Month: June 2016

The Middle Class Indian Man and His Search for a Benevolent Dictator

 

 

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“India needs a benevolent dictator.”

I have heard this being said over and over again, over the years.

Usually, the person saying it is a man.

Usually, he is a successful corporate type who is in the habit of driving his team to meet unreasonable goals set by the organisation.

Usually, he doesn’t like to take no for an answer.

Usually, he is looking to encash his ESOPs at the end of the year.

Usually, you will hear him say things like, this year we did Turkey, next year we plan to do New Zealand.

Usually his heart is in the right place. It beats for his country. It wants the country to do well. And in the process, he ends up saying the nonsense that he does.

In some cases, he is a Non-Resident Indian, living in the United States, the oldest and one of the most successful democracies in the world. In some cases, he is someone who has lived through Indira Gandhi’s emergency between 1975 and 1977 and is nostalgic about it.

“You know, trains ran on time,” he says. I don’t know if they did, but at least that is the argument that is offered.

And in some other cases, he opens the argument with the line: “Look at Singapore”.

So what is this Look at Singapore argument? Allow me to explain. As Arvind Pangariya writes in India—The Emerging Giant: “Countries, such as the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China…have attained high rates of growth under authoritarian regimes.”

India on the other hand almost always been a democracy since its independence in 1947. And on top, it has been one of the few countries which has managed to be a democracy almost all along. As Panagariya writes: “Along with Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Sri Lanka, India is only one of the four developing countries to have had democratically elected governments throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond…The remaining three countries…are all relatively tiny. The brief period of emergency rule—from June 26, 1975, to March 21,1977—in India may be viewed as representing a break in its democratic tradition.”

The people who argue in favour of benevolent dictators have basically this to say—countries in Asia that have done well, are those which have had autocratic regimes. India lost out because it was a democracy.

As Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations: “Of the eight countries that quadrupled their incomes between 1950 and 1990, two (Taiwan and Singapore) were ruled by dictators during the entire period, one (South Korea) was ruled by a dictator during most of it, two (Japan and Malta) were democracies throughout the period and three (Thailand, Portugal and Greece) waffled between autocracy and democracy.” China has also had an autocratic regime through its period of economic development through the late 1970s.

This is offered as evidence as to why India would have done much better if it had been run by a benevolent dictator and an autocratic regime. The trouble with this argument is that it looks at just one side of the equation—the countries which have had benevolent dictators and have done well. It doesn’t look at countries, which have had dictators and gone absolutely to the dogs.

The African continent is littered with examples of such countries. Closer to home, there is Pakistan. Look at the mess the country currently is in. Or look at what has happened in a country like Myanmar.

Economist William Easterly has done some interesting research in this area, which he summarises in a research paper titled Benevolent Autocrats. As he writes: “The probability that you are an autocrat IF you are a growth success is 90 percent. This probability seems to influence the discussion in favour of autocrats.”

But that is the wrong question to ask. The question that needs to be asked should be exactly the opposite—if a country is governed by an autocrat what are the chances that it will be a growth success? “The relevant probability is whether you are a growth success IF you are an autocrat, which is only 10 percent,” writes Easterly.

To put it simply—most fast growing nations are ruled by autocrats. Nevertheless, most autocracies do not grow fast. The point being, if the government in a country is being ruled by a dictator, there is no way to figure out in advance, whether he will turn out to be a disaster or be benevolent.

The question is why do so many educated middle class Indian men believe in the idea of a benevolent dictator then? (I know I am stereotyping here, but I have experienced this many times over the years).

I guess what behavioural economists call availability bias is at play here. As Leonard Mlodinow writes in The Drunkard’s Walk—How Randomness Rules Our Lives: “In reconstructing the past, we give unwarranted importance to memories that are most vivid and hence most available for retrieval. The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our views of the word by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.”

Air-crashes are an excellent example of this. As Jason Zweig writes in The Devil’s Financial Dictionary: “Flying is among the safest ways to travel, but on the rare occasions when an airplane does crash, the fireball on the runway is broadcast worldwide and burned into the brain of everyone who sees it.”

This leads people to believe that airplane travel is unsafe. But what they don’t realise is that the media does not report about the thousands of planes that land safely every day all over the world. It also does not report the many car crashes that happen all over the world every day, unless a celebrity is involved.

