Congress

Modi's first fiscal challenge

narendra_modi

 

Vivek Kaul

N Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of new Andhra Pradesh (what remains of the state after the creation of Telangana), wants to waive off bank loans to farmers and women’s self-help groups amounting to a whopping Rs 54,000 crore. Naidu promised this freebie during the course of the election campaign and now wants to fulfil it.
The trouble of course is that the banks which made these loans will have to be adequately compensated. And for that the newly elected state government will need money, which it does not have. It is estimated that the revenue deficit of Andhra Pradesh will amount to Rs 13,579 crore during the course of this financial year(April 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015). Revenue deficit is the difference between the revenue expenditure and the revenue income of a government.
Hence, the question is where will the government get this money from? Naidu is hoping that the Narendra Modi led government at the centre (BJP fought elections along with Naidu’s Telgu Desam Party both at the state and the national level) will help him fulfil his electoral promises.
But the central government is already stretched on the finance front. In the interim budget presented in February 2014, the fiscal deficit for this financial year was projected to be at Rs 5,28,631 crore or 4.1% of GDP. Even this projection was primarily achieved by cutting down on the asset creating planned expenditure and by not recognising’certain’expenses which in total amounted to more than Rs 1,00,000 crore. Hence, the actual fiscal deficit would have been significantly higher. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government spends and what it earns.
If the central government chooses to assist the new Andhra Pradesh government with the entire Rs 54,000 crore that is needed, then it will end up adding to its already high fiscal deficit. In fact, the amount that the new Andhra Pradesh government needs to waive off loans is more or less equal to the assistance that the old Andhra Pradesh received from the central government over the last 10 years(between 2004-2005 and 2013-2014). This assistance amounted to a total of Rs 54,613.4 crore. This comparison clearly tells us the astonishing amount of money that is needed to write off these loans.
One reason that the Modi government might choose to entertain Naidu is the fact that it does not have enough numbers in the Rajya Sabha. But if it entertains Naidu, then it will also have to entertain the likes of Naveen Patnaik and J Jayalalitha, who have been demanding special packages for their states, in return for their support in the Rajya Sabha. And where is all that money going to come from?
Also, it will go against the Modi’s entire electoral pitch of the government creating an enabling environment that allows people to progress, instead of giving out doles to them. It is worth remembering here that the new Andhra Pradesh has around 5% of India’s population. Given that, the question is that whether the central government should be spending such a huge amount of money in a single year on one single state? And the answer is no.
The other option for the new Andhra Pradesh government is to borrow this money by issuing bonds. The trouble is that a state cannot borrow an unlimited amount of money. The borrowing limit for old Andhra Pradesh had been set at Rs 29,000 crore, at the beginning of this financial year. Hence, the borrowing limit for the new Andhra Pradesh will clearly be less than that. Also, as pointed out earlier the state is already expected to run a revenue deficit of Rs 13,579 crore during this financial year.
The moral of the story is that the math for waiving off loans made to farmers and self help groups, does not really work out. News reports suggest that the bankers have requested the ministry of finance to try and convince the new Andhra Pradesh government, not to go ahead with this plan. Other than the math not working out, there are other reasons why the new Andhra Pradesh government shouldn’t be going ahead trying to waive off loans.
First and foremost, it is not fair on the people who have honestly repaid their loans in the past. Also, it will reward those who have defaulted on their loans.
Second, it brings the issue of moral hazard to the core. Economist Alan Blinder in his book After the Music Stopped writes that the “central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains(and incur costs) to avoid it.”
What it means in this context is that after the loans are waived off this time around, people of the state of new Andhra Pradesh, will think twice before repaying their loans, in the days to come. If the government can waive off loans once, why can’t it do it all over again, is a question that the people of Andhra Pradesh will be asking themselves?
Third, in the next election the Telgu Desam and the other parties, will compete to promise even bigger freebies.
Fourth, loans being waived off benefits those people who are in a position to take a bank loan, in the first place. Typically, farmers with large landholdings tend to fall in this category. The small farmer is not in a position to fulfil the requirements that need to fulfilled in order to take a bank loan. Hence, the question is do the large farmers really need to be subsidised?
Fifth, the government of Andhra Pradesh needs to build a new capital over the next years. It will need a lot of money in order to do that. Hence, it makes sense for it to be fiscally responsible during its initial years.
All these reasons suggest that Chandrababu Naidu should reconsider his decision of waiving loans to farmers and self help groups of the New Andhra Pradesh.

