Air India

This Govt Company Lost Rs 11.65 Crore Per Employee, and It’s Not Air India

Hindustan photo

The finance and defence minister Arun Jaitley, recently said: “India has a historic second chance, after nearly one-and-a-half decades, to disinvest in state-owned Air India Ltd and help propel the growth of aviation sector.”

Whether this happens remains to be seen given that the issue of disinvestment of Air India is a political hot potato, and any movement on this front is likely to lead to a lot of hungama, for the lack of a better word, from India’s professional trade union leaders, as well as the opposition parties, which have been in a rather moribund state of late.

Over and above this, the Modi government hasn’t really come up with any economic reform till date, which is likely to make it unpopular with a section of the population. The unpopular steps have typically been reserved to drive the so called cultural agenda of the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).

Having said that, before the government goes about disinvesting Air India there are several low hanging fruits that it can pluck, and save a lot of money in the process. One such company is the Hindustan Photo Films Manufacturing Co. Ltd. Take a look at Table 1.

Table 1: 10 Major Loss Making CPSEs during 2015-16 

As per Table 1, Hindustan Photo Films was the fourth largest loss maker among all public sector enterprises in 2015-2016. It made a loss of around Rs 2,528 crore. The three companies that made greater losses than Hindustan Photo, had some semblance of a business, though not a business model. The Steel Authority of India Ltd has steel plants all over the country and employs thousands of people, though it lost a lot of money in doing so, given that it can’t compete with the Chinese steel on the price front.

The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, offers telecom services across the country. And Air India, for whatever it is worth, is India’s national airline and flies people globally as well as locally. It also flies the prime minister whenever he takes an international trip.

But what about Hindustan Photo Films? What does the company do? Photo films went out of business a while back. The question is: Why is the government still running a photo film company? The photo film was killed first by the digital camera and then by the mobile phone. Actually, the company doesn’t make photo films any more.

During 2012-2013 (the latest annual report that I could find), the total production of the company had stood at Rs. 3.6 crore. The sales had stood at Rs. 3.7 crore. Now imagine who in their right minds would run a company with sales of under Rs. 4 crore and which ends up with losses of more than Rs. 1,500 crore, as it did during the course of 2012-2013. As mentioned earlier in 2015-2016, the company lost Rs 2,528 crore. It employed 217 individuals. This meant a loss of Rs 11.65 crore per employee. This number shows the ridiculousness of the entire exercise of keeping the company alive.

In fact, 2015-2016 wasn’t the first time that Hindustan Photo Films lost money. It has been losing money for over a decade. Between 2004-2005 and 2015-2016, the company has lost close to Rs 15,000 crore in total.

Table 2: Losses of Hindustan Photo Films 

As is clear from Table 2, the company hasn’t made any money in years. Given this, in order to continue to operate the company has borrowed money. As of March 31, 2016, the total long-term loans of the company stood at Rs 23,752 crore. Servicing these loans by paying interest on them, I guess is the major expense of the company now. I say guess because I don’t have access to the latest annual report of the company.

Banks keep giving loans to a dud company like Hindustan Photo Films because they know that they are ultimately lending to the central government, and what can be a more safer form of lending.

It is worth pointing out here that the government does not have an unlimited amount of money. Every rupee that goes towards funding the losses of companies like Hindustan Photo Films, is money that does not go towards more important things like education, health, or affordable housing, for that matter.

Also, a normal excuse offered on keeping a loss-making public sector enterprise going is that so many people are employed. Over and above the direct employment, there is a certain ecosystem that the public sector enterprise feeds into and helps that ecosystem as well. But in this case, this logic fails given that there are only 217 employees. They can be given a good voluntary retirement package and the company can be shutdown. Also, the physical assets of the company can be sold to repay the debt that has been accumulated. For starters, the company has 472 constructed homes in its township.

This is low hanging fruit that the Modi government can easily cash in on, if it wants to. Why this hasn’t happened up until now, on that your guess is as good as mine.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on May 30, 2017.

Dear PM, If Things Are Improving for PSUs, Why Not Declare Complete Numbers?

narendra_modi

In the Independence Day speech made on August 15, 2016, the prime minister Narendra Modi talked about the turnaround of three public sector units(PSUs)—Air India, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd(BSNL) and Shipping Corporation of India.

