Business

Kingfisher debacle to United Spirits row: Charting out the great fall of Vijay Mallya

vijay-mallya1Vivek Kaul

Vijay Mallya is too much of a stiff upper lip to have ever read the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. But if he has, he would know, that one of Ghalib’s most famous couplets, fits the current situation that Mallya is in, very well.
Sometime in the nineteenth century Ghalib wrote:

Nikalna khuld se aadam ka soonte aaye hain lekin
Bahot be-aabru hokar tere kooche se hum nikle

(We have heard about the dismissal of Adam from Heaven,
With more humiliation, I left the street on which you live…

Source of translation: https://medium.com/@herahussain/poetry-in-the-east-a-journey-of-discovery-of-urdu-poetry-6197767f41b4)

The board of United Spirits Ltd, India’s largest liquor company, has asked Mallya to step down as the Chairman of the company. The liquor baron may have been involved in financial irregularities as per an internal probe carried out by the company.
In a press release dated April 25, 2015, the company said: “The inquiry covered various matters, including certain doubtful receivables, advances and deposits. The inquiry revealed that between 2010 and 2013, funds involved in many of these transactions were diverted from the Company and/or its subsidiaries to certain UB Group companies, including in particular, Kingfisher Airlines Limited…The inquiry also suggests that the manner in which certain transactions were conducted, prima facie, indicates various improprieties and legal violations.”
Mallya in true Indian style has refused to bow out. ““All I wish to say is that I intend to continue as chairman of USL in the normal manner. This includes chairing monthly operating review meetings and board meetings,” he told the Mint newspaper.
Where does this confidence come from? Mallya personally holds 0.01% shares in United Spirits. United Breweries Holdings Ltd (controlled by Mallya) holds 2.90%. Other investment companies controlled by Mallya own around another 1.18%. So Mallya’s holding in United Spirits is down to a little over 4%.
Diageo, the British company to which Mallya sold United Spirits, owns 54.78% of United Spirits. Mallya’s confidence stems from the fact that while selling United Spirits, Mallya and Diageo entered into an agreement, as per which Diageo has to endorse Mallya as the Chairman of United Spirits. This, till Mallya has a stake in United Spirits.
Given this, the stage is set out for a messy legal battle, which will continue for sometime to come. Nevertheless, the question is how did Mallya end up in the mess that he has? One reason was that he took his flamboyant style a little too seriously and ended up starting Kingfisher Airlines in 2005.
Airlines are huge cash guzzlers. As Warren Buffett has said in the past: “The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by growth when they should have been repelled by it.”
