NDA

Explained: Why the Govt is Misleading Us on High Fuel Prices and Oil Bonds

The reason why doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is controlling the narrative – Fabian Nicieza in Suburban Dicks.

Over the last few years, several government ministers have blamed the oil bonds issued during the era of the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, for the high petrol and diesel prices, which have prevailed for a while now.

The then oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan had tweeted in 2018 that: “The country and our OMCs [oil marketing companies} are also yet to recover from the shock of Oil Bonds worth Rs 1.4 Lakh Crores issued during the UPA regime.”

The finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman rblamed the oil bonds for the high prices of petrol and diesel, in a recent statement.  This is not true. I have explained this issue in great detail on earlier occasions. Nevertheless, I will try and offer a broader summary here, before getting on to the new points I want to make. 

Oil bonds were largely issued by the previous UPA government. This was done in order to compensate oil marketing companies, like Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum, for selling petrol, diesel, kerosene and domestic cooking gas, at a price which wasn’t monetarily feasible for them.

The argument offered by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is that since interest has to be paid on these bonds and that these bonds have to be repaid, the government needs to charge a high excise duty on petrol and diesel. This leads to high petrol and diesel prices.

In that sense, the NDA government and you and me are paying for the sins of the UPA government. This argument is never made in as clear words as I am making it here. Things are left vague enough for people to fill in the gaps and make their own WhatsApp forwards.

As of March 2014, before the NDA government came to power, the total oil bonds outstanding stood at Rs 1,34,423 crore. By March 2015, this had come down to Rs 1,30,923 crore, which is where it has stayed up until March 2021.

This means that between end March 2015 and end March 2021, no oil bonds matured and hence, the NDA government didn’t need to repay a single rupee of oil bonds. Of course, interest had to be paid on these bonds. An interest of Rs 9,990 crore has to be paid on these bonds every year. This means, over a period of six years, between end March 2015 and end March 2021, the government has paid Rs 59,940 crore as interest on these bonds.

During the same period, it earned Rs 14,60,036 crore as excise duty on petroleum products. As the government told the Lok Sabha in early August this year: “Central excise duty is contributed largely by Petrol and Diesel.” So, excise duty earned on the sale of petrol and diesel makes up for a bulk of the excise duty earned on sale of petroleum products.

In total, during this period, 4.1% of the excise duty collected on petroleum products has gone towards paying interest on oil bonds. In 2020-21, this stood at just 2.7% (Rs 9,990 crore of interest against excise duty of Rs 3,71,726 crore earned on petroleum products).

In fact, if were to look at excise duty collected on just petrol and diesel, between end March 2015 and end March 2021, it amounts to around Rs 13.7 lakh crore. The interest paid on oil bonds amounts to 4.4% of this amount.

In 2021-22, the current financial year, Rs 10,000 crore worth of oil bonds are maturing and hence, need to be repaid. The interest that needs to be paid on the oil bonds during the year should amount to around Rs 9,500 crore. So, during 2020-21, around Rs 19,500 crore will be needed by the government to service these bonds.

In an answer provided to the Lok Sabha recently, the government had said that the total excise duty earned on petrol and diesel, between April and June this year, had stood at Rs 94,181 crore.

Given that, the second Covid wave was on during this period, and that it would have negatively impacted the consumption of petrol and diesel to some extent, it is safe to say that if excise duty on petrol and diesel continue to be where they are, the total collections this year can easily touch Rs 4 lakh crore. Of course, the collections on petroleum products will be even greater.

Rs 19,500 crore works to around 4.9% of Rs 4 lakh crore. So, the government is likely to spend one-twentieth of the excise duty earned on petrol and diesel, in servicing the oil bonds (both repaying maturing bonds and paying interest on the outstanding bonds).

The remaining bonds worth Rs 1,20,923 crore (Rs 1,30,923 crore minus Rs 10,000 crore worth of bonds maturing this year), will mature between November 2023 and March 2026.

The other argument that is being made is that the government needs to save money in order to repay these bonds in the years to come. It is worth clarifying here that the government meets the expenditure of a given year from the revenue earned during that year. Hence, bonds maturing in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, will be repaid using taxes earned during that year. This nullifies the argument about the government having to save in order to repay these bonds.