As the prime minister remarked: “The PSUs are formed to fall in a pit, to fail, to get locked or to be sold out. That has been the history. We have tried to bring in a new culture. And today for the first time, I can say with satisfaction that Air India which had a bad image, has succeeded in registering an operational profit last year. At a time when telecom companies all over the world were earning, BSNL was falling in a pit. For the first time, BSNL has succeeded in earning operational profit. Nobody knew whether Shipping Corporation of India would ever be in profit. Today Shipping Corporation of India is making profit.”

Operational profit is the profit that a company makes from its business operations. It is what accountants call earnings before interest and taxes. In case of Air India, as I have written in the past, the airline has made an operational profit primarily because of the fall in oil prices. I will not repeat the argument here. (You can read the column explaining this here). Also, just because the airline has made an operational profit doesn’t mean that the airline is not losing money.

What Mr Modi forgot to tell us is that the airline lost Rs 2,636 crore in 2015-2016. Herein we need to differentiate between the operational profit of the company and the net profit/loss. Anyone who has studied Finance 101 knows that operational profit and net profit are two different things all together.

Operational profit is the profit that a company makes from its business operations. After this, the company needs to pay interest on its debt, as well as taxes to the government. What remains is the net profit or net loss, as is the case with Air India. In case of Air India, the airline had a debt of Rs 51,367 crore as on March 31, 2015 and interest needs to be paid on this debt. After paying this interest, the airline ended with a net loss.

Also, the complete profit and loss statement of the airline for 2015-2016, hasn’t been made public yet. From the data that is available in the public domain it can be said that the airline made an operating profit primarily because of a fall in oil prices. If there is anything more to it, then the government needs to make available the complete set of numbers, as soon as possible, in the public domain.

Further, the Modi government, in the process of projecting itself positively, has shown a tendency in the past, to take credit for falling oil prices as well. Take the case of the total savings made through Pahal, the scheme in which the subsidies available on domestic cooking gas are transferred directly into the bank accounts of citizens, after they have bought a cooking gas cylinder at the full price and not the subsidised price as was the case in the past.

In June 2016, the finance secretary Ashok Lavasa said that the government had saved Rs 14,872 crore by paying the subsidy amount directly into the account of people. This turned out to be incorrect.

A CAG Audit Report on Pahal published in August 2016 eventually pointed out that while there were some savings from Pahal, they were nowhere near the claims being made by the government as well as the oil companies which sell cooing gas cylinders.

In a report the CAG said that the reduction of Rs 23,316 crore in cooking fuel subsidy for the first three quarters of 2015-2016, in comparison to 2014-2015, was largely due to a sharp fall in oil prices and not due to the Pahal scheme.

As the report pointed out: “While implementation of PAHAL scheme coupled with the LPG ‘Give it up’ campaign has resulted in the reduction of offtake of domestic subsidised LPG cylinders, the resultant savings was not as significant as that generated through fall of subsidy rates.”

The CAG said that the savings due to implementation of Pahal were only Rs 1,764 crore. The remaining Rs 21,552 crore fall in cooking gas subsidies was largely due to a fall in oil prices. Another interesting point that the CAG made was that while calculating the fall in subsidy, the national average offtake of 6.27 cylinders a year should be used and not the maximum number of 12 cylinders that consumers are allowed subsidy on, during the course of the year.

This isn’t surprising given that politicians and governing political parties all over the world, like numbers which show them in good light. As Philippa Malmgren writes in Signals—How Everyday Signs Can Help Us Navigate the World’s Turbulent Economy: “Why would politics demand that the numbers be skewed in a particular direction? Power. Politicians and policymakers want power. They want votes. They want the mathematics to show whatever will favour them in an election. If they want a different answer they simply change the assumptions or the parameters of the algorithm.”

The thing is that Pahal is actually working and has helped whittle down a good number of bogus domestic cooking gas connections which were being used to divert domestic cooking gas in the black market. Also, Rs 1,784 crore is a very good amount of saving and need not have been misrepresented in the way it eventually was.

If the government had reported the correct number, that in itself would have been a good beginning. By doing what it did, the government gave an opportunity to naysayers to say that “we told you that economic reforms don’t work in India”. And that is not a good message to spread.

