India and the Fallacy of the Demographic Dividend

indian flag

At times it is very difficult to make sense of a country as complicated as India is. What complicates the situation further is the fact that we have very little data going around in many cases. But then there are broader trends, which one can comment on.

One such thing is the demographic dividend or to put it more precisely India’s demographic dividend. Nearly eleven years back, when I didn’t understand much economics or finance, this was one of the terms I heard people connected with the investment industry, continuously talk about.

India will do well in this decades to come because of its demographic dividend, they said. In fact, some of them are still talking about it.

So what is the demographic dividend? As country progresses it moves from being a largely rural agrarian society to a predominantly urban society. Along the way it changes from being a society with high fertility and mortality rates to a society which has low fertility and mortality rates.

As Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason write in an article titled What is the demographic dividend in the Finance and Development magazine of the International Monetary Fund: “At an early stage of this transition, fertility rates fall, leading to fewer young mouths to feed. During this period, the labour force temporarily grows more rapidly than the population dependent on it, freeing up resources for investment in economic development and family welfare. Other things being equal, per capita income grows more rapidly too.”

The infant mortality rate in India was 75 in 1996. It has come down to 38 in 2015, data from World Bank shows. The infant mortality rate is essentially defined as the number of infants who die before reaching one year of age, for every 1000 live births during the course of a given year.

Along with the infant mortality rate declining, the general technological advances as well as access to medical facilities have improved. This essentially means that in the coming years there will be a huge bulge in the number of young people in the country. In this stage, the workforce of the country will increase dramatically.

There are multiple estimates of what India’s workforce will look like in the years to come. Most of these estimates essentially suggest that India’s workforce is increasing at the rate of one million workers per month and will continue increasing at this rate in the years to come.

The Planning Commission, before it was disbanded by the Narendra Modi government, had made an estimate on India’s workforce in the years to come.

As the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-2017) document pointed out: “One hundred and eighty-three million additional income seekers are expected to join the workforce over the next 15 years.” This essentially means that a little over 12 million individuals will keep joining the workforce every year, in the years to come. This works out to around one million a month. And at this rate, the Indian workforce is expected to be larger than that of China by 2030.

And this is India’s demographic dividend. As these individuals enter the workforce, find work, earn money and spend it, the Indian economy is expected to do well. When economists and politicians talk about an economic growth of close to 10 per cent per year, they are essentially hoping that India’s demographic dividend will play out as it is expected.

But the question is how likely is this? How have things with other countries been in the past? Have countries which were expected to benefit from the demographic dividend benefitted from it?

As Ruchir Sharma writes in his new book The Rise and Fall of Nations—Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World: “The trick is to avoid falling for the fallacy of the “demographic dividend,” the idea that population growth pays off automatically in rapid economic growth. It pays off only if political leaders create the economic conditions necessary to attract investment and generate jobs. In the 1960s and ‘70s, rapid population growth in Africa, China, and India led to famines, high unemployment and civil strife. Rapid population growth is often a precondition for fast economic growth, but it never guarantees fast growth.”

Sharma then talks about the Arab world which despite being poised to, did not benefit from a demographic dividend. As Sharma writes: “The Arab world provides a cautionary tale. There between 1985 and 2005 the working age population grew by an average annual rate of more than 3 percent, or nearly twice as face as the rest of the world. But no economic dividend resulted. In the early 2010s many Arab countries suffered from cripplingly high youth unemployment rates; more than 40 percent in Iraq and more than 30 percent in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia, where the violence and chaos of the Arab Spring began.”

This is something that India and Indians need to be aware of. The demographic dividend benefits a country if the government of the day is able to create the right environment in which jobs are created. As Sharma writes: “In India, where hopes for the demographic dividend have also been sky high, ten million young people will enter the workforce each year over the next decade, but the lately the economy has been creating less than five million jobs annually.”