Kingfisher Airlines became Mallya’s bottomless pit. Mallya was in a rush to buy planes. He had plans of buying one Airbus A-320 every month until March 2012. All this needed a lot of money. Mallya loaded up on debt from public sector banks. At the same time, Mallya being Mallya could not have run a low cost airline. In a October 2012 article, Tehalka quotes an aviation sector CEO as saying: “Food served in KFA[Kingfisher Airlines], recalls an aviation sector CEO, was about Rs 700-800 per passenger compared to Rs 300 of Jet’s.”
Other than this Mallya was in a hurry to fly Kingfisher to international destinations. A domestic airline was allowed to do that only once it had completed five years of operation. That meant that Kingfisher would be allowed to fly abroad only by 2010. Mallya did not have the patience to wait for that long. He bought Air Deccan in 2007 to get around the regulation. He ended up overpaying for the low cost airline.
Further, he rebranded Air Deccan as Kingfisher Red. By doing this he diluted the premier positioning that Kingfisher Airlines had acquired in the minds of the consumer. The philosophy required to run a premium brand is totally different in comparison to the philosophy required to run a low cost brand. Hence, Mallya buying Air Deccan was mistake. And then changing its name to Kingfisher Red was an even bigger mistake.
So in the end this did not work and Mallya decided to close down Kingfisher Red. He explained it by saying that “We are doing away with Kingfisher Red, we do not want to compete in the low-cost segment. We cannot continue to fly and make losses, but we have to be judicious to give choice to our customers.”
It is very difficult to run a full-service airline as well as a low cost airline at the same time. The basic philosophy required in running these two kind of careers is completely different from one another. The full service Kingfisher also soon ran into trouble leaving Mallya with a lot of debt. He had got terrible publicity for not paying the salaries of employees of Kingfisher Airlines.
Other than running the liquor and the airline business, Mallya also has interests in real estate. Over and above this, he also indulged in expensive hobbies by buying a formula one and an IPL cricket team. Running an airline is a full time business and can’t be done in a part-time sort of way which Mallya did.
The best Indian companies in the last few decades have made money by concentrating on one line of business. Airtel made money in telecom. It did not make money trying to sell us insurance and mutual funds. The same stands true about DLF. Tata, Birla and Ambani, all lost money in the retail business. Businesses over the years have become more complicated. And just because a promoter has been good at one particular business doesn’t mean it will be good at another totally unrelated business. Mallya did the same with his main liquor business, which he is now losing control of.
Over the last few years, Mallya has been battling the banks which have been going after his assets, for all the debt that is unpaid. To conclude, Mallya has always been too busy living his flamboyant lifestyle and that seems to have caught up with his businesses in the end.

