really growing at a clip of 7% why would Cos. like Flipkart and L&T Infotech not adhere to honouring the appointments orders they had issued to IIM graduates in the first case and in the case of L&T cancel confirmation letters for jobs given to some 150 graduates from engineering colleges. This happened over the last fortnight. This goes to show that the Central government is not projecting things properly and continuing to live in the false promise of tom-toming scheme names like Make In India or Start-Up India in the manner of event management exercises. If Start-Up India was working then would so many start-up Cos. also apart from the above named back out of their promise of jobs given on assured contract letters to our youth graduating from engineering and management colleges like even the IIT’s and IIM’s. IIT’s have recently stated that they are black-listing some 6 start-up Cos. from their placement programs for not maintaining their promise to recruit graduates. So please let us see the reality as it is.

*************************