More than 50% of the wheat that we consume is imported. According to the 2006-7 data the share of agriculture in our GDP is 18.5% and 52% of the country’s workforce is engaged in agriculture. So I wonder how a loan cushion of Rs. 60,000 crores, declared in yesterday’s budget for the year, is going to help the farmers in particular and the country’s agriculture in general. The problem is, most of the farming population is extremely poor and has no means to approach banks and other lending institutions. They mostly depend upon local moneylenders. So this waiver, what a business standard article terms as “the mother of all loan waivers” is only going to make the rich farmers richer. There is nothing theoretically or ideologically wrong in making the rich farmers richer but when the exchequer has to pay for them in the name of helping the poor farmers it becomes a bit of a nag.
There are estimated to be 40 million farmers in the country and with Rs. 60,000 crores every farmer should ideally get Rs. 15,000. Is it really going to help? Even a child who has no basic knowledge of economics (I’m not trying to underestimate a child’s intelligence, it is just a hypothesis) would tell you that it would have really benefited the farmers if this amount of money could be used to build better infrastructure for the farmers, to make better, environment-friendly farming technologies available, and help them pay back the loans whether they had taken them from institutions or local moneylenders. Remember that Chinese proverb that give a fish to a man and you have fed him for a day and teach him how to fish and you have fed him for life?
Instead of loan waivers the farmers need better roads, telecommunications, enough water to irrigate their fields, uninterrupted power supply, and health and education for their loved ones. A one-time waiver doesn’t really solve the problem; it just creates a psychological mirage.
Anyway, this is a political move and no party in its right mind is going to oppose it. In fact the BJP is terming this gargantuan waiver as “too little too late”.
Some people are definitely going to be happy along with the farmers. Excise duty and customs have been reduced to curb the inflation. The tax limit too has been increased; people earning Rs. 500,000 per year will be able to save Rs. 50,000 per year now and that means some extra cash to buy things and this may spur the sluggish industrial growth.
What would I do were I given Rs. 7,50,884 crores to spend on the country? There are three areas of major concern: defense, infrastructure and human resources. The expenditure on defense and defense-related R&D cannot be underestimated. With Pakistan ready to create mischief perpetually and China comes knocking at our doors at the drop of a hat; defense is something we cannot ignore. So I would spend around 20% and not 14%. You can see for yourself how serious the government is for the safety of the country that it is waiving Rs. 60,000 (around $15 billion) crores and is allocating Rs 1,05,600 ($26.4 billion) to defense.
Then I would allocate 25% to education and health. Our country needs proper education both in terms of human resources as well as infrastructure, and we need healthy people. People in India are extremely weak and that is the major reason why as the country we don’t perform the way we should. There is some problem with our dieting habits because even economically well-off people in India don’t seem fit and healthy. Elementary health services would be totally free and foods that give us nourishment would be dirt cheap.
Our current education system might be producing better scientists and computer programmers but it is definitely not producing better and healthier citizens; something drastically lacks. This allocation would include world-class facilities to both students and teachers. We need more schools and higher pays for teachers so that just like management and technology teaching too becomes a financially satisfying career. Most of the people become teachers because either they are too lazy to do anything else or they don’t get a job anywhere else. I would also like the adult population to get educated or at least literate so I would provide financial incentives to the grown-ups for joining evening classes.
What are we left with now? 55%. 30% would go into developing countrywide infrastructure. This should include roads and railways, and other structures that make life easy as well as productive. This will not only improve quality of life in general it will also provide long-term employment to millions of people. I would invest more on technologies and methodologies that don’t screw up with environment and flora and fauna. Power and electricity and telecommunications are the backbone of any growing economy so they deserve more focus and investment.
5% would go towards improving internal security and 10% would go towards improving the law and order. In my economy people won’t need loan waivers and subsidies, not even as incentives.
The remaining 10% could go towards things that got left above. Seems like a silly list. Well, I’m not an economist.
Technorati Tags: budget 2008, indian budget
I often come across expressions like “I need to make a ton of money,” or “I don’t need much money to survive,” or “Money is power or lack of it is misery.” I was reading about a search engine optimization consultant who recently wrapped up his business to pursue his writing career and somewhere in his blog post he wrote: I anyway don’t need much money to survive.
My biggest fear regarding money is that what if I don’t have enough of it to save a loved one’s life? Although here too there is never “enough” but still, if you have lots of it, you don’t have to worry at least on that front. I know merely money cannot save a life, but you can avail the best healthcare facilities if you can pay for them. This is a primary reason why I want to have sufficient money. Health insurance can surely help in this regard.
In the movie Hotel Rwanda the protagonist saves his wife and a few others by paying lots of money to an army officer, and this is a true story. All his family would have been killed had he not lots of cash available, and some connections. Whenever a catastrophe happens, the poor always die more than the rich or the financially well off.
I don’t like wearing expensive clothes (I prefer good clothes), I don’t want to have a big house (but I want spacious surrounding), I don’t want an expensive car (but a decent one will do) and I have never been crazy about food (I just need healthy food and it doesn’t have to be expensive).
