Month: April 2015

Why real estate Ponzi scheme will continue despite new Real Estate Bill


On April 7, 2015, the union cabinet cleared the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Bill. The Bill essentially mandates that every state needs to set up a Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA), to protect consumer interests.
Every commercial as well as residential real estate project needs to be compulsorily registered with the RERA of the concerned state. Real estate companies need to file project details, design and specifications, with the concerned RERA. They need to put up details concerning the approvals from various authorities regarding the project, the design and the layout of the project, the brokers selling the project etc., on the RERA’s website.
Consumers will be able to check these details on the website of the real estate regulator. Further, only once a project is registered with the RERA will it be allowed to be sold. Also, like is the case currently, a real estate company will not be able to go about arbitrarily changing the design of the project midway through the project. In order to do this the company will need approval of two thirds of the buyers.
If the real estate company makes incorrect disclosures or does not follow what it has stated at the time of filing the project with the RERA, it will have to pay a penalty. There are other provisions also that seek to protect consumer interests. Real estate companies will have to clearly state the carpet area of the home/office they are trying to sell, instead of all the fancy jargons that they come up with these days. Further, the bill allows buyers to claim a refund along with interest, in case the real estate company fails to deliver.
So on paper the bill actually looks great. But there is one provision that essentially makes all these provisions meaningless in a way. The Bill requires real estate companies to compulsorily deposit half of the money raised from buyers for a particular project into a monitorable account. This money can then be spent only for the construction of that project against which the money has been raised from prospective buyers.
This is an improvement from the way things currently are. The way things currently work are—a real estate company launches a project, collects the money and then uses that money to do what it feels like. This might mean repaying debt that it has accumulated or diverting the money to complete the projects that are pending. Given this, at times there is no money left for the project against which the money has been raised. In order to get the money for that, another project will have to be launched. Meanwhile the prospective buyers are stuck.
Developers love launching new projects simply because it is the cheapest way to raise money. Money from the bank or the informal market, means paying high interest. Hence, they raise money for the first project and use it to pay off debt or the interest on it. To build homes under the first project, a second project is launched. Money from this is then used to build homes for the first project.
Now, to build homes promised under the second project, a third project is launched and so the story goes on. In the process, all the buyers get screwed and the builder manages to run a perfect Ponzi scheme. A perfect Ponzi scheme is one where money brought in by the newer investors is used to pay off older investors. In this case money brought in by the newer buyers is used to build homes for the older buyers.
The Real Estate Bill seeks to stop real estate companies from running such Ponzi schemes. As explained above, half the money raised for a particular project needs to be deposited in a monitorable bank account and be spent on the project against which the money has been raised.
The thing is when the Bill was first presented in the Parliament in 2013, the real estate companies had to deposit 70% of the money raised against a particular project in a monitorable account and spend that money on that particular project.
Between then and now the real estate lobby has been able to dilute the 70% level to 50%. What this means that the real estate companies can still use 50% of the money raised against a particular project for other things. And this will essentially ensure that the real estate Ponzi scheme will continue.
Real estate companies will continue to launch new projects to raise money and use half of that money for things other than building the project for which they have raised the money for.
Also, this provision will allow the real estate companies to continue to hold on to their existing inventory and not sell it off at lower prices in order to pay off their debt, given that they can continue to raise money by launching a new project.
The question to ask here is why should a ‘new’ regulation allow money being raised for a particular project to be diverted to other things? It goes totally against the prospective buyers who are handing over their hard earned money(or taking on a big home loan) to the real estate company, in the hope of living in their own home.
A possible answer lies in the fact that if the government had regulated that the money raised for a project should used to build that project, it would have closed an easy way that the real estate companies have of raising money. This would have ultimately led to real estate prices coming down. And any crash in real estate prices would have hurt politicians who run this country, given that their ill-gotten wealth is stashed in real estate.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of Easy Money. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 21, 2015 