The article originally appeared in The Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle dated June 11, 2014.
(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

The wilful blindness of Manmohan Singh

Manmohan-Singh_0Vivek Kaul

The stock market crash of October 1929 started the Great Depression in the United States, from where it spread to large parts of the world. Some of the best books on the Great Depression, which are still being read, started to appear only 25 years later.
My favourite book the Great Depression is The Great Crash 1929, written by John Kenneth Galbraith. The book was first published in 1954, twenty five years after the Depression started. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, which dealt with the Great Depression in considerable detail, came out only in 1963. This book set the agenda for how central banks around the world reacted to recessions.
In fact, books on the Great Depression are still being written. A recent favourite of mine is Lords of Finance—1929, The Great Depression, and The Bankers Who Broke the World, written by Liaquat Ahamed, which was published in 2009. It won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for history. What is true about the Great Depression is also true about Mahatma Gandhi. Some of the best biographies on the Mahatma, like Gandhi Before India, have appeared in recent times.
Dear reader, before you start wondering why am I talking about the Great Depression and Gandhi, in a column which is supposedly on Manmohan Singh, allow me to explain. The point I am trying to make here is that the best history is usually written many years after something has happened. The gap is probably necessary to allow historians to iron out the noise. Also, over the years new sources of information appear, which were not available in the first place. For one, documents get declassified. At the same time, letters that the men and women being profiled wrote, appear in the public domain and so on.
Hence, the defining history on Manmohan Singh’s years as the Prime Minister of India will most probably be written a few decades from now. Having said that, it is easy to predict that historians won’t project Singh in a good light.
The story that one usually hears about Singh is that he was an honest man heading a dishonest and a corrupt government. While his ministers may have made money being corrupt, he never did. This is a very simplistic explanation of the entire scenario.
A major reason why Manmohan Singh survived as the Prime Minister of India for a full decade was because he was ‘wilfuly blind’ to a lot of nefarious activities happening around him. Wilful Blindess is a legal concept that was first applied in the British courts in 1861.
As Margaret Heffernan writes in Wilful Blindness- Why we ignore the obvious at our peril“A judge in Regina v. Sleep ruled that an accused could not be convicted for possession of government property unless the jury found that he either knew the goods came from government stores or had ‘wilfully shut his eyes to the fact’…Over time, a lot of other phrases came into play – deliberate or wilful ignorance, conscious avoidance and deliberate indifference. What they have all in common is the idea that there is an opportunity for knowledge and a responsibility to be informed, but it is shirked.”
Manmohan Singh’s decade long tenure as the Prime Minister needs to be viewed through the lens of wilful blindness. He was wilfully blind to A Raja running the telecom industry for his own benefit. Singh was also wilfully blind to the coalgate scam where coal mines were given away free to both public sector and private sector companies. In fact, he was the coal minister when a large number of mines were given away free.
In fact, as Heffernan writes “the law does not care why you remain ignorant, only that you do.” Also, on some occasions the wilful blindness comes from that “we focus so intently on the order that we are blind to everything else.” Singh was so focussed on following the orders of Sonia Gandhi, who was the actual head of the government, that he chose to remain ‘wilfully blind’ to all that was happening around him.
Interestingly, when Enron went bust in the early 2000s, Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the CEO and Chairman of Enron, pleaded that they just did not know what was going on in the company and hence, could not be held responsible for it.
Judge Lake who was hearing the case invoked the concept of wilful blindness. As he instructed the jury: “You may find that a defendant had knowledge of a fact if you find that the defendant deliberately closed his eyes to what would otherwise have been obvious to him. Knowledge can be inferred if the defendant deliberately blinded himself to the existence of a fact.”
The phrase to be marked in the above statement is “closed his eyes”. The only way Singh could not have known about what was happening around him was if he had closed his eyes to it.
“Magicians never reveal their secrets,” writes Scottish writer Ian Rankin in his latest crime thriller Saints of the Shadow Bible. Singh was no magician. If he wants history to treat him a little better than it actually might end up doing, it is best that he spends his years in retirement writing his memoirs of the ten years he spent as India’s Prime Minister, like Winston Churchill did.
Churchill in the years after the Second World War wrote his version of history of the Second World War and even won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. Singh needs to do the same. That way history might also consider his point of view.