The other company that prime minister Modi talked about in his speech was BSNL. Talk about BSNL having made an operating profit in 2015-2016 has been there in the media for some time now. In fact, the former telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in July had said that the company would report an operating profit of around Rs 2,000 crore in 2015-2016.

A news-report in The Economic Times now suggests that the company might have made an operational profit of Rs 3,378 crore in 2015-2016. Again, there is no data available in the public domain on this. The latest numbers I could find where from the department of telecommunications annual report for 2015-2016.

Figure in * Crore

Financial Year2012-132013-142014-152015-16 (Up to September 30, 2015)*
Total Income27,12827,99628,64512,929
Total expenditure35,01235,01637,29216,734
Net profit(-) 7,884(-) 7,020(-) 8,234(-) 3,462

Note: * Data is Provisional & Un-audited

For the first six months of the year, it seems BSNL was on its way to make massive losses that it usually does. What changed over the next six months will become clear only once the complete profit and loss statement of the company is available in the public domain. Right now we only have statements from the government, and a few leaks, and nothing more.

Both Air India and BSNL are unlisted companies. But given that they are eventually owned by the taxpayers, it is only fair that the government puts out their complete set of numbers as soon as possible. While these numbers will eventually be declared but by then it will be too late.

So that leaves us with Shipping Corporation of India, which is listed on the stock exchanges. In 2011-2012, the company made losses of around Rs 428 crore. In 2015-2016, the company made a net profit of around Rs 377 crore. How did this turn around happen?

In fact, the cost of fuel (bunker fuel is the main type of oil used aboard ships) in 2011-2012 was at Rs 1,560.3 crore. By 2015-2016, this had fallen by more than 59.3 per cent to Rs 637.5 crore. In 2011-2012, the cost of fuel amounted to 36.2 per cent of net sales. In 2015-2016, the cost of fuel amounted to 15.5 per cent of the net sales of the company. In fact, the sales of the company have gone down during the period.

The difference in performance of the company lies in the fall in the fuel bill of more than Rs 900 crore. This has pushed the company into a profitable zone. There is nothing more to it.

Also, in 2014-2015, 77 out of the 234 PSUs were loss-making. The number was 70 in 2013-2014. How have things changed on this front, is something that the government needs to tell us.

Currently, the government is busy making out a positive case for itself, on the basis of incomplete data and taking credit for fall in oil prices, as well. It can do better than this.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on August 19,2016

Of Venkaiah Naidu, Air India and Privatisation by Malign Neglect

VenkaiahNaidu

Yesterday afternoon something weird happened on Twitter.

An irate flyer sent out four tweets against Air India. No it wasn’t me. Here are the four tweets:

1) I had to travel to Hyderabad by Air India AI544 which is to depart at 1315 Hrs… was told on time…reached airport by 1230 Hrs.

2) was informed at 1315hrs that flight was delayed as d pilot had not yet come.Waited up to 1345 Hrs, boarding didn’t start. returned 2 home.

3) Air India should explain how such things are happening. Transparency and accountability are the need of the hour.

4) Hope Air India understands that we are in the age of competition. Missed an important appointment.

The tweets were sent out by senior BJP politician and the Union Minister for Urban Development, Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation as well as Parliamentary Affairs, M Venkaiah Naidu. Naidu is a heavy weight in the Modi government. The fact that he took to Twitter to criticise the government owned airline means he must have been extremely irritated by the airline’s failure to depart on time.

Air India replied in true government style saying that the pilot was stuck in a traffic jam and an enquiry had been ordered. (I wonder why pilots of other airlines do not get stuck in traffic jams?)

Minister Naidu got a feel of what happens when people travel Air India. This is a good thing where the politicians and the bureaucrats get a feel of how the system they help build and run, actually works.

As Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan, had said in a speech sometime back: “A lot of officials, including myself, learn the difficulties of working in India as an ‘aam aadmi’ only once we leave office, lose the assistant, the assistant to the assistant, and the assistant to the assistant’s assistant. Post retirement, and I have seen this with all the people I know, they realise the system is much harder to deal with.”

It was Naidu’s opportunity yesterday to have that kind of day. The sad part is that those who run Air India still don’t get it. The airline has managed to accumulate huge losses over the years and continues to survive on borrowing as well as equity infusion by the government (i.e. basically the taxpayer).