If this were to continue, there will be no demographic dividend for India.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on June 17, 2016

The Middle Class Indian Man and His Search for a Benevolent Dictator

 

 

in-lgflag

 

India needs a benevolent dictator.”

I have heard this being said over and over again, over the years.

Usually, the person saying it is a man.

Usually, he is a successful corporate type who is in the habit of driving his team to meet unreasonable goals set by the organisation.

Usually, he doesn’t like to take no for an answer.

Usually, he is looking to encash his ESOPs at the end of the year.

Usually, you will hear him say things like, this year we did Turkey, next year we plan to do New Zealand.

Usually his heart is in the right place. It beats for his country. It wants the country to do well. And in the process, he ends up saying the nonsense that he does.

In some cases, he is a Non-Resident Indian, living in the United States, the oldest and one of the most successful democracies in the world. In some cases, he is someone who has lived through Indira Gandhi’s emergency between 1975 and 1977 and is nostalgic about it.

“You know, trains ran on time,” he says. I don’t know if they did, but at least that is the argument that is offered.

And in some other cases, he opens the argument with the line: “Look at Singapore”.

So what is this Look at Singapore argument? Allow me to explain. As Arvind Pangariya writes in India—The Emerging Giant: “Countries, such as the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China…have attained high rates of growth under authoritarian regimes.

India on the other hand almost always been a democracy since its independence in 1947. And on top, it has been one of the few countries which has managed to be a democracy almost all along. As Panagariya writes: “Along with Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Sri Lanka, India is only one of the four developing countries to have had democratically elected governments throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond…The remaining three countries…are all relatively tiny. The brief period of emergency rule—from June 26, 1975, to March 21,1977—in India may be viewed as representing a break in its democratic tradition.”

The people who argue in favour of benevolent dictators have basically this to say—countries in Asia that have done well, are those which have had autocratic regimes. India lost out because it was a democracy.

As Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations: “Of the eight countries that quadrupled their incomes between 1950 and 1990, two (Taiwan and Singapore) were ruled by dictators during the entire period, one (South Korea) was ruled by a dictator during most of it, two (Japan and Malta) were democracies throughout the period and three (Thailand, Portugal and Greece) waffled between autocracy and democracy.” China has also had an autocratic regime through its period of economic development through the late 1970s.

This is offered as evidence as to why India would have done much better if it had been run by a benevolent dictator and an autocratic regime. The trouble with this argument is that it looks at just one side of the equation—the countries which have had benevolent dictators and have done well. It doesn’t look at countries, which have had dictators and gone absolutely to the dogs.

The African continent is littered with examples of such countries. Closer to home, there is Pakistan. Look at the mess the country currently is in. Or look at what has happened in a country like Myanmar.

Economist William Easterly has done some interesting research in this area, which he summarises in a research paper titled Benevolent Autocrats. As he writes: “The probability that you are an autocrat IF you are a growth success is 90 percent. This probability seems to influence the discussion in favour of autocrats.”

But that is the wrong question to ask. The question that needs to be asked should be exactly the opposite—if a country is governed by an autocrat what are the chances that it will be a growth success? “The relevant probability is whether you are a growth success IF you are an autocrat, which is only 10 percent,” writes Easterly.

To put it simply—most fast growing nations are ruled by autocrats. Nevertheless, most autocracies do not grow fast. The point being, if the government in a country is being ruled by a dictator, there is no way to figure out in advance, whether he will turn out to be a disaster or be benevolent.

The question is why do so many educated middle class Indian men believe in the idea of a benevolent dictator then? (I know I am stereotyping here, but I have experienced this many times over the years).

I guess what behavioural economists call availability bias is at play here. As Leonard Mlodinow writes in The Drunkard’s Walk—How Randomness Rules Our Lives: “In reconstructing the past, we give unwarranted importance to memories that are most vivid and hence most available for retrieval. The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our views of the word by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.”