Hence, the entire argument that the oil bonds have led to a situation where the government has had to charge a high excise duty on petrol and diesel, is totally wrong. In fact, as I have explained earlier, the reason for this lies in the fall of corporate tax collections.

In 2018-19, the total corporate tax or the income tax paid by corporates had stood at Rs 6.64 lakh crore. This fell to Rs 5.57 lakh crore in 2019-20. It fell further to Rs 4.57 lakh crore in 2020-21.

This fall was on account of the base rate of corporate tax being cut from 30% to 22% in September 2019. It can also be argued that Covid must have led to lower profits for corporates in 2020-21 and hence, lower corporate tax collections for the government.  

Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy tells us that in 2020-21, the net profit of listed corporates (more than 5,000 companies) increased by 120.3% in comparison to 2019-20. So, Covid didn’t impact profits among the listed corporates. While net profit went up by 120.3%, the corporate tax paid by these companies went up just 13.9%. 

Covid has negatively impacted smaller businesses and that must have impacted corporate tax collections to a certain extent. But a bulk of the fall in corporate tax collections seems to have come from a lower rate of tax. This has been compensated through higher excise duty on petrol and diesel.

In 2018-19, excise duty earned on petroleum products by the central government brought in Rs 2.14 lakh crore. This jumped to Rs 3.72 lakh crore in 2020-21, thanks to a higher excise duty on petrol and diesel.

The corporate tax cut was supposed to boost consumption and lead to an increase in corporate investment. But that hasn’t really happened. Expecting consumption to increase thanks to lower corporate taxes was kite-flying at its very best.

Consumption increases when people see the prospect of earning more money, not when corporate taxes go down. Investment, for a whole host of reasons, has been down in the dumps for close to a decade now,. I shall not go into these reasons in detail here, having dealt with this issue on multiple occasions in the past.

This has created a communication problem around high petrol and diesel prices for a government obsessed with managing the narrative.

In their book Nudge—The Final Edition, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein talk about the publicity principle, originally elucidated by the philosopher John Rawls. As Thaler and Sunstein write: “If a firm or government adopts a policy that it could not easily defend publicly, it stands to face considerable embarrassment, and perhaps much worse, if the policy and its grounds are disclosed [emphasis added].”

This is precisely the problem with the entire messaging around the issue of high petrol and diesel prices. The only reason for this is the high excise duty on petrol and diesel, in order to compensate for lower corporate tax collections.

The excise duty on petrol has gone up from Rs 9.48 per litre in October 2014 to Rs 32.90 per litre currently, a jump of close to 250%. A bulk of this increase of around Rs 10 per litre has happened in the last one year. A similar story has played out with diesel, with excise duty going up from Rs 3.56 per litre in October 2014 to Rs 31.80 per litre currently, a jump of close to 800%. (I would like to thank Chintan Patel for providing this information by using the central government notifications on excise duty on petrol and diesel).

Of course, this is not something that a narrative obsessed government can admit to. This would mean telling the world at large that the common man is being made to pay for lower corporate taxes. This has led to the entire narrative around oil bonds and they having to be repaid and interest having to be paid on them, and that leading to a higher excise duty on petrol and diesel, and hence, higher pump prices of fuel.

This is a narrative that can be easily sold on WhatsApp, given that most people don’t have the time to check the facts of any argument and buy anything that is sent to them over the world’s newest and the most happening university.

As Thomas Sowell writes in Knowledge and Decisions: 

“To exhort the individual citizen to make investments in knowledge comparable to those of lobbyists and political crusaders (both of whom have much lower costs per unit of personal benefit) is to urge him to behaviour that is irrational, if not physically impossible in a twenty-four hour day.”

This is something that the current government is making use of and projecting a narrative that wrongly blames the past government for high fuel prices.

As Thaler and Sunstein write: “Organizations of all forms should respect people, and if they adopt policies that they could not and would not defend in public, they fail to show that respect. Instead, they treat citizens as tools for their own use or manipulation [emphasis added].”

This is precisely what is happening.