So how much money does one need to be comfortable:
- Enough money for kids’ education
- Enough money to purchase a decent house for the family
- Enough money to get healthy food and clean drinking water
- Enough money to avail good healthcare if there is a need
- Enough money to see you through your old age.
How do you define enough money?
Technorati Tags: finance, money, livelihood
Interestingly, when this song was created, the country had a Congress government. It seems whenever they rule the country their only achievement is mehengai - inflation. Great song by the way. Listen to the lyrics carefully, they are a treat.
Technorati Tags: india, inflation, congress
There is so much software we don’t know of. Just see in this video how a scientist gives a presentation on world health and economic trends (which also shows how the world is getting flatter). And we think Office Vista must be cool.
A very happy independence day to all my readers. I know this post comes a bit late but I purposely didn’t write the day-before-yesterday because first, I thought everybody would be writing about it and second, after a long time I took a day off (this means, I didn’t open my laptop or check my email or respond to queries, etc.). Third, I’m suffering with a bad bout of tonsillitis. But I read a lot.
Our newspaper was filled with articles written by various columnists talking about what’s been achieved and what’s been lost in the past 60 years of India’s, some even called it illusory, independence. With so much misery, poverty, backwardness, corruption, fall of ethos, rampant hatred and intolerance, are we really free? Does freedom merely mean kicking out the foreign rulers? Look out in the street: doesn’t the common man look like a loser, totally defeated and devoid of dignity? Does a free nation look like this?
I agree with the thought but we are a lot better off than we were during the British, or even the Mughal rule. Whatever mess we create here, it is our own mess. We are always free to clear this mess, whether ideological, economic or social, whenever we feel like it (it’s another thing we don’t feel like it). Despite our politicians and destructive policy makers some of us have made things better. Whether one agrees or not, the working conditions are far better than what they used to be. The progress is in certain, limited quarters, but this is how progress starts — it gradually spreads.
The past always seems romantic and quixotic, but every age has its dark side. Chandan Mitra of the Pioneer in a recent article evoked the 60-year journey of the Hindi film music. We’re seeing the worst phase these days, but the golden phase of the Hindi film music survived with the backdrop of the Chinese invasion, political uncertainty, abysmal poverty, industrial strife and a slew of natural calamities. Poetic and all is fine, but if you don’t have food to eat or clothes to wear, you cannot simply survive on melodies (some did actually).
I think the present is the best time to live, whether in India (I’m talking about the functioning, civilized world, and not about communities that are still living in the 700 AD world) or anywhere else. We are at the threshold of a civilizational shift. Technology and new thinking is helping us do things better, faster, and it is also wrecking havoc on our environment, which needs to be tackled with the greatest urgency. The poverty is galling, but we have the means, but not enough will, to eradicate it. We have conquered most of the diseases and ailments (at least those who can afford) and the natural disasters become untenable only because as a society, as a nation, we don’t prepare for them, or we create ripe ground for them by exploiting the ecology and the environment indiscriminately. For example, the floods in Bihar are being caused due to large-scale deforestation.
I don’t prefer the past because the reins of our destiny were not in our hands. Today they are. We can steer our own paths and the opportunities allude only those who don’t seek them sincerely. All around me I see people wallowing in miseries but in 99.99% of the cases it’s their own doing. The India of today is in the driving seat. If we don’t have the roads, we have the ability to lay them. This is the greatest difference between the past and the present.
Technorati Tags: india, independence days, indian independence day
Aquafina water bottles contain tap water, and not mineral water, as claimed by the company. In fact, as the report claims, most water bottle companies sell tap water after filtering or purifying (if they really do it) it.
Technorati Tags: aquafina, water bottle
The “aam admi” (the common man) has becomes a subject of ridicule ever since the Congress party used the expression to pretend that it is a people-friendly government. You can stuff the plus 9% GDP up your…if the common man or woman cannot buy even decent food without burning a big hole in his or her pocket. Everything from gas to power to vegetables are expensive. For some commodities the increase has been more than 200%.
Shivam Vij on his National Highway blog in a post titled The Hand That Slipped says:
Meet the Congress party’s aam aadmi, exalted to VIP status just three years ago and used as a potent weapon against the India Shining delusions of the ruling National Democratic Alliance. India Shining became India’s most berated slogan, seemingly discrediting economic reforms along the way, and one thought the aam aadmi was back in the centrestage. But three years on, even the Congress seems jittery about not having kept its promise. For an electorate that does not understand the consequences of the rise and fall of the gdp, the only tool of measurement is the price of onions.
Right said. But saying that “even the Congress seems jittery” means giving too much undue credit to the party. I think they do everything purposely. Let the common man toil for even smaller things in life and this never gives him a breathing space to think about bigger issues. When even arranging for the next meal becomes an ordeal how do you get time to think about other things? Given the kind of defeatist attitude we have, and the fact that there is no ready alternative, somewhere the Congress knows it may continue in power for at least the next 10 years. So it routinely sheds the crocodile tears for the common man and then goes on doing its own dirty business of drilling holes into the existence of the country.