The article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Mutual Fund Insight

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

10 cr ‘new’ jobs: This number in Cong manifesto shows what’s wrong with India

 congress-party-symbol1

Vivek Kaul

A lot has been written panning the manifesto of the Congress party for the Lok Sabha elections scheduled over the next two months. Given this, I will just concentrate on one point that the party promises in the manifesto.
The grand old party of India has promised to create 10 crore jobs for the youth, if it forms the next government. A very noble idea indeed, at least on paper. Let’s go into this in a little detail.
In order to create 10 crore jobs (or a large number of jobs irrespective of a specific number) primarily four things are required—land, labour, money and electricity.
Let’s look at these factors one by one. If a large number of jobs are to be created, India needs labour intensive manufacturing to progress. But labour-intensive manufacturing in India has slowed down over the years. As Crisil analysts point out in a recent report titled Hire and Lower: Slowdown compounds India’s job-creation challenge “The decline in employment creation has been compounded by falling labour intensity in the economy…The capacity of labour intensive sectors such as manufacturing to absorb labour has diminished considerably in face of rising automation and complicated labour laws.”
Take the case of the apparel sector. A country like Bangladesh does better at it than us. Economist Arvind Panagariya in an open letter to Rahul Gandhi in November 2013 wrote that “India exported less apparel than much smaller Bangaldesh and less than one-tenth that by China.” Most Indian apparel firms start small and continue to remain small.
This leads to a situation where they cannot benefit from the economies of scale and hence, cannot compete in the export market. In their book India’s Tryst with Destiny, Jagdish Bhagwati and Panagariya point out that 92.4% of the 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.
Why is that the case? A surfeit of labour laws are a major reason why Indian apparel firms choose to remain small . Labour comes under the Concurrent list of the Indian constitution, meaning both the state government as well as the central government can formulate laws in this area. “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,” write Bhagwati and Panagariya.
This leads to a situation where the cost of following these laws is very high. Labour costs account for close to 80 per cent of the total costs in the apparel sector. As Bhagwati and Panagariya write “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”.
The authors recount an interesting story told to them by 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.”
Given this, it is not surprising that the Crisil analysts expect the number of fresh jobs being created to fall over the next few years. As they write “Employment generation in the non-agriculture sector will slow down sharply in the coming years as the economy treads a lower-growth path. CRISIL estimates that employment outside agriculture will increase by only 38 million between 2011-12 and 2018-19 compared with 52 million between 2004-05 and 2011-12.”
The Congress party hopes to create 10 crore or 100 million jobs in a considerably lesser period of time. In fact, the Crisil estimate suggests that more people will join the agriculture workforce over the next few years. “Due to insufficient employment creation in industry and services sectors, more workers will become locked in the least productive and low-wage agricultural sector. We estimate that 12 million people will join the agriculture workforce by 2018-19, compared with a decline of 37 million in agriculture employment between 2004-05 and 2011-12,” the Crisil analysts write.
Now let’s take the case of electricity. Every new manufacturing set up requires electricity. India currently has the power plants but it does not have the coal required to feed into those power plants to produce electricity. As Neelkanth Mishra and Ravi Shankar of Credit Suisse write in a report titled Elections: Much Ado about Nothing dated March 19, 2014 “True utilisation in thermal power generation is below 60%, near 20-year lows (reported plant load factor is 65%).”
India does not produce enough coal to feed its power plants despite having the third largest coal reserves in the world. A major reason for the same is that it takes more than 10 years and many permissions to get a coal mine going. In fact, even if coal mines are auctioned to private sector it will take a while to get these mines going. “From the time the blocks are auctioned to the time coal can start to get mined could be another 3-5 years at least,” write Mishra and Shankar. Hence, by the time, the term of the next Lok Sabha will be more or less over.
Now let’s consider the land factor. Over the years, land has been taken over from farmers by the government at rock bottom rates and been handed over to industrialists and real estate builders, who have profited majorly from this. The Congress led UPA government (along with most of the opposition parties) passed the Land Acquisition Act in 2013. This Act goes to the other extreme in comparison to what was happening till this point of time.
As TN Ninan wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard “The land law stipulates that forcibly acquired land must be paid for at two to four times…market prices, in addition to other relief and rehabilitation costs. So the new law will make land acquisition next to impossible, or unaffordably expensive (which becomes the same thing) in most states.”
Ninan also points out that “land prices “ in significant parts of rural India “are higher than those in any rural area of the United States, and in almost all of Europe barring countries like Holland.”
So, for anyone looking to set up a new business enterprise, land will be a huge cost. And this may make the entire idea of setting up a new enterprise unviable.
Finally, let’s consider the money factor. The interest rates charged by banks on loans have been at high levels over the last few years. This is because the fiscal deficit of the government (or the difference between what it earns and what it spends) has exploded. To finance the deficit the government has had to borrow more and hence, crowding out other borrowers. This has led to high interest rates. If interest rates are to come down, the fiscal deficit of the government needs to come down dramatically.
One final factor that needs to be considered here is the ease with which a new business can be started in India.In a ranking of 189 countries carried out by the World Bank, when it comes to the ease with which a new business can be set up, India stands 179th. Hence, anyone looking to start a new business enterprise in this country, needs to be slightly wrong in the head. And it is ultimately, new enterprises that create many jobs.
If all these factors are taken into account, the promise by the Congress party to create 10 crore jobs, is a big joke played on the people of this country.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 27, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