The interesting thing is that the government has given the more or less the right reason behind high fuel prices in an answer to a question raised in the Lok Sabha. As it said: “The excise duty rates on petroleum products are calibrated from time to time with the objective of generating resources for infrastructure and other developmental items of expenditure, taking into account all relevant factors and keeping in view the prevailing fiscal situation.”

Every government has the right to tax the citizens in different ways. This answer tells us precisely that. Of course, explaining the rationale behind the tax is not always that straightforward.

Switch off the TV tomorrow and don’t waste time on Bihar election results

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A cottage industry has emerged these days around trying to predict which way the Bihar election will go. I don’t want to add to it. And this is not a column explaining who will win the Bihar elections and why. Enough of that has been written and discussed in the media.

The irony in all this is that people sitting in television studios and writing editorials in newspapers, who have never visited Bihar, are perhaps the most confident on which way the election will go. Don’t ask me how.

Nevertheless, there is some logic to it. Dan Gardner explains this in Future Babble—Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway: “There is a “confidence heuristic”. If someone’s confidence is high, we believe they are probably right: if they are less certain, we feel they are less reliable, this means we deem those who are dead certain the best forecasters.”

As Gardner further writes: “Another problem with the confidence heuristic is that people may look and sound more confident than they really are. Con men do this deliberately. We all do, to some degree. Of course most of us don’t do it brazenly as con men – one hopes – but we all sense intuitively that confidence is convincing. And so, when we are face to face with people we want to convince, we downplay our doubts, or bury them entirely.”

So being confident and forceful about what you say makes for good television and great reading. And that explains why people sitting in studios in Delhi and Mumbai are making the most confident forecasts about who will win in Bihar.

Research also shows that when there is a competition to make forecasts, the forecasts people make get more and more confident. as we go along.

What does this mean during election time? When every political analyst is busy making forecast, if someone wants to standout then he has to make clear and confident forecasts. And that is precisely what has been playing out in television studios up until now.

You are likely to see more of that once election results start coming in and by 10AM tomorrow morning, it will be more or less clear who is likely to form the next government in Bihar—the Nitish Kumar led Grand Alliance—or the Narendra Modi led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Once the results are out political analysts will offer us explanations on why the results happened to turn out the way they have. If Narendra Modi led NDA wins, then we will hear stuff like the Modi magic is still at work, people have taken Modi’s promise of a separate Rs 1.25 lakh crore development package for Bihar seriously and so on. Some cheeky analyst might also suggest that all the statements made by the “so-called” fringe elements in the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), also helped bring in the votes.

If the Nitish Kumar led Grand Alliance wins, you will hear analysts stay stuff like there was no anti-incumbency at work. The development carried out by Nitish Kumar has worked. The women have come out in full force to vote for him given all the development projects targeted towards women Kumar carried out. And voters in state elections have once again shown that development gets you votes.

Given that it is Bihar election results that the analysts will be analysing, there is bound to be some analysis along caste lines. You are likely to hear stuff like the Muslims plus Yadavs, the base on which Lalu Prasad Yadav ruled Bihar for a long time, voted for the Grand Alliance en masse. Hence, all the statements made by the so-called fringe elements in BJP did not work.

So if the BJP wins we will be told that the statements by fringe elements may have added the icing on the cake. If it loses, we will be told it didn’t work.
Long-story short, we will be told a lot of stories explaining why things happened the way they did. As Gardner writes: “People love stories, both the listening and the telling. It’s a central part of human existence, found in every culture, in every place, in every time…For explanation-sharing to work, however, a story cannot conclude with “I don’t know” or “The answer isn’t clear.”” The narrative should be complete. Incomplete stories do not work.

Hence, there will be no shortage of explanations and stories on why things happened the way they did in Bihar. Political analysts will come up with extremely coherent reasons on why things happened the way they did. You won’t hear phrases like “I don’t know” or words like “maybe” or “possibly”. In fact, some analysts will even say stuff like “as I have been saying all along”. In case of television channels the “I” will become “we”.

Even those who get their forecast wrong (and believe me there will a lot of them) will revise their forecasts. As Jason Zweig writes in The Devil’s Financial Dictionary: “Once you learn what did happen, your mind tricks you into believing that you always knew it would happen. Contrary to the popular cliché, hindsight is not 20/20; it is barely better than legally blind.”

