Just a few observations…

A dead white woman comes into the picture….again…

I had this really long conversation with a friend of mine, we’ll call her the Attractive Afghani. This friend of mine has a connection with Afghanistan, as in a personal one. So anyway, due to her prior life e.t.c., she’s about as poles apart from me as can be, and yet we’re still extremely good friends. (Yea yea, opposites attract, and all that).

Anyway, what surprised me, is the extent to which the stuff Ayn Rand predicted about certain people’s behaviour is so true.

My friend, I love her to death regardless, leans towards the left..well she doesn’t lean so much as do a high-speed shuffle. Lean implies a pivot in the centre. There’s no center here…. I mean this woman is a pure communist in every sense of the word. It came as a shock to her that I don’t ‘believe’ that “Supply & Demand” is totally controlled by the government everywhere.

Now this wouldn’t matter so much, but the thing is, my friend works for the Red Cross, or used to work for them.  Now Ayn Rand predicted that people who do Social Work, usually end up with a low opinion of humanity and end up with a huge chasm of guilt within them. And surprisingly enough, this is what came out of the long tiring debate that I had with my friend. A belief that human beings are just lowly, greedy petty parasites out to feed off each other and the Earth. I tried to explain that those definitions should be reserved only for communists, KEkta Kapoor and Bollywood music producers, but she remained unconvinced. I argued long and hard with her, but to no avail. Example: I am a greedy exploiting pig because I want to buy a Merc, not a Maruti. Why can’t I just be happy with a Maruti, she asked me. She asked why can’t we just be produce enough to meet our basic needs and be happy.

So I asked her, as I have asked lots of people before  – please enumerate the basic needs:

Is a car with power windows extravagant? Air bags? What is enough? She answered it should get you from point A to point B. In that case, most cars are luxuries…

Someone said something about being able to provide basic healthcare for all at some point in my debates. What…is basic healthcare? Immunisation of which diseases? Is the ability to get an aspirin, but not a blood sugar check basic? Or below basic? How does one decide these things? There is this idea that everyone is entitled to a basic level of services, but my question is – who decides what those basic levels should be? There are two choices – either you have a government rich enough to meet all of your medical needs – in which every medical need is basic. This is the ideal solution, and one which every country should work towards. Healthcare (and Education) do need involvement from the government. They should not be left ENTIRELY to the Invisible Hand. BUT NEITHER SHOULD THEY BE ENTIRELY STATE-CONTROLLED. So if you don’t have the money to provide that kind of healthcare, STFU, and let the market help provide what it can, at the prices that it can.

This was just one of many topics. I asked my friend, time and time again, to elaborate, in simple steps, how my purchasing a Mercedes Benz exploits people. She wouldn’t do it. I told her I could explain, in very simple steps how my purchasing a Mercedes Benz employs people, and puts some money in their pockets. But that debate went nowhere. Sigh.

There should be a medal…

For knowing what happens next….

So the first link comes from the Other India, who seems to have hired some kind of newbie who isn’t in the mould as the others. This is a very moderate, tempered article, relative to the usual crud.

And the second link goes EXACTLY according to plan, from our own beloved Hindu. (Link courtesy Recursive Hypocrisy .

What am I going on about? Why THIS, of course!

Caught with yer pants down again eh?

This is what happens when you’re a pompous arse

So let’s see, pompous, armchair critic makes a statement about the One Lakh Car, and then can’t take the criticism. Aww poor baby. Then proceeds to write an article which basically puts down his commenters and tries to put Free Market economics above all of us laypeople. It’s not that you said something stupid, Mr. Dey, it is, us the laypeople who didn’t read our nobel-prize-winning economics textbooks properly. Oh wait, but you don’t blame us for being dumb, it’s just that the authors of those textbooks didn’t dumb their stuff down  enough for us peasants. I mean, you, the supreme being, have the most expert grasp of economics, what with your Ph.D and all, but the CEO of the Tata Group, heck, what the hell does he know. He’s just a money-grubbing capitalist acting out of his own self-interest. The Invisible Hand seems to be jerking off at the moment….I mean, do you really think these CEOs do arithmetic? Surely you jest! They just wander around buying foreign companies because daddy left them with a lot of money.

No no, you know what’s best for the economy, like the countless central planners before you. You and Nehru both.  Could it be, that producing a cheap car might be more for export? Could producing a cheap car automatically lead to some conclusion that it’s impossible and therefore alternative engines might need to be tried out to get a cheap car? In fact, could the whole idea just flop horribly?

Do any of these choices lie outside the realm of Free Market Economics? Free Market Economics, REGARDLESS of the conditions surrounding them, produce the best outcome. ‘Market Forces’ are ALWAYS at play. That’s because ‘Market Forces’ is another name for Human Nature. Don’t get a stable electricity supply? The market provides you with generators. Doordarshan stinks as a TV channel? Some dude starting getting signals from the sky and tossed a wire into your home. Your water supply is full of crap? Coca-Cola will sell you clean drinking water. That is the market. It is always at work. It’s job is to ‘Allocate Scarce Resources’. And it does this well. The price of oil is very high? Well then, let’s try and make cars cheaper. Or let’s use public transport.