Air-crashes are an excellent example of this. As Jason Zweig writes in The Devil’s Financial Dictionary: “Flying is among the safest ways to travel, but on the rare occasions when an airplane does crash, the fireball on the runway is broadcast worldwide and burned into the brain of everyone who sees it.”

This leads people to believe that airplane travel is unsafe. But what they don’t realise is that the media does not report about the thousands of planes that land safely every day all over the world. It also does not report the many car crashes that happen all over the world every day, unless a celebrity is involved.

Availability bias comes into the picture with an event being over-reported. As Easterly writes: “One way this can happen are with an event that is over-reported relative to its actual frequency. A common example is that probability of death from murder is overestimated because of intensive coverage of murders by the media relative to other causes of death that are not as newsworthy (e.g. heart disease).”

When it comes to the idea of a benevolent dictator, this phenomenon is at play. Indians who go to countries like Singapore and China, see how much progress the country has made, and come to the conclusion that autocracy leads to economic growth. But these individuals never go to Pakistan, so that they can see that the opposite is also true. Or Myanmar for that matter.

The media with its stories of China’s progress also has a role to play. But then the stories of how much mess dictators have made in Africa, over the decades, never really make it to the Indian press.

The column was originally published in the Vivek Kaul Diary on June 6, 2016

If we go by what Keynes said, the world is currently going through a depression

keynes_395

In a few weeks, it will be the seventh anniversary of the start of the current financial crisis. The fourth largest investment bank on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. A day later, AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, was nationalized by the United States government.

A week earlier two governments sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had also been nationalized by the United States government. In the months to come many financial institutions across the United States and Europe were saved and resurrected by governments all across the developed world. Some of them were nationalized as well.

Economic growth crashed in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Central banks and governments reacted to this by unleashing a huge easy money programme, where a humongous amount of money was printed(or rather created digitally) in order to drive down interest rates, in the hope that people would borrow and spend, companies would borrow and spend, and economic growth would return again.

And how are we placed seven years later? It would be safe to say that despite all that governments and central banks have done in the last seven years, the world hasn’t returned to its pre-crisis level of economic growth.

In fact, if we go by what the greatest economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, wrote in his tour de force, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, a large part of the developed world is currently going through a “depression”.

Keynes, defined a depression as “a chronic condition of sub-normal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency towards recovery or towards complete collapse.”

This is something that the economists tend to ignore. As James Rickards writes in The Big Drop—How to Grow Your Wealth During the Coming Collapse: “Mainstream economists and TV talking heads never refer to a depression. Economists don’t like the word depression because it does not have an exact mathematical definition. For economists, anything that cannot be quantified does not exist.”

Hence, if we go as per what Keynes said, depression is a scenario where economic growth is below the long-term trend growth. And that is precisely how large parts of the global world have evolved in the aftermath of the financial crisis. As Rickards writes: “The long-term growth trend for U.S. GDP is about 3%.

Higher growth is possible for short periods of time. It could be caused by new technology that improves worker productivity. Or, it could be due to new entrants into the workforce…Growth in the United States from 2007 through 2013 averaged 1% per year. Growth in the first half of 2014 was worse, averaging just 0.95%.”

The current year hasn’t been any better either. The economic growth between January and March 2015 stood at 0.6%. Between April and June 2015, it was a little better at 2.3%.  As Rickards puts it: “That is the meaning of depression. It is not negative growth, but it is below-trend growth. The past seven-years of 1% growth when the historical growth is 3% is a depression as Keynes defined it.”

The United States economy accounts for nearly one-fourth of the global economy and if it grows slowly that has an impact on many other economies as well.
China, another big economy, has also been growing below its long term growth rate. Between 2003 and 2007, the Chinese economy grew by greater than 10% in each of the years. It slowed down in 2008 and 2009 as the financial crisis hit, and grew by only 9.6% and 9.2% respectively. In 2010, the economic growth crossed 10% again with the economy growing by 10.6%. This was after the Chinese government forced the banks to unleash a huge lending programme.