Modi needs Rahul

narendra_modi
Rahul Gandhi is back. Back from his 57 day foreign sojourn, during which, if Congress leaders are to be believed, he was thinking about how to revive the Congress party.
And now that he is back he has come out all guns blazing against the Narendra Modi government. The Gandhi family scion has blamed the Modi government for being very close to the corporates and not being worried about the farmers. In a speech in the Lok Sabha yesterday he accused the government of being a “suit, boot ki sarkar.”
For the time that Rahul was not in the country, several leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) took potshots at his absence. Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, had recently said at the two day National Conclave of the party in Bangalore that: “Instead of raising non-issues and fictional issues, they[the Congress party] should find out where their leader is.”
After Rahul returned to India, Sambit Patra, a BJP spokesperson said: “He (Rahul) is confused. He does not know what he wants to do with his life, whether he wants to continue in politics. He has to answer to the people.”
Such statements are a part of the broad strategy of BJP of talking about a Congress mukt Bharat (an India without the Congress party). “Congress Mukt Bharat is not merely a slogan, but the determination of the people of India,” Narendra Modi said in January 2014, when the campaigning for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections had started. Since then, many leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) have used this slogan on many occasions.
Nevertheless, a slightly strong Congress party might work to the advantage of the BJP. And a Congress mukt Bharat may not necessarily be good for the party. Why do I say that? Take a look at what happened in the recent elections to the Delhi assembly.
The BJP got 32.2% of the votes polled. This was marginally lower than the 33.07% of the votes that the party had polled in the assembly elections held in December 2013. The Congress had polled 24.55% of the votes in December 2013. This collapsed to 9.7% in the recent elections. The gainer was the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The vote-share of the party jumped from 29.49% to 54.3%, helping the party win 67 out of the seventy seats in the assembly.
What this clearly tells us is that the entire collapse in the vote for the Congress moved to the AAP. This in a way ensured that the anti-BJP vote did not get divided and helped AAP win almost 100% of the seats in the assembly. If the Congress vote hadn’t collapsed as much as it did, it would clearly helped the BJP win more seats in the Delhi assembly. Hence, a stronger Congress would have helped the BJP in Delhi.
Now, along with this let’s look at an interesting piece of analysis on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections carried out by Neelanjan Sircar, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CASI at the University of Pennsylvania. In his analysis Sircar found that: “Consider the constituencies in which the BJP and Congress were the top two vote getters; there were 189 such constituencies, and the BJP won 166 of them for a whopping strike rate of 88 percent. By contrast, the BJP’s strike rate was even (49 percent) in the remainder of the constituencies it contested.”
What this clearly tell us is that when it’s on a one on one with the Congress, the BJP does well. But the same cannot be said of a situation where there is a multi-party contest. In a multi-party contest, a strong Congress party can help in dividing the anti-BJP votes. While this may not matter in the bigger states like Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and smaller ones like Chattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh, where there is a direct contest between the BJP and the Congress, it matters in many other states like Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam, where the electoral contest is multi-party.
In fact, in the first past the post system (an electoral system where the candidate winning the most votes wins, even though there might be more votes against him in total) that India has, a divided opposition can really help the ruling party. And for that divided opposition to become a reality, the Congress party needs to be on a slightly stronger wicket than it currently is.
This rule comes with a corollary. The BJP has to hope that the Congress does not come together with other opposition parties like it did in Bihar in August 2014, when bye-elections to 10 assembly seats were held. The vote percentage of the BJP plus the Lok Janshakti Party was at 37.9%. The vote percentage of Rashtriya Janata Dal plus Janata Dal (United) plus the Congress party came in at 45.6%. So, all said and done, the anti-Modi vote does remain strong. And it can create huge problems for the BJP.
But the other parties coming together is not a possibility in every state. Take the case of West Bengal where the Trinamool Congress and the Left Front are unlikely to come together for the assembly elections scheduled in 2016. A weak Congress party will mean that its votes will move to the Trinmool Congress and that can’t be good for the BJP.
The BJP cannot be expected to form the government in West Bengal. But in the 2014 assembly elections it got 17% of the votes polled. Given this, the party can expect to win more than a few seats in the state assembly.
Further, the assembly elections in Bihar are due later this year. It is important that the BJP does well in the state given that it elects 16 members to the Rajya Sabha. West Bengal also elects 16 members to the Rajya Sabha.
The BJP currently has only 47 members in the Rajya Sabha and hence can be held to ransom by the opposition parties in the upper house, whenever it wants to pass any important legislation. The Land Acquisition Bill is an excellent example of the same.
In order to increase the number of members in Rajya Sabha the party needs to do well in the state assembly elections scheduled over the next few years. And for that to happen, the BJP needs a stronger Congress party. In short, Modi needs Rahul.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on April 21, 2015

