We need more trade, not a trade war

The decision by the Trump administration to withdraw preferential treatment to Indian goods should serve as a strong warning to the New Delhi that prioritising narrow domestic politics over good economic policy can have dangerous consequences.Trump’s decision to levy import duties on erstwhile exempted goods did not, as commonly understood, come out of the blue, nor was it the first strike in an emerging trade dispute. The US Trade Representative has appealed to New Delhi multiple times in the past to remove the trade barriers that it has imposed on US goods and investments. This move by the US is largely due to three distortions introduced by the government that hurts not only US business interests but also Indian consumers. These are the price caps on cardiac stents and knee caps, the new FDI in e-commerce industry rules that prohibit foreign e-commerce firms to run inventory based retail, and the ban on American dairy products.It is not in India’s national interest to get into a trade war with the US. We have more to lose than them by doing so. India should drop the threat of escalating the trade war. Relative size of an economy and dependence on trade with the other partner are crucial in determining whether trade barriers can achieve the necessary outcomes. The US is a lot more important trading partner for India than India is to the US.Geopolitical realism instructs us that India cannot afford to indulge in such a trade war and that the damage we can inflict upon the US is not big enough to force it to change its trade regime. If India escalates the matter, it could very well lead to a full-blown trade war that could potentially witness bigger retaliation from the US in the form of higher tariffs on pharmaceutical products or non-trade barriers on Indian software products, which can truly hurt the Indian economy. We could also suffer due to decreased investment by US firms in India and, at a time of decreasing domestic investment, this can be damaging.Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/panorama/we-need-more-trade-not-a-trade-war-with-us-722934.html 

Without realistic rules, Election Commission can’t monitor social media before polls

The Election Commission has announced that it will closely monitor the social media campaigns of parties and candidates in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. It has enlisted the cooperation of Google, Facebook and Twitter to uphold “the integrity of the political campaigns on their platforms”. As much as the Election Commission must be commended for factoring in social media activities in its overall governance of the electoral process, it is unclear how effectively it can manage to do this.Even if a significant number — around 40 per cent in urban and 20 per cent in rural areas — of the 90 crore eligible Indian voters are on social media, let us be clear that tackling the regular offline issues during elections is far more important.Read More

From Jobless Growth to Job-Loss Growth

This is the eleventh edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at recruitment in the armed forces, women and jobs in STEM, artificial intelligence, and the woes of youth.Read more

Reliability of GDP data

In terms of the reliability of official data, India is getting dangerously close to Chinese territory. The year that witnessed demonetisation, when 86% of the cash in circulation was declared as illegal tender overnight and which was perhaps one of the greatest assaults on private property in recent history, is now being touted as the year of highest GDP growth in the last eight years. This was the year when all other macroeconomic indicators took a nose-dive, but the GDP for that year has been inexplicably revised upwards to 8.2%, which has left everyone confounded.Good policy-making requires reliable data. Collecting and publishing data has always been a difficult affair in India, given the magnitude of the task, compounded by the presence of a large informal and unorganised sector. We do not need deliberate manipulation and withholding of data to make the task even harder.Read more

Reservations may turn out to be vacuous

Both these are part of the fundamental rights conferred by the Constitution upon the citizens of India. The reservation bill amends both these articles by inserting sub-clauses. That these articles were amended with very little prior notice and almost no debate among people’s representatives is alarming, to say the least.Read more 

Modi calls Constitution a ‘holy book’ but his government violates its letter and spirit

On the surface, it might appear to be paradoxical that while Prime Minister Narendra Modi once declared that the Constitution is a “holy book”, his government has presided over the weakening of several important institutions: the Council of Ministers is now fully subordinate to the PMO, and once relatively independent RBI, Central Information Commission, and Election Commission have been weakened, not to mention the further deterioration of the CBI and CVC.Furthermore, in many cases — for instance during the formation of the government in Goa and Karnataka — what governors did was quite different from what the Constitution required them to do. How is it that on the one hand we say the Constitution is our holy book, and on the other hand increasingly violate its letter and spirit?Because, first of all, it is wrong to declare the Constitution of India a “holy book”. Second, the idea of a “holy book” is foreign to India’s largely Hindu culture. Finally, in India, symbolism is frequently used as a substitute for the substantial.Read more

What All Those Ministers Say!