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

The column originally appeared on www.Firstpost.com on Apr 27, 2015

Indian firms are not creating enough jobs and the reason is restrictive labour laws

220px-Arvind_Panagariya

Vivek Kaul

Arvind Panagariya, the vice chairman of the NITI Ayog, recently said that Indian companies do not invest in industries which have the potential to employ a lot of people or what economists refer to as labour-intensive sectors. “Here is my charge to you: if I look around, none of you invest in industries, in sectors that would generate lots of employment; all of you just run away from hiring purpose,” Panagariya said.
Every month more than a million Indians are entering the workforce. As Panagariya put it: “Every year, 12 million enter the labour force. What is your plan for the country so that more people are employed? We really need to think. You know the ground conditions; why you are not investing in sectors which are more labour-intensive such as food processing, electronic assembly, leather products.”
The question that Panagariya was asking is why do Indian businesses shy away from investing in labour intensive sectors? This has led to a situation where the growth in labour force in India has been much faster than the rate at which jobs are being created.
As 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.”
This slow growth in jobs has happened despite the Indian economy growing at a very fast rate for most of the period between 2001 and 2011. One obvious reason as Panagariya explained is the reluctance of Indian businesses to invest in sectors that are labour intensive. And there are reasons for the same.

The labour laws in India remain very restrictive. In their book India’s Tryst with Destiny Jagdish Bhagwati and Panagariya recount a story told to them by the economist Ajay Shah. Shah, asked a leading Indian industrialist about why he did not enter the apparel sector, given that he was already backward integrated and made yarn and cloth. “The industrialist replied that with the low profit margins in apparel, this would be worth while only if he operated on the scale of 100,000 workers. But this would not be practical in view of India’s restrictive labour laws.”
Labour comes under the concurrent list of the Indian constitution i.e. both central and state governments can make laws on it. This has led to a situation where there are a surfeit of labour laws which companies need to follow. As Bhagwati and Panagariya write: “The ministry of labour lists as many as fifty-two independent Central government Acts in the area of labour. According to Amit Mitra (the finance minister of West Bengal and a former business lobbyist), there exist another 150 state-level laws in India. This count places the total number of labour laws in India at approximately 200. Compounding the confusion created by this multitude of laws is the fact that they are not entirely consistent with one another, leading a wit to remark that you cannot implement Indian labour laws 100 per cent without violating 20 per cent of them.”
This explains why Indian businessmen stay away from labour-intensive businesses. It also explains why Indian businesses start small and continue to remain small. As Bhagwati and Panagariya point out: “As the firm size rises from six regular workers towards 100, at no point between these two thresholds is the saving in manufacturing costs sufficiently large to pay for the extra cost of satisfying the laws”.
This means many firms that can grow bigger choose not to and in the process don’t create jobs that they would have otherwise. The textile sector is a very good example where most Indian firms continue to remain small. 92.4% of workers in this sector work with small firms which have forty-nine or less workers. Now compare this to China where large and medium firms make up around 87.7% of the employment in the apparel sector.
In fact, even Bangladesh has overtaken India in the textiles sector. As Mihir S. Sharma writes in Restart—The Last Chance for the Indian Economy: “Before the expansion of trade thanks to new international rules in the twenty-first century, India made $10 billion from textile exports, and Bangladesh $8 billion. Today India makes $12 billion—and Bangladesh $21 billion.”
So what happened here? The textile industry, explains Sharma, needs to turnaround big orders quickly and efficiently. “Really long assembly lines still matter in textiles: in some cases, 100 people can sequentially work to make a pair of trousers in least time. In Bangladesh, the average number of people in a factory is between 300 and 400; in the South Indian textiles hub of Tirupur, it’s around 50,” writes Sharma.
To allow Indian businesses to grow bigger, the government will have to prune down its long list of labour laws. But politically that remains a very difficult thing to do. Further, research shows that new and young businesses create the maximum jobs. As an OECD research paper points out: “SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) account for 60 to 70 per cent of jobs in most OECD countries, with a particularly large share in Italy and Japan, and a relatively smaller share in the United States. Throughout they also account for a disproportionately large share of new jobs, especially in those countries which have displayed a strong employment record, including the United States and the Netherlands. Some evidence points also to the importance of age, rather than size, in job creation: young firms generate more than their share of employment.”
This can only happen in India if the ease of doing business and starting a new business goes up in the years to come. To conclude, Mr Panagariya asked a question for which he already had the answer.