Rahul Gandhi’s ‘suit boot ki Modi sarkar’ jibe stinks of hypocrisy

rahul gandhi
Vivek Kaul

Rahul Gandhi, the Gandhi family scion and the vice-president of the Congress party, is back from his two month holiday (57 days to be exact). And if nothing else, he surely has discovered his political machismo during the period. Speaking in the Lok Sabha today (April 20, 2015) Rahul said that the Narendra Modi led National Democratic Alliance(NDA) government was a government of industrialists, or as he put it: ‘suit, boot ki sarkar‘.
In a speech he made at the Ram Lila Maidan in New Delhi on April 19, 2015, he made similar allegations when he said: “Let me tell you how Modi ji won the election. He took loans of thousands of crores from big industrialists from which his marketing was done. How will he pay back those loans now? He will do it by giving your land to those top industrialists. He wants to weaken the farmers, then snatch their land and give it to his industrialist friends.”
There are multiple points that need to be made here. Is Rahul Gandhi trying to suggest that the Congress party did not get corporate funding to fight the 2014 Lok Sabha elections? Is he trying to suggest that the Congress party has never got corporate funding to fight elections? Is he trying to tell us that the Congress party has never used “black-money” to fight elections?
Or is it more a case of sour-grapes—the fact that when it came to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the corporates where on Modi’s side, given the sordid performance of the Manmohan Singh government. As Jairam Ramesh told The Times of India after the Lok Sabha elections: “We were out-campaigned, out-manoeuvred, out-funded and out-spent by Modi.” So, it is clearly a case of sour grapes for Rahul. Also, in all these years that Congress was in power, why did it never try to clean up political funding? Does Rahul have an answer for that?
Rahul, further said in his Lok Sabha speech that: “You know as well as I do, that this government is one that works for industrialists.” So, does this imply that the last Congress led United Progressive Alliance government did not work for industrialists?
If that was the case then why did so many scams involving corporates happen in the second term of the Congress led UPA government? Was the telecom 2G scandal a creation of the Modi government? Did the Commonwealth Games scam happen under the Modi government? Did the coalgate scam, where the governments loss lakhs of crore happen under the Modi government?
Rahul also suggested in his two speeches that the Modi government is hell bent on taking away land from the farmers and giving it to corporates. The question is what were multiple Congress governments doing since the independence?
Until 2013, the land acquisition act 1894, governed land acquisition in India. A 1985 version of this Act stated: “Whenever it appears to the [appropriate Government] the land in any locality [is needed or] is likely to be needed for any public purpose [or for a company], a notification to that effect shall be published in the Official Gazette [and in two daily newspapers circulating in that locality of which at least one shall be in the regional language], and the Collector shall cause public notice of the substance of such notification to be given at convenient places in the said locality.”
The language of the 1894 Act shows that it gave unlimited power to the government to acquire land. This wasn’t surprising given that the law came into being when the British ruled India. The Act allowed governments all over India to acquire land from the public. Many governments passed on this land to corporates, and in the process both the government and the corporates made money.
The only one who did not make money was the individual whose land was being acquired. Of course, this did not go unnoticed. People saw politicians and corporates making a killing in the process. And the trust that is required for any system to work completely broke down. The various Congress governments which led the country between 1947 and 2013(nearly 66 years) chose to do nothing about it. In 2013, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) brought in The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013.
By ensuring that corporates got land on a platter, the Congress party essentially helped build a system of political-corporate corruption. Further, given that governments acquired land for them, Indian corporates have become lazy over the years. Also, many of them started to see themselves as landlords and wanted land just for the heck of it. This can be said from the inefficient use of industrial land in India. Narendra Modi had no role in building this system. He just inherited it.
And there is more. Along with the budget document, the government releases a statement of revenue foregone every year.  “The estimates and projections are intended to indicate the potential revenue gain that would be realised by removing exemptions, deductions, weighted deductions and similar measures,” the statement points out.
For the year 2014-2015, the government is expected to forego revenues of Rs 62,398.6 crore because of exemptions and deductions given to corporates. Interestingly, the bigger the corporate the more deductions and exemptions they take. Corporates which make an operating profit within the range of Rs 0-1 crore have an effective tax rate of 26.89% Those in the Rs 50-100 crore range have an effective tax rate of 24.29%. Whereas those making a profit of greater than Rs 500 crore have an effective tax rate of 20.68%. The overall rate is 23.22%. This is not a recent phenomenon. It has been true for many years.
Who has built this tax system which favours the corporates? The Congress party is the answer. The party has been in the government in every decade after independence. Narendra Modi has not been in power even for a year. Once these factors are taken into account, the only thing one can say is that Rahul’s “suit boot ki Modi sarkar,” comment, stinks of hypocrisy. Guess, the two month sojourn hasn’t done him much good.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 20, 2015 