Anyone in their right mind, stopped traveling Air India a while back. The airline now runs simply because of government employees who when travelling officially have no other option (in most cases) but to travel in the airline and pay the full fare.

The airline now has 14.7 per cent market share. This has been a huge fall from the days when it had 100% of the domestic market share given that no private airlines were allowed to operate. (The domestic airline back then was called Indian Airlines. There was also Vayudoot, another government owned airline, which travelled to smaller locations).

This is nothing but what Ruchir Sharma calls privatization by benign neglect. As he writes in his new book The Rise and Fall of Nations—Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World: “India…has adopted a de facto policy of what I can only describe as privatization by malign neglect. The political class can’t bring itself to sell off the old state companies, or to reform them either. Instead, it simply watches as private companies slowly drive the state behemoths into irrelevance. Thirty years ago state-owned Air India was basically the only way for Indians to fly, but the rise of agile private airlines including Jet and Indigo, has reduced its share of flights to less than 25 percent.” As mentioned earlier Air India now has 14.7% of the domestic market share.

The business flyer who is willing to pay a premium and for whom time is of utmost importance, has more or less abandoned Air India and moved on to other airlines. Guess, it’s time that minister Naidu also does that, the next time he has to reach on time for any meeting outside Delhi.

Air India is not the only example of the government not being able to withstand competition. Sector after sector has seen the government companies being decimated wherever they have had to face competition. As Sharma writes: “The same goes for telecommunications, where former state monopolies like MTNL and BSNL have been allowed to slowly wither in the face of more nimble private telecom companies, and together they now account for less than 30 million of India’s 900 million telecom subscribers.”

But the government (this government as well as the ones before it) have kept these companies going. Of course, a lot of taxpayer money which could have been better utilised elsewhere has been lost in the process. Air India has lost close to Rs 35,000 crore between 2010-2011 and 2015-2016. Last year it managed to make an operational profit primarily because of lower oil prices.

The point being that it would have been better for the government to have sold off these companies long back. As Sharma writes: “The state would have done a lot better to simply sell of these companies when they were still valuable, but now it is losing money on them hand over fist, and they are worth a pittance. This approach—refusing either to privatize or protect state monopolies—is the worst possible combination for government’s finances.”

And that is precisely what the previous governments did. The Narendra Modi government continues to run on the same principle. One doesn’t expect radical decisions from a government which couldn’t even push through a five basis points interest rate cut on the Employees Provident Fund(EPF). One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

The airline business is a very tough and competitive business to be in. Any airline hoping to make a profit needs to be run by a professional who has some experience in the airline business. Air India has never had that luck for a sustained period of time. No such moves have been made by the current government either. This belief that bureaucrats and not specialists, can do everything, has been one of the primary reasons behind the degradation of India.

In fact, Air India has now reached a stage where even if the government were to try selling it, there would be no buyers. As civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju said sometime back: “Its (Air India) books are so bad. I don’t think that even if it is offered, anybody would come for it.”

The more things change the more they remain the same. The taxpayer will continue paying for this national loot.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on June 29, 2016

The Sunk Cost of Air India

Air_India_001

There are somethings one never expects a minister to say. Hence, the civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju’s recent statement on Air India, came in as a pleasant surprise. The minister told the Press Trust of India: “It is a nice airline. I like Air India but I can’t commit taxpayers’ money for eternity. That is not done.”

This is a huge thing for the civil aviation minister to say. If you take Air India out of the civil aviation ministry (by either shutting it down or selling it off) there isn’t much that remains. Having made this statement, Raju hedged it by saying: “Let’s wish and hope that it (Air India) flies high. I am not against the public sector and I am not for only public sector at all costs. Public sector has a role and private sector has a role. Let them work in competition.”

To be honest, I have also liked Air India, on occasions I have travelled in it, as long as it has taken off on time. The leg space is better than the low cost carriers. The seats are more comfortable and the food is hot. Nevertheless, this is no excuse to keep the airline going.

As I have mentioned in the past, between 2010-2011 and 2015-2016, the airline made total losses of Rs 34,689.7 crore. That is quite a lot of money. Further, the airline also has a debt of Rs 51,367 crore, of which Rs 22,574 crore are outstanding aircraft loans. (As the minister of state for civil aviation Mahesh Sharma told the Parliament in March 2016).

