The Budget Fails India’s Demographic Dividend

Fostering Public Leadership - World Economic Forum - India Economic Summit 2010

The Economic Survey released on January 31, points out: “Over the next three decades… India… seems to be in a demographic sweet spot with its working-age population projected to grow by a third.”

Estimates suggest that a million Indians enter the workforce every month.  They are India’s demographic dividend. The hope is that as these Indians work, earn and spend money, India will grow at a faster growth rate than it currently is.

This theory works if and only if India’s demographic dividend can find jobs. And the question is where are the jobs?

As per the Report on Fifth Annual Employment – Unemployment Survey, the unemployment rate in India during 2015-2016 stood at 5 per cent. If a person is employed for 183 or more days during the year, he is considered to be employed.

Further, only 60.6 per cent of those who were available for work for 12 months of the year, found work all through the year. Hence, India’s problem is underemployment and not unemployment. There aren’t enough jobs going around for everyone. And in this scenario, the single most important focus of the Indian government should be to facilitate policies and create an environment in which jobs are created.

This should have been the focus of the annual budget of the central government as well. But the budget failed miserably on this front.

Take the case of public sector banks(PSBs) which are sitting on a huge amount of bad loans. In fact, in 2009-2010, 58.7 per cent of all banks loans went to industry. By 2015-2016, it was down to 13.4 per cent. In the last one year, industrial credit has contracted.

Unless, banks give loans to industry how will industries expand and jobs be created? But banks are in no mood to lend to industry given the huge amount of bad loans they have accumulated over the years by lending to industry. The budget makes no effort to come up with a holistic solution for bad loans of banks. Many piecemeal solutions have been tried and they have failed.

These banks require a large amount of capital to continue to function. In the budget for 2017-2018, the government has allocated just Rs 10,000 crore towards their recapitalisation.

An estimate made by Viral Acharya (now one of the deputy governors of the RBI) and Krishnamurthy Subramanian, suggests that in a prudent scenario PSBs would require around Rs 9,97,400 crore of capital. The government clearly doesn’t have this kind of money. In this scenario, it should be looking at exiting out of the ownership of most of these banks. But nothing of that sort has been suggested either in the budget or otherwise.

Over and above the PSBs, the government also continues to run loss-making companies which include an airline, a couple of telecom companies as well as a company which used to make photo-films. There was no mention in the budget about getting out of these companies.

In 2014-2015, the total losses of loss-making public sector enterprises stood at Rs 27,360 crore. Given the government’s total expenditure that is not a lot of money, but at the same keeping these companies going, does take away the focus and attention from other more important areas like education, health and agriculture.

At the same time, another factor that continues to hold back India are its labour laws. The Economic Survey talks about generating jobs in the apparel sector. The sector should be employing a large number of unskilled Indians entering the workforce. It has the ability to generate close to 24 jobs per one lakh rupees of investment. Rapid export growth can create close to a half a million jobs every year in the apparel as well as the leather goods sector.

But that is not happening primarily because an average Indian apparel and leather firm continues to be small and thus lacks economies of scale to compete globally. As the Economic Survey points out: “Indian apparel and leather firms are smaller compared to firms in say China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.”

This situation can be handled by ensuring that we simplify our labour laws. But no government worth its salt has been able to do anything about it till date. Nevertheless, if the government wants to handle India’s demographic divided well, it needs to simplify the labour laws and in the process help companies grow and create jobs.

If that does not happen, it is worth “remembering that demography provides potential and is not destiny”. And the budget was as good an opportunity as any to set this right.

The column originally appeared in Daily News and Analysis on February 2, 2017

 

The Modi Govt is Finally Unleashing the Power of Executive Action

narendra_modi

Any stock market survives on two things—hope and stories.

Sometimes both hope and stories run parallelly.

Sometimes the stories run out and hope takes over. Sometimes the hope runs out and the stories take over.

When Narendra Modi was elected as the prime minister of India in May 2014, there was great hope among stock market investors that he would unleash a new wave of economic reform that would fast-forward the economic reforms process started in 1991.

But nothing of that sort happened. As economist Vijay Joshi writes in India’s Long Road—The Search for Prosperity: “There can be little doubt that the Partial Reform Model has left India unprepared.”

The country is unprepared to take on the challenges that lie ahead, the biggest among them being the fact that nearly one million individuals will enter the workforce every month, over the next decade and a half.

For the stock market investors, the story did not turn out the way it was expected to. Initially, they went back to hoping that some economic reforms will be initiated. When that did not turn out to be the case, they found another story to explain to themselves, and anyone else who was ready to listen, why things hadn’t turned out as expected.