Is using public transport, and making cheaper cars mutually exclusive? Could producing a car at a ridiculously low price also lead you to produce a bus at a low price, just like your Tata Ace Truck, so that you give people cheap public transport? Could some other innovation spring from this? Are we God-gifted seers? Could my project fail miserably when people realize that the cheap cars are deathmobiles and turn into tin sheets on being greeted by Buses? Could the fact that most of the buses and trcuks on the roads of India that kill people are made by same company force that company to make safer buses and trucks?

Could, in fact, ‘the Market’ decide whether this idea is good or bad, externalities included or not?

Free Markets do not prevent people from coming up with stupid ideas. But definitely prevents them from implementing them. Mr. Dey, your Ph.D is useless, and it is ironic that you blame others for not having explained Economics clearly enough to the rest of us. You’re doing a really bad job of it yourself.

Not the British – not directly anyways….

Dear Sir,
I am a great fan of yours, so allow me to express shock and disbelief at this opinion. To imply that Delhi’s infrastructure is the best because of the British is complete and utter Nonsense.

For starters, Delhi is _not_ a well planned city. It depends which part of Delhi we are talking about. Old Delhi (whose original name is back in fashion these days – “Shahjahanabad”) is not well planned and is a fire disaster waiting to happen.

“New Delhi” which refers specifically to an area built to the south of Old Delhi, designed by British architects and built by Sikh refugees to the City, is extremely “well planned”, and also completely useless for 21st century city dwellers. Nice and wide roads, 3 lanes one way, trees and huge bungalows are eating up space which could be utilised to build skyscrapers, art galleries, theatres, commercial space and residential space which would bring the ridiculous cost of land within Delhi tumbling down. But, that said, it all does look very Pretty. If I could level all of New Delhi, I would do it in a flash. We don’t need a bloody “Presidential Palace”, we don’t old high-roofed White House look-a-like bungalows which require a staff of 15 servants. In fact, there is no real reason at all WHY Delhi should be the capital of the country, other than the fact that is has always been the capital of something for the past 2000+ years. In my view, level the damn place, make a museum out of Parliament house, and send the bloody Central Government packing to most crime-ridden flea-infested part of Madhya Pradesh/ Bihar, and have them build a new Capital from scratch. A new capital, for a New India. And watch how that becomes a new center of economic activity. THAT would wonders for our GDP and economic growth. Fuck the British, and their so-called love of infrastructure.

Now Outside of 600-year-old Shahjahanabad, and 100-year-old New Delhi, the rest of Delhi is just absolute chaos. But this has nothing to do with lack of Britishness. After partition, wave after wave of refugees made Delhi their home. You try setting up an orderly city in those circumstances. Places like GK-1 & GK-2 built by DLF, when they were considered the edge of Delhi, sometime in the 1960s are literally creaking at the seams, with what used be single houses in big plots being converted to 4 storey-8 apartments blocks with equivalent numbers of cars unable to fit into those alleys.

The power cuts in the city used to be extremely frequent up until about a year ago, by which time Tata Power and BSES Rajdhani/Reliance Energy have finally managed to reduce power theft, upgrade billing, metering and fix a few of the centuries old transformers. If the British were so good, how come they couldn’t plan for future power stations? Do you think their broad avenues, bungalows and Presidential Palace with its still waterways consume less energy than anything produced by Indians? In terms of upkeep, water and power? Good infrastructure my left foot!

There has been no water to be had for years. I could blame this on the British too. Which idiot plans on settling next to the Rajasthani desert and have hot winds blowing in during the middle of June with the temperature at a mild 47 degrees celcius? Vasant Kunj is still a dry desert dependent on rusted, leaking Delhi Jal Board trucks. Water pipes from the new treatment plant at Sonia Vihar were completed only 2 years ago, and we are still begging-dependent on UP & Haryana to release some water to us to keep things going. There may be working water pipes under British-built New Delhi, but they are maintained at the expense and cost of that section of the local population that has no water whatsoever.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about North Delhi, West Delhi or East Delhi yet…

With due respect, the British are NOT responsible for the only city with barely passable infrastructure in – dare-I-say-it South Asia.

Delhi embarked on a clean-up plan when a few things happened in recent times:

1. Economic Liberalisation in 1991. And this is the capital of the country in which the liberalisation occured, i.e. a Centre of Power. 
2. There was a software boom (amongst other various booms, which are still very much n progress), and there was lots of empty land outside Delhi that was being developed because there was no land to be had inside the city. Thus we have Gurgaon, and NOIDA (which stands for New Okhla Industrial Development Area, btw – Okhla being an industrial area of Delhi)
3. The Congress (I HATE the Congress, as do most Delhi-ites, BUT, many of us respect Sheila Dikshit a lot, who is viewed as not being very corrupt – despite all the clout her son carries in Delhi) came to power with a huge majority.
4. Delhi bid for the Commonwealth Games and won. This means our city will have to be at a certain level before it can even consider hosting such an event – note that this is a precursor to bidding for the Olympics – and all of this is the VISION of some of the current politicians who rule Delhi. Of course, the fact that we are part of the Commonwealth is because of the British, so yes, maybe it all is because of them.
5. Being a Union Territory, and not subservient to the requirements of any rural state, coupled with The BJP’s push for Statehood allowed Delhi to have an independence in the running of affairs that no other city gets to have in all of India.