This tendency is referred to as hindsight bias.

Hindsight bias is also referred to as “I knew it all along effect”. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness: “Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny…Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information…the “I knew it all along” effect.”

The Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about this phenomenon in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, in the context of the financial crisis which broke out in late 2008.

As he writes: “I have heard of too many people who “knew well before it happened that the 2008 financial crisis was inevitable.” This sentence contains a highly objectionable word, which should be removed from our vocabulary in discussions of major events. This word is, of course, knew. Some people thought well in advance that there would be a crisis, but they did not know it. They now say they knew it because the crisis did in fact happen.”

Something similar will play after the Bihar election results as well. Depending on the result, people will adjust their analysis and say “I knew this will happen”.

So if Nitish wins they will say, I knew this will happen, even if they had been predicting a Modi win earlier. And vice versa.

This is not a good thing. As Kahneman writes: “What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion. The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.”

Given this, it’s best not to waste time watching all the analysis that will pour in on Bihar elections, all through the day tomorrow and on Monday.

Switch off the television.

Take your kids out for a spin.

Buy some gold for your Mother. And your wife. Or your girl-friend (It’s Dhanteras after all).

Or just pick up a good book and read.

Happy Diwali!
The column originally appeared on The 5 minute Wrap Up on Equitymaster on Nov 7, 2015