A major part of the debt has helped the airline meet its expenditure, given that it doesn’t earn enough to meet its expenditure. Lenders keep lending to a perennially loss making Air India because ultimately they are lending to the government. And there is no safer lending than lending to the government, at least in theory.

Over and above the debt that airline took on, up until March 2016, the government had already poured Rs 22,280 crore into Air India, to keep it going. A further equity infusion of Rs 1,713 crore has been approved for the current financial year. Hence, a lot of public money is being spent to keep the airline going. What these numbers tell us is that the current government and the ones before it, have been basically in favour of public sector at all costs.

The civil aviation minister Raju further said: “Its (Air India) books are so bad. I don’t think that even if it is offered, anybody would come for it.” What the minister was basically saying is that nobody in their right mind will buy Air India in its current state. But is this good enough a reason to keep the airline going? That seems to be the case, given that there has been absolutely no talk of shutting it down.

Behavioural economists have a term for a situation like this—they call it the sunk cost fallacy. As Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow: “A rational decision maker is interested only in the future consequences of current investments. Justifying earlier mistakes is not among the…concerns. The decision to invest additional resources in a losing account when better investments are available, is known as sunk-cost fallacy, a costly mistake that is observed in decisions large and small.”

Kahneman gives the hypothetical example of a company that has already spent $50 million on a project. As he writes: “The project is now behind schedule and the forecasts of its ultimate returns are less favourable than at the initial planning stage. An additional investment of $60 million is required to give the project a chance. An alternative proposal is to invest the same amount in a new project that currently looks likely to bring higher returns. What will the company do? All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs…[throws] good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.”

This escalation of commitment is visible in many areas including war as well. As Richard Thaler writes in Misbehaving—The Making of Behavioural Economics: “Many people believe that the United States continued its futile war in Vietnam because we had invested too much to quit…Every thousand lives lost and every billion dollars spent made it more difficult to declare defeat and move on.”

This escalation of commitment is a major reason which has led to the government keeping   Air India going over the last few years, despite the mounting losses. No minister or the government for that matter, wants to admit defeat and talk about shutting down the airline.

As Kahneman writes in the context of the example we saw above: “Cancelling the project will leave a permanent stain on the executive’s record, and his personal interests are perhaps best served by gambling further with the organisation’s resources in the hope of recouping the original investment—or at least to postpone the day of reckoning.”

This logic applies to the civil aviation minister as well as the government (and not just the current one). No government wants to admit defeat and shutdown the airline. This, in a situation, when the government isn’t exactly flush with money and there are other important sectors, like education, health as well as physical infrastructure, that need more money.

Further, the airline continues to lose money and in a scenario where the Indian Railways is in a mess and needs a lot of money to be revived. If there is only so much money going around, shouldn’t that money be going to the Railways, instead of an airline?

I guess that is a no-brainer. But then no-brainers aren’t always so easy to process.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on Equitymaster on June 14, 2016

Flipkart, Air India and the Crony Socialism of Narendra Modi

flipkartNews-reports published in several newspapers last week revealed that the ecommerce company, Flipkart, had postponed the joining date of fresh MBAs it had recruited from the various IIMs, to December, later this year. The MBAs were supposed to join the company in June 2016. In order, to compensate them for the late joining Flipkart will pay the MBAs an extra joining bonus of Rs 1.5 lakh each.

These are clear signs of trouble at the company. In fact, one of the first things the information technology companies had done after the dotocom and telecom crash of 2000-2001, was to postpone the joining date of the fresh engineers it had recruited. The joining dates kept getting postponed and in several cases went beyond one year.

A friend of mine got so fed up waiting to join that he ended up joining the Indian Navy.

The news-reports on Flipkart further suggested that the company is facing funding issues and has had to cut costs to keep itself going. The question is why are Flipkart and many other Indian ecommerce companies, having funding issues?

In late January, earlier this year, I had written a column (not on Equitymaster), in which I had called Indian ecommerce a Ponzi scheme. After the post was published, I got solidly trolled on the social media. People said, I did not understand technology. Honestly, I don’t understand technology, even though I am a BSc in Maths and Computer Science, and have an MBA in Information Systems. But that part of my education I have more or less forgotten.