There may be other factors, but these are the ones that come to mind. Sheila Dikshit, or whoever advises her has been the only person approaching a leader that I have seen in recent times. She has lived in Delhi, and is part of what one might call the Urban Elite – and therefore knows exactly what is required in a mostly _urban_ environment by urban dwellers. No other Urban area in India has this luxury – why? Because every large urban agglomeration in India also happens to be the State Capital. Bangalore for Karnataka, Hyderabad for Andhra, and of course Bombay for Maharashtra (or as arrogant Bombay people would like to claim – Bombay for all India). This means that you have goondaspoliticians coming in from their agrarian/rural base, and governing from an urban capital. So – loot the urban financial centres to feed the farmers with free rice and electricity. Result: Power cuts in the cities, no roads, and lots of cows. Welcome to modern day India.

In USA – NO Big City is the capital of the state that it is in – New York state is governed from Albany. California is governed from Sacramento, and on and on. This allows the Urban centres to focus on their priorities which are strikingly different from the rural ones.

There are a lot of other factors as well, but I am at work currently so can’t answer you fully.

 But I would like to strenuously deny that the British built city of New Delhi is the cause of what resembles passable infrastructure. All this is recent phenomena caused by the luck of having a semi-decent politician in power, and some of the other factors mentioned above. She privatised the electricity distribution. She’s privatised the Waste Management (garbage) which is now managed by the DWM (Delhi Waste Management). She wanted to privatise water distribution but that was shot down due to ‘concerns’. She wanted to liberalise the liquor policy because she was quoted as saying “I do not feel it is the government’s business to sell alcohol” but was also shot down by public protest. She managed to push through a half-attempt. Large ‘kirana’ stores can stock beer and wine. She attempted to allow shops to remain open for 24 hours, and I think that still holds, but most stores don’t do it, claiming issues with the police.

She wanted to revise farcical privatisation of Blueline buses done in Delhi by the BJP (One bus to one owner!~#$##!#!$) and revise that with a system resembling the telecom industry – allow 3/4 corporates to run bus services in Delhi. Again, this proposal was struck down by her own party members, and various other vested interests.

Now I don’t want to sound like a Sheila Dikshit fan, but which other politician in this whole country has their head screwed on this straight?

Prior to Sheila Dikshit running Delhi, it was exactly what Bombay people still perceive it to be – a sarkari village without a nightlife and where everybody knows someone in the government. (Nowadways everybody knows someone who owns a pub and can get you free entry).

Note – the Delhi Metro is success not because of anything the British did, but because of a man called E Sreedharan, and also because of Sheila Dikshit – who COULD have obstructed its construction, but instead got straight out of the way, and let them acquire the land they wanted to acquire, let them compensate the people freely and fairly, and basically gave them Support. (Having a friendly government at the Centre helped this as well).

To conclude I’d like to say a few things:

1. The British contributed nothing to improve the infrastructure of Delhi. Wide roads, and a presidential palace with a memorial arch and a canopy which used hold a statue of King George do not make life easier for a city of 14 million people (and growing)
2. I am NOT a supporter of Congress, and I hate everything they have done to this country. I am not a lover of Sheila Dikshit either, but again, looking at the alternatives, I would vote for her again if she runs or gets a ticket from her party (which she won’t because she actually accomplished something)
3. This post is messy, disorganised, and doesn’t say all i wanted it to because I am at work and have to go for lunch now. But I would love to debate this further with you.
4. I know this post sounds like a “Let’s blame it all on the British” diatribe, but that is not my intent. But let’s be clear. India was a colony. A big colony, run initially by a multinational company. They needed to get those resources extracted as efficiently as possible. Thusly, a nationwide railroad, developed ports (Bombay & Calcutta), a decentralised administration (building a local elite)  and all the support services that go along with it. If the British, with their apparent love of infratructure are so good, how come the United Provinces (British ruled) and now known as UP are in such bad shape. Why do you only mention those 3/4 specific cities?
5. I will concede one thing – Bombay – IS semi-decent because of the British. But then in my view the whole city was built by the British anyway. They reclaimed the land to make it one city, so rightly they should get the credit for that. But sorry, the same does not apply to Delhi.

Sens(eless)ex

Where I do a little pre-emption

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, the Rupee & GDP are rising, and so are Indian stock markets, namely the Bombay Sensex and the NSE-50 (or Nifty, for short).

Along with the unprecedented increase in the stock market, the communist/socialist/”I must stamp out any good news”-ists e.t.c. will now start using the stock market as another club to hit you with some guilt.

All new articles by these characters will start off with mentioning how the Sensex is at an all-time high, make a brief mention of a mass-consumerist culture, and how the reforms have benefitted ”the Few at the expense of the Many” somewhere, and terminate with guilt-inducing stories about people in Bombay slum-dwellers/Suicidal farmers or Hindutva crimes.

When they use the stock market to contrast with these other issues, they reveal the entirety of their ignorance.

Stock Markets 101 (Simplistic view)

What is the ‘Sensex’? Well it’s the short form of Bombay Sensitive Index. What is an index? It’s basically a way of measuring a percentage change in a group of somethings.