Time to change your jingle: Rahul Gandhi’s garibi hatao rhetoric is like the Nirma ad

Vivek Kaul 

Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?
Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?
Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?
Guess who’s back? – Lines from Without Me by rapper Eminem 

Rahul Gandhi is back. The vice-president of the Congress party is back to India after a 57 day sabbatical. Depending on which political gossip columnist you believe he was holidaying either in South East Asia or in Italy. A news-report also suggests that he was meditating in Burma. But all that doesn’t really matter.
While Rahul was away the Congress politicians put on a brave front. They told the nation that the Gandhi family scion was taking a break and figuring out what to do next. Among many such statements that were made the best one came from Mukul Sangma, the chief minister of Meghalaya. Sangma compared Rahul’s sabbatical (or disappearance, depends on how you look at it) to that of Alfred the Great, who ruled Wessex, an anglo-Saxon kingdom in the South of Great Britain, between 871 and 899 AD.
After a defeat at the hands of the Viking armies, Alfred retreated and came back strongly to win the subsequent war. Sangma compared Rahul’s sabbatical to that of Alfred the Great, when he told The Indian Express: “There are certain strategies, some secret plans that leaders always have. If you read stories, read history, Alfred the Great, after he lost the battle, he needed to plan, think and ideate and come up with another formula to defeat the enemy.”
Sangma suggested that Rahul was doing the same. The Congress party spokesperson Randeep Surjewala suggested the same when he said: “I don’t know where he is but I know he is not on a holiday. He has taken time off to reflect on how to strengthen the Congress. I see it as an extremely mature step.”
Companies these days regularly go on off-sites, at least once a year, to think and ideate, and to figure out the way forward. While no one quite goes on a two month off-site, but let’s not nitpick here. So Rahul’s sabbatical was along similar lines. Fair enough.
The question is what has he come up with at the end of the sabbatical? From what was visible in his speech to farmers at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi yesterday, Rahul hasn’t come up with anything new. In fact, he has gone back to the garibi hatao rhetoric of his grandmother Indira Gandhi.
Sample some of the things that Rahul said in his speech yesterday.

“Today when farmers go to sleep, they dont know what is going to happen when they wake up the next morning.” 

“We increased the MSP of wheat from Rs 540 to Rs 1400.” 

“Opposition asked us where will the money come for your loan waiver. Our govt waived Rs 70,000 crore of farmer loans.” 

“The MSP[minimum support price] has not changed, no benefit to farmers.”