How UPA turned NDA’s economic growth into shambles

upaVivek Kaul 

In both love and war, it makes sense to hit where it hurts the most.
The war for the next Lok Sabha elections is currently on. And there is no love lost between the two main parties, the Congress and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).
The BJP today hit out at the economic performance of the Congress led United Progressive Alliance government, over the last ten years.
Politically, this makes immense sense given the bad state the economy is in currently. Economic growth as measured by the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) is down to less than 5%. The GDP grew by 4.7% between October and December 2013.
The rate of inflation as measured by the consumer price index had been greater than 10% for a while and has only recently come below 10%. The consumer price inflation for February 2014 came in at 8.1%.
Industrial activity as measured by the index of industrial production (IIP) was flat in January 2014, after falling for a while. The overall index grew by just 0.1% during January 2014. Manufacturing which forms a little over 75% of the index fell by 0.7% during January 2014, in comparison to January 2013. This primarily is on account of the slowdown in consumer demand.
People have been going slow on spending money because of high inflation. This has led to a scenario where they have had to spend more money on meeting daily expenditure. Retail inflation in general and food inflation in particular has been greater than 10% over the last few years, and has only recently started to come down. Given this, people have been postponing all other expenditure and that has had an impact on economic growth. Anyone, with a basic understanding of economics knows that one man’s spending is another man’s income, at the end of the day. When consumers are going slow on purchasing goods, it makes no sense for businesses to manufacture them. When we look at the IIP from the use based point of view it tells us that consumer durables (fridges, ACs, televisions,computers, cars etc) are down by 8.3% in comparison to January 2013. The overall consumer goods sector is down by 0.6%.
This slowdown in consumer demand was also reflected in the gross domestic product(GDP) numbers from the expenditure point of view. Between October and December 2013, the personal final consumption expenditure(PFCE) rose by just 2.6% to Rs 9,81,463 crore in comparison to September to December 2012. In comparison, during the period October to December 2012, the PFCE had grown by 5.1%.
The lack of demand along with a host of other reasons also means that the investment climate for businesses is not really great. This is reflected in the lack of capital goods growth, which was down by 4.2% during January 2014. If one goes beyond this theoretical constructs and looks at real numbers like car sales, they also tell us that the Indian economy is not in a good shape as of now. Smriti Irani, a television actress turned BJP politician summarized the situation very well, when she said “Today, as the Congress-led UPA leaves office, it leaves behind a legacy of an economy which has been mismanaged.” Yashwant Sinha, former finance minister and senior BJP leader, went a step ahead and said that “an investment crisis” and “a crisis of confidence in the economy”. The Congress party is likely to react to this attack by the BJP by following the conventional line that it has always followed. The party is most likely to say that India has done much better under the UPA than the BJP led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Prima facie, there is nothing wrong with the argument. Between 1998-99 and 2003-04, when NDA was in power, the average GDP growth rate was at 6% per year. Between 2004-05 and 2012-2013, when the UPA has been in power the average rate of growth has been at 7.9% per year. If one takes into account, the GDP growth rate for this financial year i.e. 2013-2014, this rate of growth will be lower than 7.9%,but still higher than the 6% per year achieved during NDA rule.
But it is worth remembering here that the economy is not like a James Bond movie, where the storyline of one movie has very little connection with the storyline of the next. An economy is continuous in that sense.
The rate of economic growth in 2003, a few months before the UPA came to power, was at 7.9%. The rate of inflation was at 3.8%. In fact, the rate of inflation during the entire NDA term averaged at 4.8%, whereas during the first nine years of UPA regime between 2004-2005 and 2012-2013, it has averaged at 6.7%.
If we take the rate of inflation during this financial year into account the number is bound to be higher. The index of industrial product, a measure of the industrial activity in the country, was growing at 8% in early 2004. Currently it is more or less flat.
The fiscal deficit for the year 2003-2004 came in at 4.5% of the GDP. The fiscal deficit for the year 2012-2013 was at 4.9% of the GDP. The fiscal deficit for the year 2013-2014 has been projected to be at 4.6% of the GDP. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.
As I have explained in the past, this number has been achieved through accounting shenanigans and does not reflect the real state of government accounts. The expenditure and thus the fiscal deficit of the governmentis understated to the extent of Rs 2,00,000 crore. This is not to say that there wouldn’t have been any accounting shenanigans under the NDA rule, but they would have been nowhere near the present level.
The broader point here is that the NDA had left the economy in a reasonable good shape on which the UPA could build. And the first few years of growth under the UPA rule came because of this. In simple English, unlike James Bond movies, growth under the UPA cannot be separated totally from the growth under the NDA. The growth under UPA fed on the earlier growth under the NDA.
That’s one point. The second point that needs to be brought out here is that the massive economic growth during 2009 and 2010, when India grew by 8.5% and 10.5% respectively, was primarily on account of the government expanding its expenditure rapidly.
The government expenditure during 2007-2008 had stood at Rs 7,12,671 crore. This has since rapidly grown by 123% and stood at Rs 15,90,434 crore for 2013-2014. While this rapid rise in government expenditure ensured that India grew at a very rapid rate when the world at large wasn’t, it has since led to substantial economic problems. During the period Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister of India, the government expenditure grew by 68% and stood at Rs 4,71,368 crore during 2003-2004.
This rapid rise in government expenditure in the last few years has led to loads of problems like high interest rates and inflation, as an increase in government spending has led to an increase in demand without matched by an increase in production.
As Ruchir Sharma put it in a December 2013 piece in the Financial Times “With consumer prices rising at an average annual pace of 10 per cent during the past five years, India has never had inflation so high for so long nor at such an unlikely time…Historically, its inflation was lower than the emerging-market average, but it is now double the average. For decades India’s ranking among emerging markets by inflation rate had hovered in the mid-60s, but lately it has plunged to 142nd out of 153.”
In fact, if one looks at the incremental capital output ratio, it throws up a scary picture. Swanand Kelkar and Amay Hattangadi in a December 2013 article in the Mint wrote “the Incremental Capital Output Ratio (ICOR)…measures the incremental amount of capital required to generate output or GDP. From FY2004 till FY2011, India’s ICOR hovered around the 4 mark, i.e. it required four units of investment to generate one unit of output. Over the last two years, this number has increased with the latest reading at 6.6 for FY2013.” Currently, the number stands at 7.
This, in turn, has led to a massive fall in investment. As Chetan Ahya and Upasna Chachra or Morgan Stanley write in a recent research report titled Five Key Reforms to Fix India’s Growth Problem and dated March 24, 2014, “Public and private investment fell from the peak of 26.2% of GDP in F2008 to 17.3% in F2013. Indeed, private investment CAGR[compounded annual growth rate] was just 1.4% between F2008 to F2013 vs. 43% in the preceding five years.”
What all this clearly tells us is that the economic growth during the UPA rule fed on the economic growth during the NDA rule. The UPA has left the economy in shambles, and the government that takes over, will have a tough time turning it around.
The article appeared originally on www.firstpost.com on March 30, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)