In this case, it is measuring the change in the prices of publicly-listed companies’ shares. SPECIFICALLY, THE SENSEX MEASURES PRICE CHANGES IN SHARES OF 30 COMPANIES. Nothing more, nothing less. If the Sensex is ‘up’, it means that on average, the share prices of these 30 companies is up. If it is down, then naturally the opposite holds true. That. Is. All. It measures JUST those 30 shares. These 30 shares are considered to be representative of the entire share market, based on a whole bunch of financial indicators (i..e what is the size of the company, does the public hold a large amount of shares in the company, and other factors). So therefore, it should be no surprise that Reliance industries is one of the 30 shares whose price is measured. In fact, a big jump in just Reliance’s share price will cause the Sensex to go up quite a bit. So the ASSUMPTION is that if there are price rises in these 30 shares, then in general, there must be price rises in all shares in the Stock Market. This assumption holds true for most of the time, and if it doesn’t, the company shares used to represent the market are changed.

Why is a rise in the price of shares considered a good thing? Well what are shares, and what is the Stock Exchange?

A Stock Exchange is place where people can buy & sell SECOND-HAND shares, i.e. shares already owned by other people.  

A ’share’ is a chunk of ownership of a company. If I buy 100 shares of Reliance, I OWN a piece of Reliance. That means that if Reliance makes a profit, it can choose to give me some of it. If it decides not to, and I get pissed off, I can sell my chunk of Reliance to someone else.  If Reliance loses money, I can again sell my chunk of Reliance to someone else. Of course, if everybody thinks Reliance is stinky, I won’t be able to sell my shares for a good price. So the price of a share represents (amongst a WHOLE BUNCH of OTHER THINGS) how “good” a company is (THIS IS A VERY SIMPLISTIC VIEW). So naturally, I get happy if the price of the shares I own rises. Just like owning a house (AGAIN, SIMPLISTIC)

Now the media, being as sensationalist and as misinformed as it can be, attributes a rising share market to the general mood in the Country. It is not hard to see why this is so. If the shares prices of all the companies in the stock market are rising, it means a lot of people are viewing these companies as ‘good’ or ‘performing well’. If these companies are performing well, that means the economy is performing well. And that means all is right with the world. ALSO, if lots of people are buying shares on the market, it means people have money to buy things, which means incomes must be high, which means the economy is performing well, which means all’s right with the world.

Thusly, a rising sensex makes it to the front page headlines. Now it shouldn’t take much to realize why the above extrapolations aren’t always correct – Pakistan’s stock market is the second best performing in Asia. But there you have it.

SO – when one of our guilt-inducing brethren decides to contrast rising stock markets with suicidal farmers, what they want to say is this:

A small, select band of greedy, high-caste capitalists pigs with a sense of entitlement are making money in a way I know nothing about, and celebrating it as though it is good for the country, while farmers are dying in Vidharba.

But what they end up saying is this: 

The share prices of 30 publicly listed companies is on average higher these days than it was a few years ago, but there are farmers comitting suicide in Vidharba.

Yes. It is as stupid as that.

Wanted: Noodle Straps in the Ether

Why don’t private FM stations broadcast live cricket matches?

Does anybody have the answer to this? It’s probably just a stupid government regulation, but can anyone confirm this? The same goes for news broadcasts. Why is private TV news allowed, but not private radio news?

Of course, being the Free Market Fundamentalist that I am, I will say it is because Radio is more accessible than TV. Therefore, it means the government will have less control over the populace if any old fool can broadcast news. Well deplorable as that is, it is still understandable.

But what of Cricket broadcasts? I am sure the BCCI would lurve to sell more rights to competing bidders if it could. It must not be allowed to. What justification is given for not allowing cricket broadcasts? Doesn’t make any sense to me. AIR broadcasts them, so it can’t be because “it may cause public disturbance”. Of course, one could argue that the matches help keep AIR in business, but that also seems unlikely, because the FM radio stations and AIR don’t cater to the same audience, and therefore, would not get the same sponsorship.  The sponsorship for just one match would probably be enough to make any private FM station’s day.

Broadcasting cricket and news on the pvt channels can only be good for radio. Besides, I want to fantasize about noodle straps during my commute….

Negative Internalities

As human beings, we all have what are known as Primal Urges. These are those most basic of urges required for the survival of the species. The urge to eat, the urge to mate. Somehow, I seem to have an additional urge – the urge to expose Communist Bias.

Specificially, it has to do with a report found over at How The Other Half Croaks. This report claims to be some sort of sociological study of the IT industry. It interviews only 100-something people in Bangalore. Over the next few weeks (maybe) I’ll be tearing this report apart. But today I look only at one specific part:

 These steps indicate that engineering education in India is being reoriented to cater to the needs of the IT industry — a trend that has been questioned by several academics as well as by other industries.32 It is important to note here that IT companies prefer to hire engineering graduates not because their training is directly related to the work they will be doing (unless they have studied computer science), but because they believe that they have already been pre-selected for a certain level of intelligence and aptitude.

I see. And this…for some reason…is bad?

 She argues that the strategy of hiring engineers for software services work represents an “inefficient allocation of resources in a social sense” (2005:159), which also involves negative externalities for other industries by drawing engineers away from them, as well as from public sector research and development institutes.

(Emphasis mine). Ok. Now you hope that people who make these reports are people with brains. Clearly, they are not.