Availability bias comes into the picture with an event being over-reported. As Easterly writes: “One way this can happen are with an event that is over-reported relative to its actual frequency. A common example is that probability of death from murder is overestimated because of intensive coverage of murders by the media relative to other causes of death that are not as newsworthy (e.g. heart disease).”

When it comes to the idea of a benevolent dictator, this phenomenon is at play. Indians who go to countries like Singapore and China, see how much progress the country has made, and come to the conclusion that autocracy leads to economic growth. But these individuals never go to Pakistan, so that they can see that the opposite is also true. Or Myanmar for that matter.

The media with its stories of China’s progress also has a role to play. But then the stories of how much mess dictators have made in Africa, over the decades, never really make it to the Indian press.

The column was originally published in the Vivek Kaul Diary on June 6, 2016

What Sonu Nigam’s experiment tells us about multi-tasking

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Recently, the singer, Sonu Nigam, was a part of an interesting experiment. He disguised himself as a poor old man, went and sat on a road and started singing what is probably his most famous song till date (the title song of Kal Ho Na Ho).

Initially no one stopped to listen to his melodious singing. Gradually a few people gathered and in the end one youngster quietly passed him Rs 12 to have breakfast. But ultimately no one recognised that the old man sitting and singing on the street, was none other than Sonu Nigam.

A similar experiment was carried out by the Washington Post newspaper a few years back. In this experiment the Grammy Award winning violinist Joshua David Bell played his music incognito, at a subway station in Washington.

Bell played for 43 minutes. During the time he played, 1097 people crossed him. Of these, 27 people gave money and Bell managed to earn $32.17. In the end only one individual recognised Bell.

So what is the point of these experiments? Before I get around to answering this question, I want to talk about the famous invisible gorilla experiment. The crime fiction writer Jorn Lier Horst describes the experiment in his book Ordeal: “There’s a film of a basketball court with five players in each team…Before they start the film, you are told to count how many times the players in white throw the ball to one another. In the middle of the game, a man in a gorilla costume comes on to the pitch. Afterwards, there are no questions about how many passes there were, but whether anyone noticed anything else.”

As it turns out, many people don’t notice the gorilla, even though the individual wearing the gorilla stays on the screen for a total of 9 seconds. Over the years, many people have seen the experiment and around half of them do not see the gorilla, as they are busy counting how many times the players wearing white throw the ball at another.

As Margaret Heffernan writes in Wilful Blindness – Why We Ignore the Obvious At Our Peril: “The experiment has been shown repeatedly, around the world, in front of diverse audiences. I first saw it in Dublin, in an audience full of executives. Like them, I was so focussed on counting the passes I never saw the gorilla.”

In fact, people who miss the gorilla, refuse to believe that he appeared in the video at all. As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the gorilla are initially sure that it was not there—they cannot imagine missing such a striking event.”

What does the experiment tell us? As Horst writes: “It demonstrates how unobservant we are. That something quite crucial can be missed because we are engrossed in something else…And that’s mainly how it is when we are preoccupied.”

The reason many people do not see the invisible gorilla is the same reason why people did not recognise Nigam singing on the road or Bell playing in the subway station. They were too busy to notice these excellent artists. They were in a hurry to reach somewhere in case of Nigam, and too catch a local train in case of Bell.

As Kahneman writes: “Intense focussing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention…The gorilla study illustrates two important facts of our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

A good example of this blindness these days is people being absorbed with their mobile phones while walking on the road or crossing the street. They are busy WhatsApping, listening to music or just calling someone. And in a few cases, they are totally blind to the oncoming traffic and accidents do happen.

The more important point being that the ability of human beings to do two things at the same time, is extremely limited. Nevertheless, most people don’t realise this.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He can be reached at [email protected])

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on June 8, 2016

Problem with Robots is…

Sony_Qrio_RobototIn the recent past, there have been a spate of news-reports talking about robots taking over manufacturing. A recent news-report talked about the German shoemaker Adidas manufacturing shoes in its home country after more than two decades.

But instead of using human beings it has decided to use robots. Another news-report points out that Foxconn, a company which manufactures mobile phones for both Samsung and Apple, is replacing 60,000 workers with robots. Closer to home, information technology companies have also talked about robots taking over low-end activities.