UPA destroyed economy. Where will Modi get the money to sort out this financial mess?

narendra_modiVivek Kaul 
The Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) seems to have more or less realized that the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is a lost cause. Hence, the idea seems to be make things difficult for the next government, especially on the finance front.
I had written on this issue on February 17, 2014, the day the finance minister P Chidambaram presented the interim budget. Since then, more details have come out, and these details clearly suggest that things are much worse on the finance front than they first seemed.
A recent news report in the Daily News and Analysis points out that the central government owes the states Rs 50,000 crore on account of compensation for the central sales tax. The newspaper quotes a finance ministry official to point out that a 2% cut in the central sales tax was introduced as a part of the process to phase it out and move towards goods and services tax. The state governments were to be compensated for the losses they had incurred because of this. This payment hasn’t been made for the last three years and the amount has now gone up to close to Rs 50,000 crore.
This is something that the next government will have to deal with. On February 28, 2014, the government raised the dearness allowance of five million central government employees to 100% of their basic salary. This was earlier at 90%. This move is expected to cost around Rs 6,390 crore in 2014-2015. Interestingly, the government had hiked the dearness allowance from 80% to 90% of basic only in September 2013, with effect from July 2013.
The government also approved among the terms of reference for the seventh pay commission, the addition of 50% dearness allowance with the basic pay. This is expected to push salaries of public sector employees up by 30%, that is, if the recommendations of the seventh pay commission are implemented in the time to come. Also, once the dearness allowance of the central government employees is increased, it puts an immense amount of pressure on state governments to increase the salaries of their employees as well.
There are some points from the interim budget that need to be highlighted as well. An amount of Rs 1,15,000 crore has been budgeted against food subsidies for 2014-2015(the period between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015). Out of this around Rs 88,500 crore has been allocated under the Food Security Act.
The problem with this number is that the food security scheme is expected to cost much more than the amount that has been allocated. (you can read a detailed explanation here). Also, with Rs 88,500 crore allocated towards food security scheme, it doesn’t leave enough, for the public distribution system that is already in place. As the DNA article cited earlier points out “The next government will have to find a lot of resources for the public distribution subsidy as well. Out of the total Rs 115,000 crore for the food subsidy, the government has allocated Rs 88,500 crore to the Food Security Act.”
And if all this wasn’t enough there are expenditures from the current year that haven’t been accounted for and will spill over to the next year. Estimates suggest that this year close to Rs 1,23,000 crore of subsidies have been postponed to the next year. The next finance minister would have to meet this expenditure.
In fact, in a last ditch effort the government tried to push in nine ordinances before the election commission announced the elections dates. But the President Pranab Mukherjee did not agree to it. As economist Arvind Panagariya points out in a recent column in The Times of India “Perhaps the worst poison pill is UPA’s attempt to push as many as nine ordinances and clear vast numbers of projects on literally the last possible day before Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct was expected to kick in. Only sage advice from the president held back the government’s hand from pushing the vast majority of these ordinances.”
The Congress led UPA government has left the country in a huge financial mess and the next government will have a tough time dealing with it, from day one. And if they mess it up even slightly, India will end up in an even bigger mess than it currently is.
The opinion polls suggest that Narendra Modi is likely to be the next Prime Minister of India. The great Indian middle class has high hopes from Modi and his ability to get the Indian economy back on track. But the question is where will Modi get the money from, for whatever he wants to do, to set the economy back on track? Close to Rs 2,00,000 crore of government expenditure next year, hasn’t been accounted for.
One way out is to cut down on the subsidies. But will Modi be able to do that, given that he is likely to lead a coalition government. Also, during all the years that the BJP has been in opposition it has supported the populist entitlement programmes, which have led to the government expenditure going up big time. So it is really not in a position to reverse that expenditure even if it is voted to power.
As Robert Prior-Wandesforde, an economist at Credit Suisse in Singapore, recently told Mint “The power of the finance minister in the new government will be key… as will be the administration’s ability to either cut spending on social welfare or match that expenditure through revenue.”
Now that, as the common phrase goes, is easier said than done.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 13, 2014
 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

GDP growth at 4.7%: Is P Chidambaram the new Yo Yo Honey Singh?

