"Those who can make you
believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
—Voltaire (French 1694-1778)
Word for the day
Cucurbit (n)
Any plant of the gourd
family.
Malice towards none
Mispriced aspirations are
quintessentially designed to meet undesirable denouncement.
First random thought this morning
Pirated CDs are sold audaciously in all markets; sex workers and
quack sexologists solicit business blatantly by advertizing in national
dailies; prohibited alcohol products are advertized in the garb of soda water,
playing cards, music CDs, crockery and what not; people drive on the wrong side
even on expressways as highway police personnel rub tobacco on their palms.
But no one should dare raise issues like these, for the fear of
being termed Shalya.
Incremental vs. transformative
Obviously, his supporters who were
on back foot since past few weeks, especially after Yashwant Sinha's outburst,
came back strongly and #ModiTransformedIndia started trending on social media.
Since, I based my decisions on the
premise of "business as usual" not relying on tall promises, I have
absolutely no problems with the economic performance of the incumbent
government. Moreover, I do not give much credence to economic data quoted
selectively by politicians to suit their convenience. As such, I have no
comment to offer on PM's speech and claims made therein. Nevertheless, I must
share three observations.
Firstly, the whole endeavor of
Prime Minister was on establishing how his government is better than the
previous administration. In that also, he did only highlight the data like FDI,
roads completed, CAD, inflation, electronic manufacturing etc., that has seen
improvement in past 3yrs. He may find it little tough to explain, in my view,
how come this improvement is not part of a long drawn process that started a
long back in 1991, accelerated in 1998 and further boosted during 2003-2007 and
well greased in 2013.
Even a cursory study will show
that the economic growth in India is business as usual and no transformative
change (conceived and implemented by incumbent government) has taken place in
past three years. If only, some disruptions, like GST, have taken place, which
again were due and anticipated since long.
Secondly, it is unfair for him to
benchmark his performance against an establishment which he never forgets to
rubbish as paralyzed, enslaved to a family and regressive. He may want to
evaluate his performance against his promises or rather the aspirations he has
raised. I see the aspirations which were mostly mispriced, correcting to mean,
if I may use stock market jargon.
Thirdly, I refuse to believe that
the incumbent government has introduced changes, a variant of which we have not
seen before (including alleged demonetization and whip on non-compliant
citizens) or which has been conceived and implemented ab initio by the
incumbent administration. Green Revolution (1960s), Joining GAAT and WTO (1947
& 1995), Industrial Liberalization (1991), Nuclear Tests (1998), and
dismantling of government monopoly over energy, roads, ports, telecom, coal,
etc, (1998-2004) were some transformative changes to my mind. Providing LPG connection
to BPL families and distributing LED bulbs may be transformative for
beneficiary households, but not for the economy or country by any stretch of
imagination. If that is claimed to be so, then MNREGA and RTE were much more
powerful and far reaching changes.
Disclosure: I am a BJP voter since
1989, and will remain so in 2019 too.
No comments:
Post a Comment