Every (decent) economics course comes with a section on “Market Failures”. That is things that market forces do not handle well. Examples of these are the provision of a national defence force or street lighting. Other exampls include accounting for pollution e.t.c. or externalities. Now every communist worth his/her salt only reads this chapter, and disregards all of the other 15 chapters which show why market forces are a Good Thing (especially the chapters on Free Trade and Minimum Wage)

The definition of an economic externality (positive or negative) is the effect of an economic transaction on an UNRELATED party.

Example 1
There is a Car consumer: X. There is a Car Producer Y. Then there is Individual Z, who has nothing to do with cars. When I say “nothing” to do with cars, I mean nothing to do with the economic activity of producing or consuming cars. He doesn’t sell them, he doesn’t buy them.

X buys a Car from Y. This can be considered an economic transaction. Now in order for Y to have produced that car for X, Y’s factory emitted some pollution. That pollution spreads into the air, and causes Individual Z to cough. At this point, one can say that the X-Y transaction has produced a negative externality. It affected a party unrelated to the transaction. Governments can reduce negative externalities in a variety of ways and that’s out of the scope of this post. The simplest way to do so, however, would be to put a tax on cars. This raises the price of the car for X, so X buys less cars. And the money the government collects by the Tax can be used to make hospitals to help out Z, or find cleaner ways to produce cars. Ok that’s the most simplest of ideas.

But hopefully it paints a picture.  Now how does this relate to the excresence written above? Well what the author is saying, is that BECAUSE demand for labour is so high in the Software industry, the other industries suffer because of it. The fundamental flaw in this thinking is that the other industries are “unrelated” parties in the transaction between non-computer science engineers and software companies.

The bottom line is this:  The software companies AND the companies in other industries are all consumers for the SAME product. They are all competing to buy the same product – the engineer’s brains. The software company happens to value it more than the other industries and thus gets to hire the engineers.

This isn’t an externality, it’s EVERYDAY LIFE!

When you go to a TV store to buy a TV, you see some which are expensive and some which are cheap. You are willing to buy the cheaper TV. Does this mean that because Plasma TVs are out of your budget, that is a negative externality to you? Are you upset that somebody who is willing to pay more than you are for that TV got it? Are you “affected” by it? Sure, the person with more money may not really have any need for a Plasma TV, and may have rearrange his furniture to install it. But that is not a NEGATIVE externality! It is simply a cost which is part of the transaction.

But this report makes it look like it is some sort of negative impact. The simple fact is that the other industries are unable to pay as much as software industries. Why not? Could be lots of reasons. It could be because they don’t make enough profit, or they don’t know how to manage their costs, or because there is some sort of minimum wage requirement or because of some stupid government regulation. The bottom line is that the fact that someone can afford to pay for an engineers services, and someone else can’t does not make it a negative externality.

From those sample quotes alone, it is obvious that the report is a bunch of completely biased tripe. Further, it shows to what level communism is ingrained in the Indian Psyche, and why it will be a long time before most of the people in our country will ever rise from the misery they are trapped in by “Good Intentions”.

More on this stupid report, later.

Update to Liberalisation – A True Story

Shouting down a well….

Every artist is a cannibal
Every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration
And sing about the grief

The Fly – U2

I dunno if anybody reads my rants or cares, and since I have not been blessed with a response from Amit of India Uncut (see last post), I can only assume that my write-up prompted him to update – and justify himself – this is when you know you’ve made an impact – when somebody actually feels obliged to defend themselves *pats self on back, for the millionth time*

Some people will no doubt consider such articles to be “unpatriotic”. Some of the responses I got to my AWSJ oped � just a small minority, thankfully � berated me for showing just the dark side of India’s liberalisation.

Ok first – complete inaccuracy. What Amit mentions in his blog is NOT The Dark Side of India’s Liberalisation. It’s the regular everyday side of India that’s existed since independence.

Second, at least now he admits that the liberalisation is not a myth. :-p

Third. It is not for me to judge whether anybody is ‘unpatriotic’ or not. Patriotism these days is almost like a swear word. Bush, and his ilk are ‘Patriotic’. Hitler loved his country. I’m sure Saddam loved his country too, and I’m sure Musharraf considers himself a true patriot.

….This gives globalisation and free markets a bad name, and it was important to point out that the reason for India’s inequalities is not the process that began in 1991, but the fact that it was wasn’t widespread enough, that it touched just a fraction of the people, and crucially, that it was the state, and the vast bureaucratic apparatus set up by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, that were coming in the way of progress….

So then… again… Liberalisation is not a myth… it’s just not complete (or as Liberal as MANY of us would like it to be). Big. Big. Difference. When you go spouting off to the Asian Wall Street Journal, please try to be a bit more accurate. Second has anybody else noticed his contradiction? Near the top, you say the Dark Side of India’s Liberalisation. Down below, you try to clarify that it is NOT the post 1991-process that’s holding things back.
I don’t think I’m nit-picking. If you write for the Asian Wall Street Journal, you should have an idea of what you’re writing, and what you’re trying to say…

But too many of us get too caught up in ourselves and don’t notice that most of India is still on the outside looking in.

Nope. 99% of us – us being Indians in India, and the rest of the world, are too busy worrying about the Large part of India on the outside looking in. This is called Socialism. And it is ingrained in us, as you show below.

Yes, our prosperity will touch them in small ways, but televisions in slums don’t count for progress if the owner of that television does not have legal entitlement to that land and a system that enables him to get ahead instead of pulling him down repeatedly.