I don’t understand technology, but I do understand a very basic point—in order to survive, businesses need to make money. And almost all of the Indian ecommerce companies don’t make any money. If you look at their financial results (currently available only as on March 31, 2015), their losses have grown at a faster rate than their revenue. What sort of a business model is that?

Take the case of Zomato, a company which basically delivers food at your doorstep. The latest numbers of this company are available because 47% of it is owned by Info Edge, a stock market listed firm.

For the financial year ending March 31, 2016, the losses of Zomato shot up by 262% to Rs 492.3 crore. It had reported a loss of Rs 136 crore for the year ending March 31, 2015. The revenue of the company went by around 91.3% to Rs 184.97 crore. The revenue for the year ending March 31, 2015, was at Rs 96.7 crore.

So, the losses of Zomato went up by 262%, when its revenue went up 91.3%. What sort of business model is this, where the losses of the company go up at a much faster rate than its revenue? Of course, I don’t understand information technology.

The Indian ecommerce companies have adopted a discount model in order to lure customers. This means selling products at a loss in order to build a customer base. And this has made their operating structure very similar to that of a Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is essentially a financial fraud in which investment is solicited by offering very high returns. The investment of the first lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the second lot. The investment of the second lot of investors is redeemed by using the money brought in by the third lot and so on.

The scheme continues up until the money being brought in by the new investors is greater than the money being redeemed to the old investors. The moment the money that needs to be redeemed becomes greater than the fresh money coming in, the scheme collapses.

How does this apply in case of Indian ecommerce companies? Up until now the ecommerce companies have managed to survive because of private equity, venture capitalists and hedge fund investors, bringing in fresh money into the company at regular intervals. This fresh money being brought in essentially funds the huge losses that these companies make, in order to drive up their revenues.

This money seems to have dried up or is coming in more slowly than it was in the past. And this has put many Indian ecommerce companies in trouble. Some of them have had to cut down their operations. And some others like Flipkart have had to postpone joining dates of MBAs they have recruited, in order to control costs.
And this brings us back to the oldest business lesson—businesses need to make money, in order to survive. Businesses which don’t make money for an extended period of time, don’t survive. They shutdown. That is how it is.

Of course, there is a corollary to this rule. There are businesses which can keep running, even if they don’t make money. They can keep making losses. This is only possible if they happen to be owned by the government of India.

Take the case of the government operated airline Air India (Okay, I know I am sounding like a broken record here, if you know what that means, in the MP3 era). The airline has made losses of Rs 34,689.7 crore between 2010-2011 and 2015-2016, and is still running.

Or take the case of Hindustan Photo Films, the fourth largest loss making public sector enterprise. The company has accumulated losses of Rs 7,794.51 crore between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015. As the table shows, the losses of the company have been going up over the years.

Hindustan Photo Films Manufacturing Company
YearLosses(in Rs crore)
2010-20111156.65
2011-20121352.32
2012-20131560.59
2013-20141560.59
2014-20152164.36
Total losses7794.51
Source: Public Sector Enterprises Surveys

This is sheer waste of money. The money can be better spent on many other things like primary education, health, roads, railways, ports, and so on. There isn’t exactly a shortage of things that the government of India needs to spend on. And it isn’t exactly going around loaded with money. In this scenario, it needs to be careful with where and on what it spends its money on. Hence, the last thing it should be doing is subsidising losses of public sector enterprises which have been perpetually losing money.

The prime minister Narendra Modi in a recent interview to the Wall Street Journal said: “You can’t suddenly get rid of the public sector, nor should you.” Well, that doesn’t mean that the government continues to run loss making companies like Air India and Hindustan Photo Films. Further, Modi has been governing for more than two years now, and if he still continues to run companies like Air India and Hindustan Photo Films, it clearly tells us that he has no intention of shutting them down.

The Congress led United Progressive Alliance practiced crony capitalism (the mess at public sector banks is a clear evidence of that) as well as crony socialism (by continuing to fund loss making public sector enterprises). While Modi, to his credit, has gotten rid of crony capitalism, he continues with crony socialism.

While, we may be able to have a Congress mukt Bharat in politics, it seems difficult to have that scenario when it comes to economics. Indeed, that is a big tragedy.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on May 30, 2016