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

The article originally appeared on Firspost on April 15, 2015 

Why Modi’s dream of acche din will continue to remain a dream

narendra_modi
Sushma Swaraj, the minister of external affairs, must be one unhappy woman these days. This, coming from the fact that prime minister Narendra Modi among other things is also India’s real minister of external affairs.
Modi is currently touring Germany, after having visited France. In an op-ed in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the prime minister wrote: “We have re-energised the Indian growth engine. The credibility of our economy has been restored. India is once again poised for rapid growth and development…It is the only emerging economy where growth rate is rising. The prospects are even better.”
Prime ministers need to say such “optimistic” things when they go on foreign visits. But things on the ground level in India are not very different than they have been in the past. Take corporate performance for one. In a research note released last week Crisil Research expects “India Inc.’s revenue growth to slip to a 7-quarter low of 2.5 per cent on a year-on-year (y-o-y) basis,” for the period between January to March 2015. This is less than half the growth of 5.4% seen in the period October to December 2014.
Crisil believes that the steel sector will see revenue declines of 10-11%. The petrochemicals industry will see a revenue decline of 20-22% on account of drop in global crude oil prices. “Growth for construction and capital goods sectors’ will continue to remain sluggish due to lower order backlog and slow project execution,” the research note points out.
The revenues of the automobile sector are expected to grow by around 6%. “While sales of cars and medium & heavy commercial vehicles have picked up, muted growth in international businesses and the two wheeler space will impact the topline.” The two wheeler companies are not expected to do well primarily because of the non-seasonal rains in large parts of the country which will impact the production of the rabi crop. This will dent farm incomes.
As Crisil Research points out: “Domestic consumption and export-oriented sectors are likely to outperform but, here too, sectors heavily dependent on rural consumption such as motorcycles, tractors, and FMCG have been facing severe pressure on volumes as unseasonal weather conditions and slow growth in crop prices have dented farm incomes.”
This will have an impact on the Fast Moving Consumer Goods(FMCG) sector as well. Crisil forecasts this sector to grow at 8-9% during the period January to March 2015. The sector had grown at close to 14% in between April and September 2014, the first half of the last financial year.
What this clearly tells us is that the performance of the Indian companies will remain weak during the period January to March 2015. What is interesting is that before Narendra Modi came to power, corporate performance had been relatively stronger than it is now. During the period April to June 2014 (the first quarter of the last financial year) the revenues had grown by 12.8%. In each of the three quarters before that, the revenues had grown at higher than 10%.
Since July 2014, the revenue growth started to fall and has continued to fall. Modi came to power on May 26, 2014. Corporate growth is a function of many factors and just blaming the Modi government for it is not fair. But the claim that Modi made in Germany that “ we have re-energised the Indian growth engine,” is not correct either. Without growth in company revenues, there is no way the overall Indian economic growth can be re-energised. Both are closely linked.
Further, if sustainable economic growth is to be created jobs need to be created to employ India’s burgeoning workforce. Sample this—Every year up till 2030, 13 million Indians will enter the workforce. This means more than a million Indians are entering the workforce every month. And if enough new jobs are created for them, economic growth will automatically happen.
But is that the case? Are enough jobs being created? The trouble on this front is that India does not have good data on employment. In fact, the latest economic survey makes this point: “The data on longer-term employment trends are difficult to interpret because of the bewildering multiplicity of data sources, methodology and coverage.”
Despite this, some broad inferences can be made by looking at data from multiple data sources. (I will spare you the details here. But anyone interested in the details can refer to Box 1.3 Employment Growth and Employment Elasticity: What is the Evidence? In Volume 1 of the Economic Survey).
As the 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.”
This is a major challenge for the Modi government and honestly it doesn’t seem to have done much on this front. Jobs are essentially created by small entrepreneurs as they grow big. The labour laws in India essentially ensure that most firms start small and continue to stay small. For this anomaly to be corrected, India’s labour laws need to be simplified. Nothing has happened on this front at the central level, since Narendra Modi came to power.
Over and above this, the entire process of starting and running a business in India is not easy. As per the Ease of Doing Business ranking India ranks 142 in a list of 189 countries. When it comes to the ease of starting a new business it comes in 158th. When it comes to enforcing contracts India comes in 186th out of 189 countries.
What this clearly tells us is that the entire Indian system works against an individual wanting to establish and run a business. What it also tells us is that in order to run a business in India you need to be well connected and that explains the surfeit of crony capitalists who do well in India.
If jobs are to be created the ease with which a business can be started and operated in India needs to be improved. Sadly, nothing much has happened on that front despite the so called dynamism of Narendra Modi. And unless this changes, the entire dream of acche din will continue to be just that. 