Nevertheless, growth fell below 10% again and since then the Chinese economy has been growing at below 10%. In fact, in the recent past, the economy has grown at only 7%, which is very low compared to its rapid rate of growths in the past.

Interestingly, people who observe China closely, are sceptical of even this 7% rate of economic growth. As Ruchir Sharma, Head of Global Macro and Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley wrote in a recent column for the Wall Street Journal: “Chinese policy makers seem unwilling to accept that downturns are perfectly normal even for economic superpowers…But Beijing has little tolerance for business cycles and is now reviving efforts to stimulate sectors that it had otherwise wanted to see fade in importance, from property to infrastructure to exports….While China reported that its GDP grew exactly in line with its growth target of 7% in the first and second quarters this year, all other independent data, from electricity production to car sales, indicate the economy is growing closer to 5%.”

The moral of the story being that China is growing much slower than it was in the past. What this means is that countries like Brazil and Australia, which are close trading partners of China, will also feel the heat. Over and above this, much of Europe continues to remain in a mess. As Rickards puts it: “Keynes did not refer to declining GDP; he talked about “sub-normal” activity. In other words, it is entirely possible to have growth in a depression. The problem is that the growth is below trend. It is weak growth that does not do the job of providing enough jobs or staying ahead of national debt.”

In fact, much of the economic growth that has been achieved through large parts of the developed world has been on the basis of more lending carried out at very low interest rates. Data from the latest annual report of the Bank of International Settlements based out of Basel in Switzerland, suggests, that the total global debt has touched around 260% of the global gross domestic product (GDP). In 2008, it was around 230% of the global GDP.

As the BIS annual report for the financial year ending March 31, 2015 points out: “very low interest rates that have prevailed for so long may not be “equilibrium” ones, which would be conducive to sustainable and balanced global expansion. Rather than just reflecting the current weakness, low rates may in part have contributed to it by fuelling costly financial booms and busts. The result is too much debt, too little growth and excessively low interest rates.”

The tragedy is that there seems to have been no change in the thought process of those who are in decision making positions.

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Aug 20, 2015

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

Chinese politicians will do whatever it takes to keep economic growth going

chinaThe one thing I know for sure about China is, I will never know China. It’s too big, too old, too diverse, too deep. There’s simply not enough time.”
Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown

Ideally, I should have written this column last week, but this trend isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  On August 11, 2015, the People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank, engineered a 1.9% cut in the value of the Chinese yuan against the US dollar. This was the largest single day cut in the value of the yuan against the dollar in two decades. The Chinese yuan doesn’t move freely against the dollar. The People’s Bank of China controls its value. Before last week’s cut, 6.2 yuan equalled a dollar.

As I write this on August 17, 2015, around a week later, 6.4 yuan are worth a single dollar. The value of a currency is a big variable for exporters. But by ensuring the yuan had a fixed value against the dollar, the Chinese central bank took this variable out of the Chinese exporters’ equation totally. This helped Chinese exports and exporters flourish and has been a very important part of the Chinese economic miracle.

Nevertheless, Chinese exports have been falling lately. In July 2015, Chinese exports fell by 8.3% compared to a year earlier. Even in June 2015, the exports had gone up by only 2.8%. A major reason for this is that the Bank of Japan, the Japanese central bank, has rapidly driven down the value of the Japanese yen against the dollar. In October 2012, 80 yen made up a dollar. As I write this, around 124.5 yen make up for a dollar. This has made many Japanese exports more competitive than China’s. Further, it has made imports into Japan more expensive. This caused Chinese exports to Japan between January and July 2015 to fall by 10.5%.

So it’s not surprising that the Chinese authorities pushed down the value of the yuan against the dollar. Their goal is to boost Chinese exports while making imports into China more expensive, thereby pushing the sales of local Chinese made goods and boosting economic growth in the process.