This time the story was that the Modi government did not have majority in the Rajya Sabha and given this, the Congress party was in a position to block key legislation, which they did. What they forgot to tell us was that the Bhartiya Janata Party had behaved along similar lines in the past when it was in the opposition.

As Joshi writes: “Lack of a majority in the Rajya Sabha is also not a completely new problem: other governments in the past have faced it quite successfully by using their negotiating skills. It was therefore widely expected that the new government would undertake a programme of sweeping economic reform.” Nevertheless that did not happen.

Also, every reform does not need a legislation. As Joshi puts it: “Quite a lot can be done without new legislation, simply on the basis of ‘executive action’.” An executive action of the government unlike a new legislation does not need the approval of the Parliament.

The Modi government has started to unleash the power of executive action in the recent past and that is a good thing. Here are a few things that it has done in the recent past and plans to do in the days to come, which should work well for the Indian economy.

a) Starting this month, the government has allowed oil marketing companies to increase kerosene prices by 25 paisa every month, up until April 2017. This will result in a saving of Rs 2.25 per litre (25 paisa multiplied by nine months) of kerosene sold during the current financial year.

The strategy is similar to the previous Congress led United Progressive Alliance government allowing the oil marketing companies to increase the price of diesel by 50 paisa every month. It was ultimately this strategy which helped the Modi government to deregulate diesel in October 2014.

The under-recovery on diesel for the month of July 2016 stands at Rs 13.12 per litre. The Bank of America-Merrill Lynch expects that this gradual increase in prices will lead to savings of Rs 1,100 crore for the government during this financial year. If the price increase continues in 2017-2018 as well, then the government will see savings of another Rs 2,400 crore.

While this is not a huge amount, it is a step in the right direction. Also, it needs to be pointed out here that 46 per cent of kerosene distributed through the public distribution system does not reach those it is intended for. The leakage into the open market is used to adulterate diesel and is also smuggled into neighbouring countries.

b) In June, the government had introduced some reforms in the textile sector through executive action. The government re-introduced the concept of a fixed term contract which allows textile companies to hire workers for a fixed period, instead of offering permanent employment.

Up until now companies had been hiring contract workers, who in many cases are not paid as much as permanent workers are, even though the work being done is exactly the same. The fixed term contracts will also allow companies the flexibility to hire according to their demand. And they won’t have to keep workers on the rolls even when they don’t actually need them.

This should help create employment in the low-skilled workers space, which is India’s natural competitive advantage and that is precisely what India wants. (You can read the complete article here).

c) Another good decision is the government’s move to invite merchant bankers to sell shares of 51 companies that it holds through the Specified Undertaking of Unit Trust of India(SUUTI). The SUUTI was formed in 2003 to bailout the investors of US-64, the flagship scheme of the UTI.

The government owns companies like ITC, Axis Bank and L&T, through SUUTI. And it’s time the government sold these shares to raise some money. Also, it is important how this money is used. Instead of simply going into the general coffers of the government, it should be specifically earmarked towards creating better physical infrastructure.

In fact, as I write this, there is a report in the Mint which suggests that the government will get the Life Insurance Corporation of India to pick up a major portion of the shares held by SUUTI. The Mint quotes an official as saying:LIC has been asked to pick up at least a third of the overall SUUTI holdings. This primarily includes (its holdings in) ITC, Axis Bank and L&T. The cost of the deal could be Rs 25,000-30,000 crore for LIC.”

If anything of this sort happens this will dilute the entire idea of the government selling out shares held by SUUTI, lock, stock and barrel. Basically money will move from one arm of the government to another. It is estimated that the current value of shares held by SUUTI is around Rs 60,000 crore.

d) A news report in the Swarajya Mag suggests that the NITI Aayog has recommended that “as many as 16 PSUs” be put up for strategic sale and 26 others be closed down. If the government does get around to doing this, it will be a huge thing. A lot of money that is currently being wasted will no longer be wasted. The loss making public sector enterprises lost more than Rs 27,000 crore in 2014-2015.

Other than money being saved, it will also give the government more bandwidth to concentrate on more important things than looking after loss making public sector enterprises.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on July 14, 2016

Here is One Chinese Story that Narendra Modi Needs to Listen to

Deng_Xiaoping
The Chinese economic growth story started in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping taking charge of the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly, Xiaoping did not hold any official post. Nevertheless, he was looked upon as the Supreme Leader of China between 1978 and 1992.

Most accounts of China’s astonishing double digit growth for close to three decades give credit to Xiaoping for initiating Chinese economic growth and pulling out millions of people out of poverty in a very short period of time.