Hmmmm….
1991. Slum-dweller with no legal entitlement to land tries to fight off starvation
2001. Slum-dweller with no legal entitlement to land manages to earn enough money to buy a TV
2011. …ummm can somebody see a pattern, or is just my naivete, stupidity, and optimism getting in the way. Could the entry here be… Slum-dweller makes enough money to either move out of slum, or get legal entitlement to his land? I think this is called progress…..

It is for him, and the millions like him, that it is important to point out what still needs to be done, and to not rest on whatever laurels we’ve earned.

1) Will all those Indians resting on our current laurels and who say that India has achieved all she has to achieve please stand up. All of those who are complacent, again please stand up. I don’t see anybody standing up.

2)I can hear my communism detectors going off – or I guess just left-wing detectors going off, because Amit claims to be all for free markets and stuff. “It is for him…” once upon a time, I wrote a post called The Common Man Myth. It is what every India denouncer uses to get his/her point across. It’s for that poor little common man. Forget the common women, and the other uncommoners. Note Amit says “It’s for him”, not it’s for them, or her. Sure it’s common for all of us to use hims or hers whenever we feel like. But can anybody see the picture that Amit has just formed for himself. It conforms to that same old stereotype used by the politicians down the ages. All of us want our country to be a better place. But I don’t want it to better for the slum-dweller of dharavi. I want it to be better for me. I want it to be better so that I don’t have to walk down a street covered in Cow Shit. So that I can contemplate the meaning of life in an air-conditioned room without having to suffer through a power cut. Slum-dwellers in Dharavi be damned. The Road to Hell, and a place called Pre-1991 India is paved with Good Intentions. Socialism is all about Good Intentions. You want to eliminate those slum-dwellers? Well then stop denouncing your country and scaring foreign investors away. Stop scaring the Indian Diaspora away. Try showing them that good things can happen in your country. Bring them back (along with their nice fat wallets). And eventually, the change will come. It has already begun.

What needs to be done is obvious. But it is difficult. It is obviously easier to progress to the level where the slum-dweller can afford a TV, than to drag HIM (or her :-p) out of that slum. Duh. But that is what comes next. Or were we all hoping to wake up one day and magically find our country transformed, with butterflies flying by while the rainbow’s on the horizon…..?

Liberalisation – A True Story

uicy stuff to argue about….
Everywhere you look in life, you can see patterns. Here’s a familiar one:
“Hey Guess What. I heard that there’s <Insert Positive Development> in India”
“Oh yes, but so what. <Insert standard Real India is poor, everybody is dying caste-system yada yada yada yada>”Now This Voice is the top voice. Deeshaa.org, Indian Writing, Arundhati Roy, The Communist Parties of India, Rohinton Mistry, and others belong in the second camp – latest addition is Amit of India Uncut. He writes about The Myth of Indian Liberalisation – Note this has also been published in the Asian Wall Street Journal.

Wha? Myth? Are you trying to tell me my paycheck from the software company I’m working for is fake?

While part of India has benefited from being opened up to foreign products and influences, most of the country is still denied access to free markets and all the advantages they bring.

Ok all those living under the illusion that India has done all the “developing” it needs to – put their hands up please….. nobody? Ummm duh – I think we all know that India has a long way to go in terms of getting better – who is Amit addressing when he states the above obvious-ism?

India opened its markets in 1991 not because there was a political will to open the economy, but because of a balance-of-payments crisis that left it with few options. The liberalization was half-hearted and limited to a few sectors, and nowhere near as broad as it needed to be.

Another obvious-ism. I have never heard any Indian claim that it was through the sheer brilliance and intelligence of the People of India that we started economic reforms. It was the simple fact that Socialism finally came crashing down and left India with little choice. Yes – it was sort of an “accident” – but one that was going to happen sooner or later. You cannot chain 1 billion people, either economically, or politically. Some way, somewhere, the dam will burst. Further, the part about liberalization being half-hearted – another obvious-ism. Isn’t this just more common knowledge?

Next para goes on about the bribes people have to give to set up shop. Again, more common knowledge – but why doesn’t he mention the things you no longer have to pay bribes for. A telephone line – important for economic growth, last time I checked. Bringing many goods into India (I’m talking personal items here, not commercial shipping – which is yet-to-beliberalized).

The vast shantytowns of Bombay–one of them, Dharavi, is the biggest slum in Asia–hold, by some estimates, more than $2 billion of dead capital. For most of the migrants who live in these slums, India hasn�t changed since 1991. As that phrase from India�s pop culture goes, �same difference.�

Proof – I want proof that these people see no change between now and 1991 – it is YOU who see no change. You saw slum in 91, you see slum today. In 1991, maybe these people thought about where they would get their next morsel of food. Today, it might be where they can find a better place to live. That’s a change. For the better. But yes, these people are not out of the woods yet – but they’re getting there.

The socialist left, a natural proponent of such views, believes that free markets are the problem and not the solution. India�s communist parties have blocked labor reform, opposed foreign investment and prevented privatization of public-sector units. They naturally have a vested interest in the �license-permit-quota raj,� as the web of statist controls is called. On all these issues they are supported, surprise surprise, by the religious right.

The Hindu right wing, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, also fears globalization.