 Yo-Yo-Honey-Singh-Rap
 
Vivek Kaul 
Yo Yo Honey Singh has an amazing sense of rhythm.
And every time he comes up with a new song, it keeps playing in my head over and over again, like an infinite loop. His latest song “char botal vodka kaam mera roz ka” is no exception to the rule.
Having said that, one has to also state up front that the lyrics of his songs should never be taken seriously and need to be treated with a pinch of salt. As the tagline of the old Hero Honda advertisement used to be “fill it, shut it, forget it”.
Yo Yo Honey Singh is a tad like that.
But what about the finance minister P Chidambaram? How seriously should he be taken on what he says? Or is he the new Yo Yo Honey Singh? In a recent interview to ET now, after presenting the interim budget, Chidambaram said “There is no doubt that growth is reviving. We clocked 4.4% in Q1 of the current year, 4.8% in Q2, 5.2% at the minimum in Q3 and Q4 taken together. It shows that growth is coming back at the rate of about 0.4% per quarter.”
What Chidambaram was essentially saying is that the economic growth as measured by the growth in gross domestic product(GDP), in the first quarter of the 2013-2014(i.e. the period between April 1 and June 30, 2013) came in at 4.4%. In the second quarter (i.e. the period between July 1 and September 30, 2013) it came in at 4.8%. He further said that the growth during the next two quarters of the year (i.e. the period between October and December 2013 and January and March 2014) would come in at 5.2%, when taken together. And hence, this shows an economic growth rate of 0.4% per quarter, he remarked. So, by that logic it would take around eight quarters or two years more, more for the economic growth to get back to 8%. Now only if things were as simple as that and everything in life moved in an arithmetic progression.
One needs to be rather ‘brave’ to make predictions on the basis of two data points. But that is what Chidambaram did. And now he has been proven wrong with the GDP growth numbers for the third quarter of 2013-2014(i.e. the period between October 1 and December 31, 2013) that were released on February 28, 2014.
During the period, the economic growth as measured by the GDP growth came in at 4.7%. This is nowhere near the 5.2% growth that Chidambaram had predicted around two weeks back. If one looks at the data in detail there are many worrying signs.
The manufacturing sector shrunk by 1.9% during the period (GDP at factor cost. At 2004-2005 prices). It had grown by 2.5% during September to December 2012. The sector had grown by 1% during July to September 2013. If India has to create jobs and move people from farms, the manufacturing sector needs to do well.
The agriculture sector grew by 3.6% during the period, after growing by 4.6% during July to September 2013. The agriculture sector contributed around 16.9% to the GDP ( GDP at factor cost. At 2004-2005 prices). But it employs around 45% of the Indian working population (Employment and Unemployment Survey 2011-12(68th round)). Given this, it is fairly straight forward that if India has to progress jobs need to be created, so that more people can moved out of agriculture, which currently suffers from over-employment.
And what for that to happen, the manufacturing sector needs to do well. In fact, the GDP data clearly shows that the manufacturing sector has barely grown over the last two years.
