It would be a pity if Modi govt keeps ignoring bad economic news. Danger of doing nothing is that growth of 6% or less becomes the norm, not the unacceptable.
India’s GDP growth data Friday will be culmination of months of downbeat figures, from plunging car sales to shrinking factory output & an export slump.
National Health Profile data, released Wednesday, says cost of treatment has been on the rise in India, which has led to inequity in access to healthcare.
Analysts from IIM and IIT have looked at former CEC Arvind Subramanian’s data and concluded that India’s true growth rate might have been closer to 4.5%.
Economic soothsayers may well be right when they predict a pick-up to 5.8% growth for Q2, 6.4% for Q3 and 7.2% for Q4. The low base will help with that.
Garment exports offer a solution to a number of economic problems, but India faces an unlevel playing field. Correcting rupee’s bloated value can be a start.
RJD, once a prominent representative of Mandal politics, now finds itself in a political era where welfare, good governance, and new aspirations are overshadowing old caste equations.
Without a Congress revival, there can be no challenge to the BJP pan-nationally. Modi’s party is growing, and almost entirely at the cost of the Congress.
While Modi cleared cobwebs of the past in many areas including the most intractable issue of Art 370, the fundamental structure reforms to get out of the quagmire of the old socialistic and control mind set of the Nehru Indira days has not found any salience at all with Modi. In fact, he seems to believe in it but wants better efficiency out of it and without corruption, of course. Demonetization seemed to be a beginning of a string of well ordered reforms but it just stopped at one episode. In Modi, we have a leader who has the political capital to demolish old structure and build a fresh one which will give impetus to the sustained economic growth. If Modi fails in his economic reforms, it would be a disaster as we may not get another leader of his standing in near future. India wasted 10 years under Man Mohan Singh and surely India can not afford to waste another 10 years under Modi!!
There’s been a dip in India’s fortunes along with China &rest of the world. Some things in the economic world defy understanding,why despite so much of money printing is inflation absent in the developed world .How can Japan & European economy have negative interest rates. If we grew in excess of 8/ ,from where have the structural problems crept up to drag us to 4.5,and so on. And amazingly the stock markets are trading at their lifetime highs.
(1) The stock markets in India are showing irrational exuberance; (2) the lack of inflation in the developed world is due to highly efficient supply chains and reasonably fair competition; the burden is passed onto less discerning economies and largely unfair societies willing to supply to developed countries at low prices even if that means paying low wages to their own workers (exploitative capitalism). The West does it in a more refined manner with low corruption and lack of black money in the system keeps inflation in check, and corporates compete by creating low wage jobs (till workers) but paying huge executive salaries and bonuses; (3) if the interest rates are low, so are the savings rate. Most middle class is living on credit in the Western world. It is consumption all the way on borrowed money; a system in which all stakeholders think they are winners. Summing it up, the world today is so interconnected, that financial and economic integration works just like nuclear deterrence. My theory is if that were not the case, China and US would have been at war by now.
Does the solution only lie with Modi? Or is it a failure of the society itself? Are we putting too much of blame on his government? Would the Congress have done better if the were in power? After all, the current NPA problems of the banks started under MMS with a free for all spending.
What about Indian schools and Universities? Railways?
I just checked on Google maps. It takes 18 hours to cover 613km between Allahabad and Bhopal by road! That is an average speed of about 30 km/hr.
While Modi should take a fair part of the blame, I suspect that it’s only part of the story. It’s a failure of society as a whole.
As a small example: if you want to put more money in the pockets of the poorer people, pay them more. This as citizens.
Too generous an assessment. More than five years ago, the advice should have been : This is a rare, stellar mandate the government should not waste. One million new job seekers each month, joining an already interminably long queue, should provide a democratically elected government with all the incentive it needs to place the economy at the centre of its concerns. We are still debating cyclical vs structural, slowdown vs recession. The only advice that will be heeded comes from the EVMs. Jharkhand should give us a better idea.
While Modi cleared cobwebs of the past in many areas including the most intractable issue of Art 370, the fundamental structure reforms to get out of the quagmire of the old socialistic and control mind set of the Nehru Indira days has not found any salience at all with Modi. In fact, he seems to believe in it but wants better efficiency out of it and without corruption, of course. Demonetization seemed to be a beginning of a string of well ordered reforms but it just stopped at one episode. In Modi, we have a leader who has the political capital to demolish old structure and build a fresh one which will give impetus to the sustained economic growth. If Modi fails in his economic reforms, it would be a disaster as we may not get another leader of his standing in near future. India wasted 10 years under Man Mohan Singh and surely India can not afford to waste another 10 years under Modi!!
There’s been a dip in India’s fortunes along with China &rest of the world. Some things in the economic world defy understanding,why despite so much of money printing is inflation absent in the developed world .How can Japan & European economy have negative interest rates. If we grew in excess of 8/ ,from where have the structural problems crept up to drag us to 4.5,and so on. And amazingly the stock markets are trading at their lifetime highs.
(1) The stock markets in India are showing irrational exuberance; (2) the lack of inflation in the developed world is due to highly efficient supply chains and reasonably fair competition; the burden is passed onto less discerning economies and largely unfair societies willing to supply to developed countries at low prices even if that means paying low wages to their own workers (exploitative capitalism). The West does it in a more refined manner with low corruption and lack of black money in the system keeps inflation in check, and corporates compete by creating low wage jobs (till workers) but paying huge executive salaries and bonuses; (3) if the interest rates are low, so are the savings rate. Most middle class is living on credit in the Western world. It is consumption all the way on borrowed money; a system in which all stakeholders think they are winners. Summing it up, the world today is so interconnected, that financial and economic integration works just like nuclear deterrence. My theory is if that were not the case, China and US would have been at war by now.
Does the solution only lie with Modi? Or is it a failure of the society itself? Are we putting too much of blame on his government? Would the Congress have done better if the were in power? After all, the current NPA problems of the banks started under MMS with a free for all spending.
What about Indian schools and Universities? Railways?
I just checked on Google maps. It takes 18 hours to cover 613km between Allahabad and Bhopal by road! That is an average speed of about 30 km/hr.
While Modi should take a fair part of the blame, I suspect that it’s only part of the story. It’s a failure of society as a whole.
As a small example: if you want to put more money in the pockets of the poorer people, pay them more. This as citizens.
Too generous an assessment. More than five years ago, the advice should have been : This is a rare, stellar mandate the government should not waste. One million new job seekers each month, joining an already interminably long queue, should provide a democratically elected government with all the incentive it needs to place the economy at the centre of its concerns. We are still debating cyclical vs structural, slowdown vs recession. The only advice that will be heeded comes from the EVMs. Jharkhand should give us a better idea.
The problem starts when we pretend that all is well when nothing is well.