On the face of it, it makes immense sense for a company to replace a human being with a robot. Robots can work all the time. They don’t sleep. They are not moody and there are no days when they don’t feel like working. They don’t need lunch and dinner breaks. They don’t need to go to the loo. And they don’t need to be paid every month or given an increment every year, either.

As Rutger Bergman writes in Utopia for Realists: “Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at the high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in next twenty years.”

He then quotes a New York university professor as saying: “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame.”

The idea that machines will take over human jobs is nothing new. It has been around for the past two centuries. But nothing of that sort has happened as productivity levels (or output for every unit of input) have gone up. Nevertheless, it takes fewer and fewer employees now to create a successful business than it did in the past.

Take the case of the Indian manufacturing sector and the share of population it employs in various states. As Amit Amirapu and Arvind Subramanian write in a 2015 research paper titled Manufacturing or Services? An Indian Illustration of a Development Dilemma: “No major India state has achieved more than 6.2% of employment from registered manufacturing in the last 30 years, and many major states peaked at less than half that… most states have not been experiencing secular growth in employment shares over time (the only exceptions are Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and – possibly – Karnataka).”

What this basically means is that even though the absolute size of the manufacturing sector in India has gone up over the years, the proportion of the population working for it, hasn’t. This is primarily because more and more manufacturing now is carried out by machines rather than human beings. In the Indian case, one of the major reasons are the hare-brained labour laws that companies need to follow.

But globally the basic reason is different. As Bergman writes: “The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create successful businesses, meaning when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.”

Take the case of Kodak, the company that invented the digital camera. In the 1980s, it employed 1.45 lakh people. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012. On the other hand, Instagram, the Kodak of this era, had just thirteen employees on its rolls, and was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.

Nevertheless, there is a basic problem with all this, best explained through this example. As Bergman writes: “When Henry Ford’s grandson gave labour union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”

The point being if people don’t have a job, they don’t have any income or not much income. And in that situation they are going to buy only the most basic stuff that they require for survival. They will not have money to spend on all the goods being manufactured by companies which use robots.

And therein lies the basic problem with robots.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He can be reached at [email protected])

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on June 1, 2016

Why MTNL Cannot Be Turned Around

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Normally I don’t write on individual companies, so today’s column is a bit of an exception to that. Today I plan to discuss the annual results of the government owned Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd.(MTNL), and why it cannot be turned around.

The cue for this column lies in the fact that for the period of January to March 2016, the company made a profit of Rs 174.58 crore. The results were declared on May 30, 2016. On the same day, the telecom minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, told The Economic Times, that the telecom department is “also working on to improve state-run Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL)”.

Does that mean MTNL can be turned around? The answer is no. There is a fundamental problem with the way the company is run, and I have my doubts on whether that can be corrected. But before we get into that, let me first try and explain how did the company end up with a profit of Rs 174.58 crore during the last three months of 2015-2016.

There were basically two entries that helped the company come up with a net profit. The other income for the period stood at Rs 580.60 crore. Other income essentially means the money that a company earns from activities other than the normal business operations.

The company earned Rs 458.04 crore from surrendering the spectrum it used for its CDMA operations, back to the government. The company discontinued its CDMA operations from March 1, 2016, onwards. Further, taxes of Rs 492.96 crore for an earlier period have been written back. These two items essentially helped the firm come up with a net profit of Rs 174.58 crore.

The annual loss of the firm for 2015-2016 stood at Rs 2,012.24 crore. This is lower than the losses of Rs 2,901.16 crore in 2014-2015. This has been achieved through the surrendering of the CDMA spectrum and a tax write back. If these two things hadn’t happened, the losses of the company in 2015-2016, would have been similar to the losses in 2014-2015.

Now let’s talk about the fundamental problem that the company faces and why the telecom minister Ravi Shanker Prasad, cannot turnaround the company, despite his best intentions. Allow me to explain.

For the year 2015-2016, the company’s income from operations (which does not include its other income) stood at Rs 3,197.40 crore. Of this, Rs 2,310.76 crore went towards employee benefits. A further, Rs 343.68 crore went towards employee benefits for retirement. Hence, of the Rs 3,197.40 crore operational income of the company, a total of Rs 2,654.44 crore went towards employee benefits.