Other than the manufacturing sector, the mining sector has shrunk by 1.6% during the period. The construction sector, another sector which has the potential to generate ‘huge’ jobs, grew by only 0.6%, after growing by 1%, during September to December 2012. Financing, insurance, real estate and business services did reasonably well and grew by 12.5%, and thus pushed up the overall economic growth by 4.7%.
In fact, things are worrying even when looks at the GDP from the expenditure point of view. The personal final consumption expenditure formed 61.5% of the total expenditure during the period. In September to December 2012, the PFCE had formed around 62.7% of the total expenditure. What this clearly tells us is that PFCE is not rising as fast as other expenditure. In fact, during the period, the PFCE rose by just 2.6% to Rs 9,81,463 crore in comparison to September to December 2012.
Interestingly, during the period September to December 2012, the PFCE had grown by 5.1%. What this clearly tells us is that people are going slow on personal expenditure. The reason for that is high inflation which has led to more and more money being spent on meeting daily expenditure. Hence, people are postponing all other expenditure and that has had an impact on economic growth. One man’s expenditure is another man’s income, after all.
This scenario has been playing out pretty much over the last few years. But P Chidambaram has continued to be optimistic.
In November 2013, he remarked “The second quarter GDP growth rate indicates that the economy may be recovering and is on a growth trajectory again.” In December 2013, he remarked “We are going through a period of stress, but there is ground for optimism. We expect things to become better.” In late December 2013, he remarked “I am confident that the greenshoots that are visible here and there will multiply and that the economy will revive, there will be an upturn in the second half of this year.” In January 2014, he remarked “ I am confident that Indian economy will also get back step by step to the high growth path in three years.” And in February 2014, after presenting the interim budget, he said “we will get back to the high growth path.”
At almost every given opportunity Chidambaram has told us that the economy is recovering, there are green shoots and that the second half of the year will be better than the first half. The GDP grew by 4.4% during April to June 2013 and by 4.8% during July to September 2013. And it grew by 4.7% during October to December 2013. So where is the economic recovery that Chidambaram has been talking about? And where are the green shoots? To me, it appears to be more of the same happening.
Chidambaram has also predicted that “India is likely to achieve an economic growth of between 5-5.5 percent in this fiscal year.” But with the GDP growth being less than 5% during the first three quarters of the year, achieving even 5% growth will be difficult. Let’s not even talk about achieving 5.5% growth.
To conclude, Chidambaram’s statements on economic growth, like the lyrics of Yo Yo Honey Singh’s songs should not be taken seriously at all and be taken with a pinch of salt. While one doesn’t expect a minister of the ruling coalition to be totally negative on the economy, but at least some honesty on what is happening on the economic front, would be nice. Now only, if Chidambaram was listening.
Or, is he, like me, and a lot of other people, busy listening to Yo Yo Honey Singh?
Char botal vodka, kaam mera roz ka…
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 1, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)