The People’s Bank of China decreased its foreign exchange reserves by $300 billion over the last four quarters. In other words, in a bid to keep the yuan at 6.2 for every dollar, the Bank has been selling dollars from its kitty and buying up yuan, which is essentially money being taken out of the country.

The People’s Bank doesn’t have an unlimited supply of dollars. At some point, it had to let the value of the yuan fall against the dollar, which is precisely what it did last week. For years on end, China has grown at double-digit rates. But recently, as global demand has fallen in the aftermath of the financial crisis which started in 2008, economic growth has slowed to 7% per year. In fact, many China followers believe the official 7% figure is an overstatement.

For example, Ruchir Sharma, Head of Emerging Markets and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a recent column in The Wall Street Journal that: “While China reported that its GDP grew exactly in line with its growth target of 7% in the first and second quarters this year, all other independent data, from electricity production to car sales, indicate the economy is growing closer to 5%.”

Most China experts and analysts fail to mention this, but it is important to understand that economic growth gives legitimacy to the unelected communist government that runs China.

As John Plender writes in Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets:  “Unelected Chinese politicians may put the interests of the Communist Party elite before those of the nations. Their legitimacy, after all, rests chiefly on the continuation of high rates of economic growth. If they fail to deliver, their survival in an economic crisis may depend on whipping up nationalist popular feeling against Japan, Taiwan or other Asian neighbours, intensive trade relations notwithstanding.”

This phenomenon was at play in the recent past, when the Chinese government tried to do everything to stop the stock market from falling. It banned investors with more than a 5% holding in a company from selling shares and it directed big financial institutions to invest in the stock market. These moves were to prop up stocks, but mostly to maintain political legitimacy.

Since the financial crisis, the Chinese politicians have been able to maintain credibility by ensuring that the economic growth has not collapsed, as it has in much of the Western Word. This has been done by lending cheap money across various sectors. As Sharma of Morgan Stanley writes: “The problem is that China’s economic rise of late has been facilitated by a massive and unsustainable stimulus campaign. No emerging nation in recorded history has ever tacked on debt at such a furious pace as China has since 2008, and a rapid increase in debt is the single most reliable predictor of economic slowdowns and financial crisis. China’s debt as a share of its economy increased by 80 percentage points between 2008 and 2013 and currently stands at around 300%, with no sign of abating.”

This easy money first led to a property bubble, which was followed by an infrastructure bubble and a stock market bubble.
The point is that the Chinese politicians will do whatever it takes to keep the economic growth going. So expect the devaluation of the Chinese yuan against the dollar to continue, as China tries to push up its exports again.

As Albert Edwards of Societe Generale writes in a recent research note: “For although the PBoC [People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank] said the move was a one-time adjustment [the drop in the value of the yuan against the dollar] to reflect changes in the way it calculates the daily fix, it also said that the price would be set “in conjunction with demand and supply conditions in the foreign exchange market and exchange rate movements of the major currencies.”

What does this mean? Well, the race to the bottom isn’t exactly rocket science. With the yuan’s value now down against the dollar, chances are that the Bank of Japan will respond by printing even more yen, in a bid to further drive down the value of the yen against the dollar. The South Korean central bank may also do something along similar lines in order to drive down the value of the won [the South Korean currency] against the dollar to protect its exports. This in turn will lead to the People’s Bank of China to push the yuan down even further against the dollar. Rest assured, the currency wars in Asia will continue.