This basically means that 83% of the company’s income from operations went towards meeting employee cost. This is not an anomaly. In 2014-2015, employee cost formed around 78% of the company’s income from operations. Hence, employee cost as a proportion of income from operations has gone up by a whopping 500 basis points during the course of just one financial year. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

How does this compare with competition? Let’s look at the numbers of Bharti Airtel. In 2015-2016. The income from operations of the company stood at Rs 60,300.2 crore. This is close to 19 times the total income from operations of MTNL.

And how much money did the company spend on employee benefits? Rs 1,869.3 crore. This is nearly 30% lower than the employee benefits expenses of MTNL. So what does this mean? It means that Airtel earned 19 times MTNL’s income from operations by spending 30% lesser on its employees.

Further, Airtel’s employee cost in 2015-2016 was 3.1% of its income from operations. MTNL’s was at 83%. And how did things look for Airtel in 2014-2015? The employee benefit expenses of Airtel were at 3.05% of its income from operations. For MTNL, the figure was 78%. Hence, the employee benefit costs of Airtel went up by 5 basis points, during the course of one financial year, whereas that of MTNL went up by 500 basis points.

This is what MTNL is competing against. For it to be viable, the employee cost as a proportion of income from operations, will have to come down dramatically. That can only happen in two ways—salaries being slashed or employees being fired. The first option can be ruled out. The second option will have its own share of costs.

Actually, there is a third way as well i.e. if the company manages to increase its income from operations. But given the brand image that the company has among consumers that seems to be difficult. As they used to say in the good old days when MTNL was a monopoly, MTNL equals Mera Telephone Nahi Lagta. The company had a branding problem back then as well, but the consumer did not have choice. Now he does and he has executed it.

Also, MTNL operates in Delhi and Mumbai, the two biggest and the two toughest telephone markets in the country. While it goes about restructuring (assuming that it does), the other companies won’t be sitting idle doing nothing. While excuses can still be made for keeping Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd(BSNL) going, there is none to keep MTNL running.

It’s time the government shuts down the company and starts monetising its assets. MTNL has offices in premier areas of Mumbai and Delhi. In Mumbai, two offices in Prabhadevi (Central Mumbai) and Cumbala Hill (South Mumbai) can be sold at a very good price. The money thus earned could be spent towards improving the physical infrastructure of the country.

It’s time the country stopped subsidising the lives of a fe

Normally I don’t write on individual companies, so today’s column is a bit of an exception to that. Today I plan to discuss the annual results of the government owned Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd.(MTNL), and why it cannot be turned around.

The cue for this column lies in the fact that for the period of January to March 2016, the company made a profit of Rs 174.58 crore. The results were declared on May 30, 2016. On the same day, the telecom minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, told The Economic Times, that the telecom department is “also working on to improve state-run Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL)”.

Does that mean MTNL can be turned around? The answer is no. There is a fundamental problem with the way the company is run, and I have my doubts on whether that can be corrected. But before we get into that, let me first try and explain how did the company end up with a profit of Rs 174.58 crore during the last three months of 2015-2016.

There were basically two entries that helped the company come up with a net profit. The other income for the period stood at Rs 580.60 crore. Other income essentially means the money that a company earns from activities other than the normal business operations.

The company earned Rs 458.04 crore from surrendering the spectrum it used for its CDMA operations, back to the government. The company discontinued its CDMA operations from March 1, 2016, onwards. Further, taxes of Rs 492.96 crore for an earlier period have been written back. These two items essentially helped the firm come up with a net profit of Rs 174.58 crore.

The annual loss of the firm for 2015-2016 stood at Rs 2,012.24 crore. This is lower than the losses of Rs 2,901.16 crore in 2014-2015. This has been achieved through the surrendering of the CDMA spectrum and a tax write back. If these two things hadn’t happened, the losses of the company in 2015-2016, would have been similar to the losses in 2014-2015.

Now let’s talk about the fundamental problem that the company faces and why the telecom minister Ravi Shanker Prasad, cannot turnaround the company, despite his best intentions. Allow me to explain.