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Apr 14, 2015

The Indian Hustler

Ramalinga_Raju_at_the_2008_Indian_Economic_SummitVivek Kaul

At the heart of it most scams are very simple—Satyam was no different. Sometime in 2003, B Ramalinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services started over-declaring revenues of the company. The process continued till 2008. On January 7, 2009, Raju in a letter to the board of directors of the company admitted to fudging the accounts of Satyam.
Between 2003 and 2008, Raju over-declared revenues of the company by creating fictitious clients. Once he had over-declared revenues he automatically ended up over-declaring profits. Over-declared profits had to be invested somewhere. This led to the creation of fictitious bank statements and fixed deposit receipts. With a rapid advancement in the quality of colour printers, creating fictitious bank statements wouldn’t have been very difficult.
In his letter to the board, Raju admitted that the cash and bank balances were hugely overstated. The cash and bank balances of the company as on September 30, 2008(the last time the company declared quarterly results) were at Rs 5,313 crore. Th actual number was at a much lower Rs 273 crore. More than half a decade of declaring fictitious profits had led to a massive jump in the cash and bank balances of the company. But the number, like the profits of the company, was fictitious.
The company was guzzling whatever “real” cash it had at a very fast rate. By the time January 2009 started, the company’s actual cash and bank balance of the company would have been much lower than Rs 273 crore.
One of the theories put forward after Raju admitted to all the wrongdoings in the letter was that only when he realized that the company wouldn’t have enough money to keep paying salaries to its employees did he decide to come out with the truth. As Raju said in his letter: “The company had to carry additional resources and assets to justify higher level of operations…It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.”
The irony is that Raju had to get off the tiger, and he still hasn’t been eaten. Like all big businessmen in India, Raju is also a survivor. A special court in Hyderabad has found him and nine others guilty of cheating, criminal breach of trust, destruction of evidence and forgery. The court pronounced a seven year-jail term for the founder and also imposed a Rs 5 crore fine on him.
It took the judicial system six years and three months to sentence Raju. And this is not the end of it. The decision will be challenged in higher courts and the process will continue for a while.
The question I want to explore in this column is the timing of Raju’s confession. Raju sent a tell-all letter to the Satyam Board in January 2009. Why didn’t he do the same in January 2008? Or even earlier, for that matter, is a question worth asking.
The probable reason is that Raju was confident enough of pulling off the scam till he wasn’t. And why is that? It is worth remembering that between 2003 and 2008, the stock market in India had a huge bull run. The economy was also booming. And in such a scenario, when the financial system is flush with money, it is easy to keep a scam going.
As economic historian Charles Kindleberger writes in Manias, Panics and Crashes: “The propensities to swindle and be swindled run parallel to the propensity to speculate during a boom.” This precisely what Ramalinga Raju was busy doing.
The stock market started crashing from early 2008, due the advent of what we now call the global financial crisis. And because of this, money wasn’t as easy to raise as was the case earlier. Raju tried to plug the huge gap in Satyam’s balance sheet by buying out two real estate firms Maytas Properties and Maytras Infra. Both these firms were owned by his family (Maytas is the opposite of Satyam).
But by late 2008, an era of easy money had come to an end. And sham transactions were not as easy to pull through. The idea here was to use Satyam’s fake cash and bank balances to buy out the real estate firms and thus have “real” assets on the balance sheet. As Raju wrote in the letter: “ The aborted Maytas acquisition deal was the last attempt to fill the fictitious assets with real ones…Once Satyam’s problem was solved, it was hoped that Maytas’ payments can be delayed.” But this deal fell through after the independent directors on the Satyam board raised issues about an IT company taking over real estate assets. In fact, if Raju had tried to push this deal through a year earlier, chances are that the board might have agreed, given that the going was good at that point of time. And when the going is good no one wants to spoil the party by asking inconvenient questions.
As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith writes in The Great Crash 1929: “At any given time there exists an inventory of undisclosed embezzlement. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. In good times people are relaxed ,trusting, and money is plentiful. … Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. … Just as the (stock market boom) accelerated the rate of growth (of embezzlement), so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery.”
Interestingly, the Satyam scam was the first of many scams that were to hit the nation starting in 2009. It was followed by the 2G, Commonwealth games and the coalgate scam. Sahara, Saradha, Rose Valley and many other big Ponzi schemes came to light. The National Spot Exchange scam came to light as well. These scams were mostly executed during the period between 2003 and 2008, when the economy was doing well and the stock market was going from strength to strength, but they were only revealed after the good days came to a stop.
In that sense Raju set the trend of things to come. We have to give him credit for at least that.

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

The article originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis on April 12, 2015