History when it gets written is built around the idea of Great Men doing great things. But things are never as simple as that.

As Matt Ridley writes in The Evolution of Everything: “If you examine closely what happened in China in 1978, it was a more evolutionary story than is usually assumed. It all began in the countryside with the ‘privatisation’ of collective farms to allow individual ownership of land and of harvests. But this change was not ordered from above by a reforming government.”

In the village of Xiaogang, 18 farmers came together. They despaired the dismal production of their farms under the collective system. And they did not like the fact that they had to beg for food from other villages. Given this, one evening they gathered together to figure out what they could do. This was at a time when even holding a meeting was considered a serious crime.

As Ridley writes: “The first, brave man to speak was Yen Jinchang, who suggested that each family should own what it grew, and that they should divide the collective’s land among the families. On a precious scrap of paper he wrote down a contract that they all signed…The families went to work on the land, starting before the official’s whistle blew each morning and ending long after the day’s work was supposed to finish.”

And this soon stared to show results. “Incentivised by the knowledge that they could profit from their work, in the first year they grew more food than the land had produced in previous five years combined,” writes Ridley.

Of course, the local communist party bosses soon came to know. The regional communist party chief intervened to save Yen and at the same time recommended that the same experiment should be copied elsewhere as well. “This was the proposal that eventually reached Deng Xiaoping’s desk. He chose not to stand in the way, that was all. But it was not until 1982 that the party officially recognised that family farms could be allowed – by which time they were everywhere,” writes Ridley.

The economic incentives of private ownership rapidly transformed farming in China and industry soon followed. While the Communist Party still continues to rule the country, the economic success of China wasn’t built on socialism. And there is a thing or two that Indian politicians can learn from this, given their obsession with socialism.

Private firms are normally better at running businesses than the government. This is something that politicians including prime minister Narendra Modi need to understand. As TN Ninan writes in The Turn of the Tortoise—The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future: “The last quarter century’s experience has shown that when the private sector is asked to provide telecom services, run airlines and airports, build and run ports, undertake banking, distribute electricity and even undertake water supply, the result is usually (though not always, for there is no shortage of private banks and airlines that have failed) a substantial improvement on what, the government was doing until then.”

This is basically means two things. One is that the government should be getting out of all the businesses that it has been trying to run for all these years. This is a point that I have often made in the past. There is no point in the government running more than 25 banks. There is no point in the government running a phone company or an airline for that matter.  It does not serve any purpose.

As Ninan writes: It is a matter of regret that Narendra Modi, who got elected on the promise of ‘minimum government, maximum governance’, has shown no taste for radical change or minimizing government…The government system continues to run loss-making airlines and hotels, three-wheeler units and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam.”

Also, in its effort to do everything, the government doesn’t pay adequate attention to many important areas. As Ninan writes: “There is too little of government attention paid to core areas like law and order, education and health—too few judges, too few teachers who teach, too few hospital beds; also too few trade negotiators and too few policemen, especially those with proper training. It should be obvious that there are many things that the state does inadequately or badly, and many tasks that the state has needlessly taken on itself.”

The second point here is that the government should be encouraging entrepreneurship in all possible ways. One point against entrepreneurship are India’s multiple labour laws. But they may not be as much of a problem as they are made out to be.

It is often argued that Indian entrepreneurs do not expand beyond a certain point because it is very difficult to fire workers once they have been taken on. The Chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, makes it very difficult for companies with 100 employees or more, to fire an employee without the permission from the government. This, it is argued, prevents entrepreneurs from expanding.

Economist Pranab Bardhan makes an interesting point in Globalisation, Democracy and Corruption: “It is not clear that the rigid law on retrenchment is always the binding constraint on manufacturing expansion. Take the highly labour-intensive garments industry, for example. A combined dataset [of both the formal and informal sectors] shows that about 92 per cent of garment firms in India have fewer than eight employees…Labour law cannot discourage an eight-employee firm from expanding to an 80-employee firm since Chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act does not kick in until the firm reaches the size of 100 employees.”

So what is stopping these firms from expanding? “The binding constrains on the expansion of that eight-employee firm may have to do with inadequate credit and marketing opportunity, erratic power supply, wretched roads, bureaucratic regulations etc. There are good statistical studies by some economists which show that states with more rigid labour laws have had lower industrial growth and that labour laws can be a constraint. But these studies do not show that they are the only or even the main constraint,” writes Bardhan.