For the year 2015-2016, the company’s income from operations (which does not include its other income) stood at Rs 3,197.40 crore. Of this, Rs 2,310.76 crore went towards employee benefits. A further, Rs 343.68 crore went towards employee benefits for retirement. Hence, of the Rs 3,197.40 crore operational income of the company, a total of Rs 2,654.44 crore went towards employee benefits.

This basically means that 83% of the company’s income from operations went towards meeting employee cost. This is not an anomaly. In 2014-2015, employee cost formed around 78% of the company’s income from operations. Hence, employee cost as a proportion of income from operations has gone up by a whopping 500 basis points during the course of just one financial year. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

How does this compare with competition? Let’s look at the numbers of Bharti Airtel. In 2015-2016. The income from operations of the company stood at Rs 60,300.2 crore. This is close to 19 times the total income from operations of MTNL.

And how much money did the company spend on employee benefits? Rs 1,869.3 crore. This is nearly 30% lower than the employee benefits expenses of MTNL. So what does this mean? It means that Airtel earned 19 times MTNL’s income from operations by spending 30% lesser on its employees.

Further, Airtel’s employee cost in 2015-2016 was 3.1% of its income from operations. MTNL’s was at 83%. And how did things look for Airtel in 2014-2015? The employee benefit expenses of Airtel were at 3.05% of its income from operations. For MTNL, the figure was 78%. Hence, the employee benefit costs of Airtel went up by 5 basis points, during the course of one financial year, whereas that of MTNL went up by 500 basis points.

This is what MTNL is competing against. For it to be viable, the employee cost as a proportion of income from operations, will have to come down dramatically. That can only happen in two ways—salaries being slashed or employees being fired. The first option can be ruled out. The second option will have its own share of costs.

Actually, there is a third way as well i.e. if the company manages to increase its income from operations. But given the brand image that the company has among consumers that seems to be difficult. As they used to say in the good old days when MTNL was a monopoly, MTNL equals Mera Telephone Nahi Lagta. The company had a branding problem back then as well, but the consumer did not have choice. Now he does and he has executed it.

Also, MTNL operates in Delhi and Mumbai, the two biggest and the two toughest telephone markets in the country. While it goes about restructuring (assuming that it does), the other companies won’t be sitting idle doing nothing. While excuses can still be made for keeping Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd(BSNL) going, there is none to keep MTNL running.

It’s time the government shuts down the company and starts monetising its assets. MTNL has offices in premier areas of Mumbai and Delhi. In Mumbai, two offices in Prabhadevi (Central Mumbai) and Cumbala Hill (South Mumbai) can be sold at a very good price. The money thus earned could be spent towards improving the physical infrastructure of the country.

It’s time the country stopped subsidising the lives of a few thousand individuals that MTNL employs.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on June 2, 2016

 

India’s Crony Socialism and Why Congress Mukt Bharat Will Remain a Dream

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The prime minister Narendra Modi in a recent interview to the Wall Street Journal said: “Actually, in any developing country in the world, both the public sector and the private sector have a very important role to play. You can’t suddenly get rid of the public sector, nor should you. “

In this column we will concentrate on the second sentence i.e. you can’t suddenly get rid of the public sector.

Let’s look at the losses of the loss making public sector units over the last twenty years. As can be seen, the losses have gone up from Rs 5,188 crore per year to Rs 27,360 crore per year. While the number of loss-making public sector enterprises came down over the years, it has started to go up again. Also, it needs to be stated here that I stopped in 1995-1996 because I couldn’t find data before that.

YearTotal losses of loss making PSEs (in Rs crore)Number of loss making  PSEs
1995-19965,188102
1996-19975,939104
1997-19986,697100
1998-19999,305107
1999-200010,302105
2000-200112,841110
2001-200210,454109
2002-200310,972105
2003-20048,52289
2004-20059,00379
2005-20066,84563
2006-20078,52661
2007-200810,30354
2008-200914,62155
2009-201016,23160
2010-201121,81762
2011-201227,68364
2012-201328,56279
2013-201421,34170
2014-201527,36077
Source: Public Sector Enterprises Surveys

 

The public sector enterprises have lost a total of Rs 2,72,512 crore over the last twenty years. Of course, this calculation has got very little meaning given that it does not take inflation into account. If inflation were to be taken into account, we would be expressing the losses of 1995-1996, 1996-1997 and so on, by adjusting them for inflation. This would be a horribly big number.