Even RBI does not trust the new GDP number

RBI-Logo_8
Earlier this year, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation revised the way the gross domestic product(GDP) is calculated. Such a revision is necessary every few years, given that the structure of the economy keeps changing. Over and above that, the datasets that are used to compute the GDP also keep improving. Given this, the change is necessary. This revised method led to the economic growth for 2013-2014 being revised to 6.9% against the earlier 5%. In fact, using the new model, the growth projected for 2014-2015 was forecast to be at 7.4%. Earlier, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had projected an economic growth of 5.5% for 2014-2015.
The ruling politicians have caught on to the new economic growth number, with finance minister Arun Jaitley even talking about India returning to double digit economic growth soon. As he said in the budget speech in February: “Based on the new series, real GDP growth is expected to accelerate to 7.4%, making India the fastest growing large economy in the world…We have turned around the economy dramatically, restoring macro-economic stability and creating the conditions for sustainable poverty elimination, job creation and durable double-digit economic growth. Domestic and international investors are seeing us with renewed interest and hope.”
Jaitley’s comment notwithstanding, there has been extensive scepticism about the new growth number. Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the ministry of finance in an interview to the Business Stanard said: “This is mystifying because these numbers, especially the acceleration in 2013-14, are at odds with other features of the macro economy. The year 2013-14 was a crisis year – capital flowed out, interest rates were tightened and there was consolidation – and it is difficult to understand how an economy’s growth could be so high and accelerate so much under such circumstances.”
Andy Mukherjee writing for Reuters made a very pertinent point when he said: “No large economy has pulled off…such a handsome pickup in output[GDP],to [an]…analysis of 189 nations over 33 years.” Mukherjee was talking about the jump in economic growth in 2013-2014, from the earlier stated 5% to 6.9% as per the new method.
Now even the RBI has questioned the credibility of the new method of measuring the GDP. In the monetary policy report dated April 2015 and released on April 7, the central bank said: “The new GDP data…came as a major surprise as it produced significantly higher growth at constant prices.”
“The divergence between the new series and the old series in the pace of growth of the manufacturing sector has turned out to be stark; in particular, the robust expansion of manufacturing portrayed in the new series is not validated by subdued corporate sector performance in Q3 and still weak industrial production,” the RBI said.
For the period October to December 2014 (or what is referred to as Q3 by the RBI) both corporate profit and sales remained weak. A newsreport in the Business Standard points out that “aggregate net profit of 2,941 companies” declined by 16.9% in comparison to October to December 2013. The sales growth also has been the weakest in at least 12 quarters, the report points out. This clearly shows that the manufacturing sector continues to remain in a weak zone.
And manufacturing is not the only sector which remains in trouble. As the RBI report points out: “In the financial and real estate sub-sector, the high growth of 13.7 per cent at constant prices is not corroborated by the observed sluggishness in key underlying variables such as credit and deposit growth, housing prices, rent and most importantly, the subdued performance of real estate companies in terms of sales growth and earnings.”
Lending by banks has grown by a minuscule 9.5% in the last one year, data from the RBI points out. In comparison, the growth in deposits collected by banks has been at 11.4%. What also needs to be taken into account here is that the deposit growth has been on a higher base. Both deposit growth as well as loan growth of banks is at a multi-decade low. So, how is the finance as well as real estate sector growing at 13.7%, is a question that RBI is asking?
The RBI report then goes on to say: “Data revisions and their after-effects are not unique to India, but the magnitude of the gap in real GDP growth rates between the old and the new series for 2013-14 and 2014-15 has complicated the setting of monetary policy. Undoubtedly, the new GDP data embody better coverage and improved methodology as per international best practices. Yet these data cloud an accurate assessment of the state of the business cycle and the appropriate monetary policy stance.”
There are multiple things that the central bank is saying here. First, is that it doesn’t really believe in the new GDP number. And that has made the setting of the monetary policy more difficult for the RBI. If India is currently growing at more than 7%, then the RBI should not be cutting the repo rate, but raising it. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark to the interest rates that banks pay for their deposits and in turn charge on their loans.
Nevertheless, all real time data seems to suggest that India is not growing at higher than 7%.
The broader point here is that if the RBI does not believe the new GDP number, why would anyone else do as well? As Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley recently wrote in the Financial Times: “India’s latest growth data look less like the work of a calculating political machine than the result of bungling… This is a classic example of how Indian bureaucrats can take something that is not broken and fix it until it is…It’s hard to see how India’s economy could have been accelerating when the government was restraining its spending, investment was weak and credit was barely growing.” This clearly does not show India in a good light.
The situation needs to be set right if India does not want to go the Chinese way on this front. Analysts have questioned the validity of Chinese data for a very long time. India clearly needs to avoid going that way. 

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Apr 9, 2015