What this tells us very clearly is that the Modi government should work towards removing these binding constraints. This will allow entrepreneurship to flourish. That will lead to more jobs, better pays, higher spending and in the process, higher economic growth.
The column originally appeared on Vivek Kaul’s Diary on January 11, 2016

Why India missed out on the industrial revolution and might miss it again

narendra_modi
The Prime Minister Narendra Modi met representatives of Indian business on September 8, 2015. The Indian businessmen as usual asked for lower interest rates, weaker rupee and so on, to get economic growth going.

Modi on the other hand emphasized on job creation and the role the private sector could play in it. A report in the Mint newspaper points out that Modi also prodded the banks to help small and medium enterprises in the so-called informal sector as “they have great potential for generating new jobs”.

As I have mentioned in previous newsletters of The Daily Reckoning, creating new jobs should be a top priority of the Modi government. This is primarily because 13 million Indians are entering the workforce every year.

Also, as I have mentioned in the past, the only way countries have gone from being developing to being developed is by unleashing a manufacturing/industrial revolution. Despite having a huge labour force and initiating economic reforms in 1991, India has missed out on the manufacturing revolution.

Why is that the case? As Sanjeev Sanyal writes in The Indian Renaissance—India’s Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline: “The country [i.e. India] appears to have shifted from farming to services without having gone through an industrial stage. This not only goes against conventional wisdom but also the experience of other fast-growing Asian economies particularly China.”

China and other Asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and countries of South East Asia) essentially followed an export oriented manufacturing strategy to create economic growth. They started with low-end exports and then gradually started going up the value chain. “These economies usually started out by scaling up low-skill exports like making ready-made garments, toys, cheap household items and so on. With time, they all move up the value chain as wages rise and their workforce become more skilled. Exports shift to things like high-end electronics and automobiles,” writes Sanyal. The services sector becomes a driver of growth only later.

In the Indian case, nothing like that happened. After the 1991 economic reforms, we moved on to exporting complex automobile parts and pharmaceuticals. We also exported information technology and became a global hub of the business process outsourcing industry. India also saw a huge expansion in banking, hotels, airlines, cable television, telecom and so on. None of this was low-end, like was the case of Asian countries as well as China. Hence, we jumped from farming to services, without going through an industrial/manufacturing stage.

And this jump from farming to services, without going through an industrial stage, is counter-intuitive. In fact, India should have latched on to a low end export oriented manufacturing strategy much before the 1991 reforms. But that did not happen.

In order to understand why, we need to go back in history and talk about a gentleman called Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute in two rooms at the Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the early 1930s. He became close to Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and was appointed as the Honorary Statistical Advisor to the government of India.

As Gurcharan Das writes in India Unbound –From Independence to the Global Information Age “His biggest contribution was the draft plan frame for the Second Five Year Plan…In it he put into practice the socialist ideas of investment in a large public sector (at the expense of the private sector), with emphasis on heavy industry (at the expense of consumer goods) and a focus on import substitution (at the expense of export promotion).”

Hence, big heavy industry became the order of the day at the cost of small consumer goods. The alternative vision of encouraging the production of low-end consumer goods was put forward as well. As Das writes “It belonged to the Bombay [now Mumbai] economists CN Vakil and PR Brahmanand. It was neither glamourous nor as technically rigorous as Mahalnobis’s, but it was more suited to the underdeveloped Indian economy. Its starting point was that India lacked capital but had plenty of people…The thing to do was to put these people into productive work at the lowest capital cost.”

And how could this be done? “The Bombay economists suggested that we employ the surplus labour to produce “wage goods,” or simple consumer products – clothes, toys, shoes, snacks, radios, and bicycles. These low-capital, low-risk, business would attract loads of entrepreneurs, for they would yield quick output and rapid returns on investments. Labour would produce the goods it would eventually consume with the wages it earned in producing the goods,” writes Das.
Nevertheless, with the focus on the public sector, nothing like that happened.

But why did India miss out on a manufacturing/industrial revolution even after the process of liberalization started in 1991? India’s domestic savings through much of the 1990s stood at around 23% of the GDP. A major portion of these savings went into financing the government fiscal deficit. Given this, interest rates were high and “the country was forced to use capital sparingly,” writes Sanyal. Any industrial revolution needs a massive amount of capital, which wasn’t easily available in the Indian case.

Further, even with economic reforms many things on the ground did not change. As Sanyal writes: “The easing of big-picture impediments like industrial licensing and import tariffs did not get rid of the underlying framework of over-regulations, bureaucratic delays and erratic judicial enforcement. The country had built up a huge baggage off laws, by-laws and regulations at every layer of government during the half-century under socialism.” Much of this still remains to be dismantled.