What is common to all these statements? That India is a poor country. And that the Indian farmer is poor. And that he needs to survive only on doles given by the government. And that the Congress led United Progressive Alliance was excellent in giving out doles. And that the Narendra Modi led Bhartiya Janata Party is not doing the same thing.
This has been the Congress party rhetoric since Indira Gandhi took over the party in the late 1960s. And truth be said it worked beautifully for decades. But isn’t working any more. Why is that? One reason lies in the fact that agriculture contributes 18% of the country’s GDP while it employs almost around 50%(or more depending on which estimate you believe in) of its workforce. What this shows is that agriculture is not remunerative enough given that there are too many people dependant on it. It is also known that only 17% of farmers survive on income totally from agriculture. The rest do other things as well to make money.
Hence, truth be told India has many more farmers than it needs. People need to be moved away from agriculture. And that in turn means we need to create more jobs in other sectors. And that is clearly not happening. This is something that the latest economic survey points out: “Regardless of which data source is used, it seems clear that employment growth is lagging behind growth in the labour force. For example, according to the Census, between 2001 and 2011, labor force growth was 2.23 percent (male and female combined). This is lower than most estimates of employment growth in this decade of closer to 1.4 percent. Creating more rapid employment opportunities is clearly a major policy challenge.”
As per the Census the employment growth between 2001 and 2011 was at 1.8%. It was at 2.5% between 1991 and 2001. The Labour Bureau suggests that the employment growth between 2011-12 and 2013-2014 was at 1%.
The Congress led UPA was in power between May 2004 and May 2014. And it clearly did a lousy job of creating jobs. In fact, data from the last census tells us that nearly 4.7 crore Indians under the age of 25 are looking for jobs, but have not been able to find one. Who is responsible for this?
Once we take all this information into account, what it clearly tells us is that the garibi hatao rhetoric and the policies that have emanated from it, haven’t really worked.
It is time for the Congress(and all other political parties) to do this country a favour and move on from it. It is time to think jobs. But Rahul Gandhi is still stuck up garibi hatao. This even after taking a two month sabbatical.
In that sense, the Congress party is a bit like the Nirma washing powder advertisement, which worked beautifully for a long period of time. In all these years the ad has basically stayed the same. (I have watched it since television first came to Ranchi in 1984). But Nirma is no longer the company it used to be. And the same is true for the Congress.
It is time for both to change their jingle. 

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 20, 2015 

The new Janata Party will be a challenge for Modi in Bihar

Vivek Kaul

The year was 1977. The emergency had just ended. The opposition leaders who had been imprisoned during the course of the emergency had just released. They were holding a massive rally at the Ram Lila maidan.
It was a rainy day in Delhi and well past 9.30pm by the time Atal Bihari Vajpayee rose to speak. He was the star speaker for the evening and the people who had turned up at the rally had stayed back just to hear him.
To the shouts of “Indira Gandhi murdabad, Atal Bihari zindabad,” Vajpayee started his speech with a couplet:
“Baad muddat ke mile hain deewane,
Kehne sunne ko bahut hain afsane,
Khuli hawa mein zara saans to le lein,
kab tak rahegi aazadi kaun jaane.”
(It has been an age since we whom they call mad have had the courage to meet,
There are tales to tell and tales to hear,
But first let us breathe deeply of the free air,
For we know not how long our freedom will last). (Source: Tavleen Singh’s Durbar)