The broader point here is that public sector enterprises have been losing money for many years now. This is a problem that has been left unaddressed by a series of governments. So, when Modi says that you cannot suddenly get rid of the public sector, what he is not taking into account is the fact that these companies have been bleeding for many many years.

In many cases, the government makes up for these losses, once the networth (i.e. assets minus liabilities) of the company has been eroded. And this money can easily be used somewhere else.

Up until, May 2014, India had an era of coalition governments. And this limited the ability of the government to do anything about these loss making companies. Each loss-making public sector enterprise comes under a ministry and what is a ministry without a few public sector enterprises under it. The current Modi government has no pressures of a coalition government.

Further, most political parties have trade unions affiliated to them and no government likes to take them on. Hence, shutting down a public sector enterprise remains difficult.

As of 2013-2014, a total of 2.5 lakh people worked for sick public sector enterprises. A public sector enterprise is considered sick if its accumulated losses at the end of a given financial year are equal to more than 50% of its average networth in the four preceding years. Of course, the number of people working for loss making public sector enterprises would be more than 2.5 lakh. But it still forms an insignificant portion of the population.

The question is why is the whole county subsidising these 2.5 lakh people? Or is this another version of sabka saath sabka vikas? The general impression is that such a waste of money, hurts only the income tax payers, who form an insignificant portion of the population and hence, the government does not bother about them.

This is incorrect. While everyone doesn’t pay income tax, people do pay indirect taxes. And by subsidizing these sick and loss making public sector enterprises, the government is essentially wasting this money. In fact, the government seems to have the same view as well.

 

As the Economic Survey of 2015-2016 points out: “Those paying the costs could well be the poor. They pay taxes, even if only indirect ones. And they may also have to bear the burden of paying higher prices while getting substandard goods and services from inefficient firms which should have exited, but haven’t.”
Other than this, subsidizing these losses means that the government has lesser money to spend on other things, given that it has only so much money to spend. Let’s take the case of money that the government spends on elementary education (classes I to VIII). The following table shows the money spent on elementary education between 1997-198 and 2014-2015.

 

YearMoney spent on elementary education (in Rs crore)Total losses of loss making PSEs in Rs crore)
1997-19982,2676,697
1998-19992,7439,305
1999-20002,85410,302
2000-20013,15212,841
2001-20023,57710,454
2002-20034,30510,972
2003-20045,2198,522
2004-20057,2289,003
2005-200611,2206,845
2006-200715,3718,526
2007-200818,44010,303
2008-200919,48914,621
2009-201018,44816,231
2010-201129,31021,817
2011-201231,67327,683
2012-201335,92928,562
2013-201436,50721,341
2014-201535,51727,360
Note: The numbers from 2008-2009 onwards are actual numbers. The numbers before that are revised estimates
Source: Indiabudget.nic.in

 

If one looks at the numbers between 1997-1998 and 2004-2005, the losses of public sector enterprises were much more than India’s elementary education budget. After that, the allocation to elementary education has gone up. Nevertheless, the losses of public sector enterprises continue to remain huge. And this isn’t good.

What is more necessary, subsidizing people who work for loss making public sector enterprises or educating India’s children? Of course, educating India’s children. So, why is so much money being wasted then on loss-making public sector enterprises?

Also, it needs to be stated here that simply spending more money is not a solution to the problem. The money needs to be well spent as well. In fact, since the Right to Education became a reality in April 2010, the learning levels of India’s school children have actually gone down. (This remains another topic to be discussed on another day).

The crony socialism of continuing to run loss making public sector enterprises which was initiated by the Congress party, continues to survive. Prime minister Modi told that Wall Street Journal that public sector enterprises couldn’t be done away with suddenly.

Actually, there is nothing sudden about the entire problem. These companies have been losing money for many years. And some of them should have been shut down a long-time back. But they haven’t been. And from what he said, it is unlikely that Modi will shut them down as well.

This means that the crony socialism of the Congress will continue to thrive. Politically, Congress mukt Bharat, might become a reality, but when it comes to economics, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

At least, in India.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on June 1, 2016.