This is the ninth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at the ministrations of Modi’s ministers, Ambani vs Bezos, jobs for trans men, and unfair taxes on angel investors.Read more

Forget Job Creation, India is LOSING Jobs

This is the eighth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at lost jobs, the new reservations, sexism, and much more.Read more

How the lack of ‘dharma’ caused the CBI crisis

To untangle the sordid controversy over the removal, restitution, and re-removal of Alok Verma as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) director, it is useful to look at the affair from the perspective of ‘dharma’.Now the word ‘dharma’ is derived from the root ‘dhr’, which means ‘to hold together, to preserve, maintain or keep’. Dharma, therefore, is a set of norms, rules, behaviours, thoughts, and actions that keep something together. It is contextual, depending on what the ‘something’ is.Of course, the word ‘dharma’ is also used to refer to righteousness, duty, morality, law, and religious denomination. But at the heart of it, dharma is still about holding things together: from day-to-day interpersonal affairs to human relationships to political institutions. It follows that ‘adharma’— that is non-dharma or anti-dharma — would cause things to break up or collapse. The CBI controversy is an example.Indeed, it is impossible to diagnose the steady collapse of governance and public administration in India without reference to ‘dharma’. The simple question is: Are the individuals concerned acting in ways that hold the institution together? Are they acting in ways that preserve the trust that people have placed in them? Are they acting in ways that the social contract between the government and the governed is maintained?Read more

Beyond Modi waves, Ravana airports: What media failed to report on Indian Science Congress

The amount of information in a message, American engineer-mathematician Claude Shannon realised, is closely associated with its uncertainty. Shannon’s pioneering work on information theory follows from the simple insight that the more surprising a message is, the more information it carries. If you get a text message saying ‘the sun will set around 6 pm this evening’, you are likely to ignore it. But if the message reads ‘expect heavy snowfall tonight’, you would be jolted into attention.That’s because it is almost certain that the sun will set in the evening, but the chances of snowfall in India anywhere south of the Himalayas are almost zero.That’s why bad news makes headlines. Conversely, we should start worrying if good news is considered headline-worthy. That’s why most of what was reported about the 106th Indian Science Congress last week was about ancient Indians possessing stem-cell technology and the need to rename gravitational waves as Modi waves. As Roshni Chakrabarty, a journalist covering the Congress, wrote there were ‘hundreds of mind-blowing, groundbreaking lectures’ but what caught public attention were the two making outlandish claims.Read more

The Economic Agenda for 2019

The focus has to be on reforming PSU Banks and managing the fiscal situation both at centre and states.The fiscal situation in the country continues to be under severe strain, and with the impending general election, there is a severe danger of setting the clock back. The finance minister has continued to assert that the fiscal deficit target for the year will be complied with. The GST collections have lagged the budget estimates. The government will minimise the shortfall by claiming undistributed collection of cesses and IGST. There will also be additional allocations needed for Ayushman Bharat, additional food subsidy bill due to higher minimum support prices, more funds may be injected to Air India and additional provision may have to be made for MGNREGA.The fiscal situation of the states is likely to turn fragile. The farm loan waiver poses the greatest risk to fiscal consolidation. As the states have to seek the permission of the Centre to borrow, limiting their borrowing to conform to FRBM limits will crowd out capital expenditures which will have adverse effects on growth. Already, there is additional outgo on account of UDAY, and escalation in subsidies and transfers is the last thing that is needed now.Read the full article on The Financial Express here. 

India needs Reforms 2.0 to save both bureaucracy and good IAS officers like H.C. Gupta

How is it that despite widespread corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence across governments, India remains a country where, by and large, people are relatively safe, secure, and prospering?Because, the outcome of the actions of the good people in government still outweighs the actions of the bad ones — even if the number of good people is comparatively small. Conversely, if a government department, industry sector, or state is dysfunctional, it is because it either has too few good people or that its ‘system’ is tuned to unduly amplify the actions of bad people.On the balance, in my subjective opinion, India’s ‘system’ is still tuned to amplify the good. However, our society, which has been in a state of moral panic for the past decade, is turning the knob dangerously backward.Read more

Where Are the Jobs?