This is incorrect. It is is the extremists – the RSS and VHP which fear globalization (and all things rational and sane, much like the Republican right-wing in USA) – BUT the BJP is all for free-markets and the like – being right-wing means being all for less government. The BJP wanted to privatise, and there was more privatisation under the BJP and MORE economic reform too, than by any of the previous governments post-1991. Note to all – the only ideology of the BJP that I support is their economic one. As a sort of agnostic Arya-Samaji-Punjabi, I don’t subscribe to their views of Hindutva. At all. Yech.

You can read the rest of his article on his blog. I’m unclear as to what the Creative Commons licensing rights are for reprinting his article, so I’ll stop here. But the point is this. I have yet to come across an article written in the any section of the Media which says that India’s liberalisation is whole-hearted, and very complete, and has benefited everybody. So I’m trying to figure out two things:

1) Who is Amit speaking to and
2) How does this make liberalisation a myth?

What one could say is that liberalisation has benefited the Rich, Upper-Middle- and Middle-Class. And saying so doesn’t make it a myth. The Rich and the upper-middle-class will obviously be the first to benefit from a small unshackling of rules. Obviously, they will be the first ones to go out and buy cellphones and snazzy cars. But is that not an improvement? When previously, the elite section of the country was running away to America, and smuggling “Imported” things into the country, it’s now deciding to stay behind and open another bar or restaurant or multiplex, or mall – is that not an improvement? Who pays the taxes in India? The slum dwellers of Dharavi? Apart of from bribes, where else does India pick up its finances from? It is the Middle Class – these are the salaried people of India, the ones who don’t get to hide their money from the Tax-collector, because it’s deducted at source. You have to push the Middle-Class foward FIRST, before tackling the poor. And these people are benefitting. They can afford cars and houses due to the lower interest rates. They can start travelling across country due to the new bunch of low-cost airlines that have sprung up. Telecom is an issue covered a gazillion times already, so I don’t think I need to mention how easy it is to get in touch. Their lives are no longer restricted to Doctor/Engineer/IAS. There are new ways to make money (legally), that did not exist before. In the TV industry, the airline industry, the BPO industry, the Software industry, the Telecom Industry and I’m sure there are others. This IS liberalisation. This IS economic reform. I’m sorry that 800 million out of those 1 billion aren’t dancing on the streets and riding around in their Suzuki Swifts, but they will get there (well most of them), just not as fast as you would like.

This does not make India’s liberalisation a myth. It just makes it slower-than-China.
Sort of. I think Amit’s intent is to say – “can we cut down on the hype and come back down to reality? We have a long way to go”. And I say NO. Let’s NOT cut down on the hype. For once in a very f-ing long time, there are some genuinely positive things to say about India. Yes people are being murdered for their caste in villages, but at the same time, they’re rubbing shoulders and eating in the same canteen in software companies. There was caste discrimination 10,20,30,40,100 years ago too. But there were no software companies (or malls, or cellphones, or TV channels, or radio stations, or low-cost airlines, or New Delhi Metros, or Mumbai-Pune expressways). That’s a change. For the better. These small changes should be treasured – AND TRUMPETED. Very soon, India’s demographic pattern is going to shift towards youth – I think it already has. There will be more people in the 18-24 year old bracket than in any other. If this is going to be the dominant group in the country – how should you inspire them? By telling them their country is hell? They’re going to need role models. Who should their role models be? People telling them that nothing is ever going to change? Or people acknowledging that some stuff has changed for the better, now go out there and finish the job. That would require the role models – and the youth to be less cynical – this hard to do, because I think Cynicism is now ingrained in India’s genes (and jeans?).But some of us are trying….

Oh, and I have one bit of proof that Liberalisation is not a myth.
I want the next person who reads this article to go and download the latest version of Adobe Reader (version 7.0).
Start it up, click on “Help”.
Then click on “About Adobe Reader 7.0″.
When the splash screen comes up, click on credits.
Now sit back, and count the names which look Indian to you. Most of those names belong to people who work in NOIDA, UP, India. Hell, Siddharth Jain used to work in my team before he joined Adobe!
Now answer this question honestly – would this have been possible before the Mythical Liberalisation?

Ye Olde India-China Debate…

*Pats self on back*
There is a publication, that this Voice has always admired, and turned to as a source for most of its information, called the Economist. Started, in late 19th century London by a Walter Bagehot, to promote Democracy and Capitalism, it has quite a few followers (recent circulation figures have just crossed 1 million, with 500,000 of those in USA). I respect it simply because it makes out a very objective case for the two systems, and is very objective in its news reporting (although it did support the Iraq War II ). Anyway, The Economist makes a case that this Voice has been screaming about forever.
It is this – that although it seems that India is way behind China currently in the race to become richer, India is going to win out in the long-haul. Some excerpts from the India-China (”Tiger in Front”) survey, from the 5th March Edition:

HOME to nearly two-fifths of humanity, two neighbouring countries, India and China, are two of the world’s fastest-growing economies. The world is taking notice. In December, a report by America’s National Intelligence Council likened their emergence in the early 21st century to the rise of Germany in the 19th and America in the 20th, with �impacts potentially as dramatic�.

That India is an open society and China is not is one of the most glaring differences between the two. Some people in both countries are tempted to use it to explain another: that China’s economy has grown much faster. This survey will argue that this view is simplistic and misleading.