Take the case of labour laws. There are more than fifty labour laws just at the central government level. As Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya write in India’s Tryst with Destiny: “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.”

These laws prevent small Indian firms from growing bigger. They also prevent big Indian industrialists from entering sectors that can employ a huge amount of labour. 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 worthwhile 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.”

If Narendra Modi wants Indian businesses to create jobs, he first needs to sort out the labour laws. And that will be easier said than done.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Sep 10, 2015

 

Jobs, jobs and more jobs is what India needs

jobs
Buried somewhere
in the last financial year’s Economic Survey are some very disturbing data points, which the pink papers do not like to talk about. The usual news reports that you will read in the business newspapers published in the country are about professional colleges (MBA/Engineering) being flush with jobs.
None of the newspapers get into detail about how bad the overall job scenario in India is. The fact of the matter is that we just aren’t creating enough jobs for the youth who are entering the workforce every year.
The
Economic Survey points out that between 1999-2000 and 2004-2005 the employment as measured by the usual status method increased from 398 million to 457.9 million. This was the period when the Bhartiya Janata Party led National Democratic Alliance was in power.
After this, the job growth just came to a complete standstill. Between 2004-2005 to 2009-2010, the employment increased by just 1.1 million to 459 million. The first term of the Congress led United Progressive Alliance was a period of jobless growth, despite the gross domestic product(GDP) registering solid growth. So, the size of the overall economy was growing but the jobs weren’t.
The situation improved over the next two years. Between 2009-2010 and 2011-2012, the number of employed individuals increased by 13.9 million to 472.9 million. Hence, the employment growth between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012 was at a minuscule 0.5% per year. In comparison, the employment growth was at 2.8% per year between 1999-2000 and 2004-2005.
Mihir S Sharma in
Restart—The Last Chance for the Indian Economy looks at the data over a longer time frame and comes up with a similar conclusion: “In the years from 1972 to 1983—not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity—the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew by 2.3 percent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of 1.6 percent a year.”
The trouble is that this is not enough. “13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now on till 2030…But, if these young people have to absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year—almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won’t find one,” writes Sharma.
What makes the scenario worse is that as per the last census nearly 47 million Indians under the age of 25 have been looking for a job, and not been able to find one.
So what is the way out? The
Economic Survey provides what looks like an answer. As it points out: “The defining challenge in India today is that of generating employment and growth. Jobs are created by firms when firms invest and grow. Hence it is important to create an environment that is conducive for firms to invest…The ultimate goal of economic policy is to create a sustained renaissance of high growth in which hundreds of millions of good quality jobs are created. Good quality jobs are created by high productivity firms, so this agenda is critically about how firms are created, how firms grow, and how firms achieve high productivity.”
Theoretically the above paragraph makes perfect sense. But there are several problems with it. India grew at the rate of 7.4% per year between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012. Despite this the job growth came to a standstill. Between 1999-2000 and 2004-2005 the economic growth was around 6% per year. Nevertheless, jobs grew at a much faster rate than they grew between 2004-2005 and 2011-2012.
So, faster economic growth does not always create jobs. Further, the
Economic Survey talks about highly productive firms creating quality jobs. The question is what portion of Indian firms are highly productive or want to achieve high productivity. A significant portion of big Indian firms are essentially run by crony capitalists who are more interested in short term gains rather than building a highly productive organization.
Then there is the question of labour laws as well. Sharma provides a comparison between Bangladesh and India, and how the countries stack up when it comes to their respective textile industries. As he writes: “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.
Why is there such a huge differential is a question worth asking? The answer lies in the surfeit of labour laws that firms in this country need to follow. And this ensures that most Indian textile firms start small and continue to remain small.
In their book 
India’s Tryst with Destiny, Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind 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.
In fact, the Indian Constitution allows both the central as well as state governments to pass labour laws. This has led to a surfeit of labour laws. As Bhagwati and Panagariya point out: “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.”
What leads to further trouble is that these laws are not consistent with one another. This has led to a situation where “you cannot implement Indian labour laws 100 per cent without violating 20 per cent of them,” write Bhagwati and Panagariya.
This explains why Indian textile firms continue to remain small and not enough jobs are created in the process. 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”.

In fact, the textile sector is an excellent representation of the overall Indian business. Businesses which have less than 10 workers, employ more than 90% of India’s workers. What this clearly tells us is that the government of India needs to start simplifying its labour laws. At the same time this needs to trickle down to the level of state governments as well.
Sharma summarizes it best when he says: “[India] tried to protect workers instead of work; and it failed.” And that needs to change.

The column appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning on Feb 13, 2015