This is the seventh edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at the jobs mantra during elections, the eternal promise of reservations, trade wars, Brexit, and Facebook trying to wash away its sins.Read more

Vote For Jobs

This is the sixth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at political party manifestos, the effects of DeMon, and how companies are upskilling their employees.Read more

Jobs From Abroad

This is the fifth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at how international trade creates jobs in India, how many ‘Australias’ of jobs India has to generate, our abysmal gender bias, and job scams.Read more

India has Statues of Celebrity, Duality and of course, Gandhi’s Statues of Ubiquity

If it is the world’s tallest statue of one of the Indian republic’s greatest leaders and promoted by its most powerful contemporary one, it will, of course, receive a lot of public attention. But unless you are the Nizam of Hyderabad or some other reluctant prince who had to be, er, strongly persuaded to accede to the Indian Union, you won’t be opposed to a statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.You might, however, be either amused or dismayed by the BJP’s appropriation of Patel and his misprojection as an anti-thesis of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The great leaders of India’s independence movement did not operate in the small-minded manner as the current ones do — they certainly had differences of opinion but were for the most part respectful of each other in public. Patel and Nehru had different backgrounds, worldviews, and temperaments, but did not allow their differences to descend into the low politics of rumour and squabble. If Patel united the territory of India, Nehru united its people, and together with the other stalwarts of that generation created this great republic.Read more

Who Wants a Sarkari Naukri?

This is the fourth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at a range of jobs from tech and AI and how to eradicate manual scavenging.Read more

India moved on so quickly from Amritsar rail tragedy that it forgot to ask key questions

Less than two weeks have passed since the horrific tragedy near Amritsar where 59 of the people celebrating Dussehra on railway tracks were killed, and over 100 more injured, by a passing train. Yet, like many other such tragedies in India, it has already disappeared from public discourse.A simple analysis using Google Trends shows that interest in the Amritsar tragedy peaked on 20 October, a day after the accident, and sharply declined over the next few days. In fact, by 23 October, searches for Amritsar tragedy fell below that for “Narendra Modi”, indicating that Indians had moved on. Just for context, more people were searching for “Virat Kohli” than for the accident in a mere two days after its occurrence. If we always knew that we, the people, didn’t care much for the loss of lives in accidents, we now have nice charts to show for it. The people affected, their loved ones, the citizens of Amritsar and the people of Punjab will, in decreasing order of time, remember the tragedy. The rest of us will move on.Read more

The addictive nature of bad policies

Al Capone, the infamous prohibition-era US gangster, once remarked, “I am like any other man, all I do is supply a demand.” In Bihar, the smuggling supply chain has already been well established. Around 6.5 lakh raids have been conducted and 1.22 lakh people have been arrested. Altogether, 16.4 lakh litres of Indian-made foreign liquor and around 12.4 lakh litres of various types of country liquor have been seized so far since the law was enacted in 2016. The seizures and arrests reflect the prevalence of the problem. Some of the seized illicit liquor started disappearing from police stations as well.

Further, crime statistics also betray the ineffectiveness of the law. Total cognisable crimes rose 11% in April 2016 to December 2017 period compared to the same period before prohibition. Crimes related to other prohibited substances have increased as well.

There are also significant socioeconomic losses. At least 35,000 direct jobs have been lost as 21 alcohol manufacturing plants and 5,500 retail outlets have been shut down. Add to this the number of indirect jobs lost, because of forward and backward linkages, and the number becomes daunting. For instance, tourism in Bihar has taken a hit. The food and beverage sector revenue declined by around 30%. Room occupancy rates have drastically fallen and corporate conferences and events have almost completely stopped.

Finally, as expected, Bihar’s finances have taken a toll. The 2017-18 financial year saw an approximate loss of ₹5,500 crore because of lost revenue from excise and value-added tax (VAT). To compensate for this, the Bihar government has raised the VAT on 600 other items and has also resorted to higher state borrowing, which has pushed up the fiscal deficit. The loss in revenue from taxing alcohol has also impacted government expenditure. Expenditure across crucial sectors, such as education, pension, health, and energy was much lower than the budgeted figure. The political parties promising prohibition in Madhya Pradesh are also promising a farm loan waiver, another bad policy that is contagious. Funding a farm loan waiver, while losing out on the excise revenue, would derail state finances.

Read more here>

The Answer is Blockchain

This is the third edition of The Jobscape, our fortnightly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, Industry 4.0 holds a lot of hope for the future of jobs.Read more