Some of the main reasons for China’s better performance have nothing to do with the political system. When China started its reforms, in 1978, it was poorer than India. Part of the gap now is due simply to that earlier start.

India is often portrayed as an elephant: big, lumbering and slow off the mark. Now investment-bank reports are beginning to talk of it as a new Asian �tiger�.

According to the World Bank, 87% of adult Chinese women are literate. The equivalent figure in India is 45%. Many things follow from educating girls: better health and education and longer lives for the whole family; more productive workers; and a boost to industrialisation and urbanisation. �An educated child�, says Asian Demographics’ Mr Laurent, �does not want to plant rice.�

The other consequence of smaller families has been a sex ratio strongly skewed in favour of boys. In China there are 118 boys for every 100 girls born, compared with a natural ratio of 105 to 100. India’s figures are also skewed, but to a lesser extent. The most recent census, in 2001, showed 108 boys under the age of seven for every 100 girls.

The foreign-investment boom in China was started by overseas Chinese. From 1985 to 1996, two-thirds of foreign investment in China came from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. There China has, close at hand, some 30m ethnic Chinese, many of them with close ties to the mainland. Moreover, these places specialised in labour-intensive manufacturing industries for export. Wage costs were rising fast, so, in effect, they exported their trade surpluses with America to coastal China. They were made very welcome, for political as well as economic reasons, and paved the way for the big multinationals.

Overseas Indians, in contrast, are scattered around the world and across professions. There are a number of global tycoons, tens of thousands of software engineers who powered Silicon Valley’s dotcom boom, and millions of others. It is not surprising they have played a different role to that of the Chinese diaspora.

Except for the brief interlude of �emergency� imposed in 1975 by Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister, Indian democracy has stuck. It may have seemed an improbable experiment in such a poor, ethnically divided and hierarchical society, but it has proved resilient and deep-rooted. Turnout at elections is higher than in many developed countries�and it is the poor who vote in large numbers. The system may not deliver economic growth rates of 9-10%, but nor has it imposed Mao Zedong’s murderous millenarian lunacies.

After Jawaharlal Nehru became independent India’s first prime minister in 1947, his Congress party enjoyed three decades of uninterrupted rule, most of them with a large parliamentary majority. It took the chance on offer to make radical choices and changes. It is not democracy’s fault that many of them were the wrong ones.

Well there you have it… of course, I have given you just a small taste of it. Obviously I can’t give more, else I’ll probably be sued. Do check out the latest copy of the Economist and see for yourself. I, in the meantime, shall wander around cyberspace, smug in the knowledge that the Economist agrees with me, rather than Deeshaa.org… it is simply a matter of time, before I will have to change the title of my blog… the sooner, the better.

The Present is Wireless

Hello? India Calling
So I forget which tech company has the tagline “The Future is Wireless” regardless, they got it wrong. The present is wireless. At least it is in India. Sometime today the number of mobile connections will race past the number of landline connections in India, according to the Hindustan Times. This is really amazing stuff for India, considering our beautiful reputation for being a laggard in most developmental figures.
Last time I checked, the average monthly rental for a mobile phone is about 500 rupees (US$11) whereas the outgoing call rates are about 2 rupees/min (US$0.04) – we don’t get charged for incoming calls in India, and an outgoing SMS costs 60 paise..which is less than 1 US cent). GPRS and EDGE have been implemented here, so our mobile networks are very much at the 2.5G stage already…
Contrast this to 1992, which is when I moved back to India after spending 9 years in Hong Kong (heaven, compared to the India of the Eighties…).

We had to fill out a form obtained at a filthy disgusting office populated with paan stains and uncouth bumpkins. This form asked you if you were Government Servant, a Hindu Undivided Family, a Doctor, an Exporter and some other rubbish. If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you got a phone a little bit faster. If the answer was no, you had two options – option 1 was a 5 year wait, and a bribe at the end of it all. Option 2 was a bribe at the beginning of it all, a one year wait, and then a monthly bribe (usually in the form of a bottle of ‘Old Monk’ rum, presented to the local linesman) to ensure the smooth working of your phone. Everytime it rained, you knew your phone would die, along with your connection to the outside world. And every once in a while, somebody would bribe the linesman, who would then hack into your line and allow the briber to make calls on your line, for free.. Fun.
Then one day the government came out with a Telecom Policy, which paved the way for GSM Mobile phones. They were pretty slow to take off, as they were considered pure luxury items, toys for that class of people who pretend to be perpetually ‘on the run’. But slowly and surely, call rates dropped (when mobile phones were launched the incoming AND outgoing rates were 19 rupees/min), and people realised that there was no corruption involved in getting a mobile phone. Further, the quality of the mobile phone network is very much late 20th Century/Early 21st Century, and not 5th century b.c. like the fixed line network . And so mobiles grew so pervasive that people may be homeless, but they aren’t mobile-less. Also, in typically Indian “ishtyle”, the government came up with idea of a “Shared Mobile”. This consists of a mailman with a mobile phone who travels to villages, and allows villagers to make calls on his phone for a small fee. Finally, competition from the mobile companies (and private fixed-line companies) forced the state-owned telecom firms to start behaving, so much so that now, getting a landline in Delhi/Mumbai/Other big cities is also a graft-free experience. And then people say nothing has changed in 5000 years. BAH!

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