In the time to come all the major opposition parties came together and formed the Janata Party. This was the only way they could take on Indira Gandhi by ensuring that their votes did not split. The party won 295 seats in the Lok Sabha elections that followed and thus came to power. The largest number of 93 MPs were of the Jana Sangha (now the Bhartiya Janata Party) origin. Forty four MPs came from the Congress (O) party. Seventy one MPs came from Charan Singh’s Bhartiya Lok Dal. Jagjivan Ram’s Congress for Democracy brought in 28 MPs.
A large number of the Lok Sabha seats that the party won was limited to North India, given that the southern part of the country hadn’t really felt the ill-effects of the emergency implemented by Indira Gandhi as much as the north India had. Given this, Indira Gandhi’s Congress still managed to win 154 seats though they were wiped out in Uttar Pradesh with both Indira and her son Sanjay losing elections.
If one leaves out the Jana Sangha from this, the other parties were what we would call socialists, in the Indian sense of the term.
Nearly four decades later some of these socialists who were a part of the Janata Party have decided to come together again. This time to take on Narendra Modi. The parties which are merging together are Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal(United) Indian National Lok Dal of Om Prakash Chauthala, Janata Dal(Secular) of HD Deve Gowda and Kamal Morarka’s Samajwadi Janata Party.
Mulayam Singh Yadav has been announced as the head of the party in Parliament, though its name and symbol haven’t been decided as yet. The Times of India reports that the party is likely to be called Samajwadi Janata Dal with the cycle as its symbol (which is the current symbol of the Samajwadi party).
So how strong a challenge is this new party going to be to Narendra Modi? Will it be as strong as the Janata Party was to Indira Gandhi? The first thing we need to understand is that the party has been formed when the next Lok Sabha election is still four years away.
After the merger, the party will have 15 members in the Lok Sabha, which is minuscule to the 295 members that the Janata Party had. In the Rajya Sabha the party will have 30 members. In that sense, the party will provide very little challenge to Narendra Modi.
Further, the support of all the parties which are coming together is heavily localized. Samajwadi Party is strong in Uttar Pradesh. The Indian National Lok Dal is strong in Haryana and Dev Gowda’s Janata Dal(Secular) is strong in parts of Karanatka. Hence, to that extent no consolidation of votes can be expected against Narendra Modi.
The only exception to this is Bihar. In Bihar, both Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal(RJD) and Nitish’s Janata Dal (United)(JD(U)) are on a strong wicket. Data from the election commission shows that the combine of Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party(LJP) got 35.8% of the votes polled during the Lok Sabha elections last year.
The RJD and the Congress Party which fought the elections together got 20.1% and 8.4% of the votes respectively. The Janata Dal(United) which fought the elections separately got 15.8% of the votes. Hence, the vote percentage of JD(U) + RJD matches that of the BJP + LJP. Further, RJD+JD(U)+Congress got more votes than BJP + LJP. Nevertheless, since RJD+ Congress and JD(U) were not in alliance, these votes did not translate into Lok Sabha seats.
Things changed in the by-elections to 10 assembly seats that happened in August 2014. In these elections the JD(U) came together with the RJD+Congress and took on BJP+LJP. The data from the election commission shows that the RJD+Congress+JD(U) got 45.6% of the total votes polled. The BJP+LJP got 37.9% of the votes polled. Given that, this time JD(U) was not fighting the elections separately, the votes polled translated into assembly seats as well, unlike the Lok Sabha polls. The RJD+ Congress+ JD(U) got six out of the ten assembly seats.
Hence, in Bihar, given the way the caste combinations work, the new Janata Party can be a potent force to take on Modi. The trouble is that Lalu and Nitish, despite the claims that they make in public these days, do not get along with each other.
Nitish became the Chief Minister of Bihar in 2005, more than three decades after he entered politics in the early 1970s. And for the first half of his political career, he propped up Lalu Prasad Yadav even though he knew that Lalu wasn’t fit to govern. Journalist Sankarshan Thakur puts this question to Nitish in his book Single Man: “Why did you promote Laloo Yadav so actively in your early years?” he asked.
And surprisingly, Nitish gave an honest answer. As Thakur writes “’But where was there ever even the question of promoting Laloo Yadav?’ he mumbled…’We always knew what quality of man he was, utterly unfit to govern, totally lacking vision or focus.”
So why then did Nitish decide to support him? “There wasn’t any other choice at that time,’ Nitish countered…’We came from a certain kind of politics. Backward communities had to be given prime space and Laloo belonged to the most powerful section of Backwards, politically and numerically.”
And this logic still continues to remain valid. The next assembly elections in Bihar are scheduled for later this year is in November 2015. And the chief minister’s post will be a bone of contention between Lalu and Nitish. It remains to be seen whether the new party will be able to survive this.
In other states the new party may be able to cause some damage to Modi only if it comes together with the Congress. To conclude, the biggest challenge for the party will be to survive till the next Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The article originally appeared on Firstpost on April 16, 2015