Technorati Tags: indian economy, indian gdp, the congress, aam admi, indian politics, indian poverty
Well, ask me! Since most of my earnings come from abroad, the rising rupee value means less money for me. But instead ruing the fact I’m trying to earn more. In the macro-economics terms the rising rupee may render the RBI poorer. The link says:
A strong rupee, which adversely impacts exporters’ earnings, could also leave the Reserve Bank of India poorer. Any appreciation in the rupee results in an erosion in the value of RBI’s foreign exchange reserves in its balance sheet.
This is paradoxical. Doesn’t a rising rupee mean a healthier Indian economy? And this puzzles me:
“The only way out for the central bank could be to resume its intervention in the forex market, by mopping up dollars to prevent the rupee from rising further,??? said Mr Barua. The Kotak Mahindra Bank report foresees that the central bank would resume its intervention in the foreign exchange market, prior to June 30, probably also to shore up its CGRA before its year closes.
Can someone throw some light on this in the comments section?
Technorati Tags: economics, indian economy, rupee value, rising rupee
I know a lot has been written on the legendary (the service was started around 125 years ago by the British), the dabbawala business continuously gets international coverage for its mammoth scale and unfaltering efficiency. The entire functioning of the process goes like this:
A network of (dabba)wallas picks up the boxes from customers’ homes or from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals to a local railway station. The boxes are hand-sorted for delivery to different stations in central Mumbai, and then re-sorted and carried to their destinations. After lunch, the service reverses, and the empty boxes are delivered back home.
The secret of the system is in the colored codes painted on the side of the boxes, which tell the dabbawalas where the food comes from and which railway stations it must pass through on its way to a specific office in a specific building in downtown Mumbai.
A business that is still growing at the rate of 5 to 10 percent, it has received the Six Sigma award from the Forbes Magazine. Only those organizations get the Six Sigma award that can keep their defects at around 1 defect every 6,000,000 (six million) deliveries. This is amazing, and they don’t even get any special management training. Seth Godin in his post rightly says:
The dabbawalas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it would never work. There’s trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives monsoon season.
You can apply for a dabba service at MyDabbaWala.com.
Technorati Tags: dabbawalas, mumbai, food supply, tiffin, six sigma
It has to be nasty when “Hindu” organizations get involved. These bloody fascists need to be taught a lesson, even if for that you have to cut your own arm. Our progressive central and state governments are planning to demolish the Ram Setu to make way for the ambitious Sethusamudram project that is going to connect the Bay of Bengal with the Indian Ocean (Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay). A ship canal will be dug, I think somewhat similar to what they did when they created the Suez Canal. This will significantly reduce the shipping time, as right now all the ships have to come round Sri Lanka.
It’s irrelevant how much money the canal is going to save. It is also irrelevant that the vanar sena (the monkey army of Lord Ram) laid the millions of stones so that they could reach Lanka and rescue Sita from the demon king Rawan. What’s relevant is the ecological, geographic and oceanic effect the project is going to unleash. This is what some of the experts say:
Retired marine scientists and experts claim that if the Government persists with the project in its present form, India could be inviting an ecological disaster. They cite the 2004 experience of the coastline protected by Ram Setu escaping the fury of the Boxing Day tsunami.
Destroying the setu, they point out, citing tsunami expert Tad S Murthy, “Opens up serious potential damage to the entire Kerala and Tamil Nadu coast when the next tsunami occurs.” The project does not factor in measures to protect the coastline from tsunamis after the existing barrier is destroyed.
Experts have pointed out that as a consequence of dredging and opening of Ram Setu, fragile coral islands will be “destroyed by sediments and turbulent tides of Bay of Bengal entering the tranquil Gulf of Mannar.” They have suggested that the channel should be realigned towards Pamban and, like the Panama Canal, locks could be provided at the Palk Bay end and the Gulf of Mannar end to prevent disasters like tsunamis.
And this is where religion gets involved:
It is ironical that a government which changes the metro rail route to protect the Qutub Minar, built with the material of destroyed temples, stops a corridor to protect the Taj Mahal’s surroundings and spends crores of rupees to showcase ancient potteries and jewellery in heavily guarded museums, is destroying a unique symbol of national identity and an icon well preserved in our minds since ages. Even a child knows that a bridge was built by the friends of Lord Rama using floating stones and Rama’s army marched over it to Lanka to rescue Sita and destroy the evil regime of Ravana. [link]
This is sad. I’m not saying the monuments and historical artifacts belonging to the “great Mughal period” shouldn’t be protected — of course they should be protected because they are a part of our heritage — but then why be so callous about the Ram Setu, which officially the government calls the ”Adam’s bridge”? Just because the bridge bears Hindu connotations, it doesn’t mean it deserves no protection. So I fully support the VHP campaign to save the bridge – sometimes the end does justify the means. It’s disastrous that destructive organizations like the VHP is doing something that the civil society should do.
Here you can find more information on Ram Setu, or Ram Sethu.
Technorati Tags: sethusamudram project, ram setu, ram sethu, vhp, hindutva, hindu
RSS Feeds
My Social Media Links