The column originally appeared in The Daily Reckoning on Aug 18, 2015

Busting a few more real estate myths

India-Real-Estate-MarketVivek Kaul

The last column on real estate which appeared on January 19, 2015, stuck a chord with a lot of readers. Given that, I thought it made sense to dwell a little more on this topic and the “spin” that real estate wallahs try to give it.
One logic that I have heard being given over and over again is that India has too little land and too many people. Given this, real estate prices can never fall. They will only keep going up ad infinitum and hence, you need to invest in real estate and earn a perpetual return. This is the most widely used logic to justify high real estate prices in the country. But a little bit of number crunching basically tells us that there is nothing right about this theory.
Let’s look at India has “too many people” theory first. As per the 2011 census, India has an average of 382 people living per square kilometre. When it comes to density of population India is ranked 33rd in the world. Let’s compare this with Japan. The country has 336 people living per square kilometre and is ranked 39th in the world.
Japan had a huge real estate boom in the 1980s. The boom came to an end towards the end of the 1980s and prices fell big time after that. As George Akerlof and Robert Shiller point out in
Animal Spirits: “Urban land prices…in Japan (where land is every bit as scarce as it is in other countries)…fell 68% in real terms in major Japanese cities from 1991 to 2006.” And if real estate prices could fall in Japan, which has a slightly lower population density than that of India, they can in India as well.
Even in India real estate prices have fallen in the past. It’s just that people don’t rememember about it anymore. As Manish Bhandari of Vallum Capital wrorte in a report titled 
The End game of speculation in Indian Real Estate has begun: “The previous deleveraging cycle in year 1997-2003 witnessed price correction by more than 50% in Mumbai Metro Region (MMR) property.” And this was just a little over a decade back. Bull markets lead to bad memories and theories justifying high prices.
In fact, real estate prices have been falling in some parts of the country.
A December 2014 newsreport in The Economic Times suggested that “secondary market prices of properties in posh South Delhi localities have fallen 25-30 per cent over the last one year as a pileup of inventory and need for money turn many investors into desperate sellers.” “Compared with peak prices, the discount is as much as 40 per cent, say brokers,” the report added.
Another important point here is that the consumer sentiment seems to be turning against real estate. Recently a buyer sentiment survey was carried out by IIM Bangalore and Magicbricks.
A report on the survey in The Economic Times said that: “[The survey] orecasts that the homebuyers expect real estate prices to drop over the next six months. In fact, the aggregate Housing Sentiment Index (HSI), measured across the 10 cities, dropped sharply by 29% in the 3rd quarter of 2014-15 to 81. (An HSI score of 100 suggests the prices would remain static).”
Now compare this with another survey that the business lobby ASSOCHAM had got done in June 2013, which said: “Over 85 per cent of urban working class prefer to invest in real estate saying it is likely to fetch them guaranteed and higher returns.” So, the sentiment clearly seems to be changing. And there is no greater danger to the price of an asset class than changing sentiment of those who want to invest in it.
The second theory offered is that India has very little land to house its huge population. Again a little number crunching tells us that this is not correct. The 
Indian Institute for Human Settlements in a report titled Urban India 2011 esimates that “the top 10 cities are estimated to produce about 15% of the GDP, with 8% of the population and just 0.1% of the land area.”
Economist Ajay Shah in a May 2013 column in
The Economic Times did some number crunching to show that India has enough land to house its millions. As he wrote “A little arithmetic shows this is not the case. If you place 1.2 billion people in four-person homes of 1000 square feet each, and two workers of the family into office/factory space of 400 square feet, this requires roughly 1% of India’s land area assuming an FSI(floor space index) of 1. There is absolutely no shortage of land to house the great Indian population.”
One corollary of this theory is that as cities expand they will take away land from agriculture and that will create a problem as well. Again this is a specious argument.
Data from World Bank shows that around 60.3% of India’s land area is agricultural land. The bank defines agricultural land as “share of land area that is arable, under permanent crops, and under permanent pastures.”
In fact, only the United States has more agriculural land than India. A
s India Brand Equity Foundation, a trust established by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry points out: “At 157.35 million hectares, India holds the second largest agricultural land globally.” Only, the United States has more agricultural land than India. Take the case of China. India has more arable land than China. This, despite the fact its total area is only a little over 34% that of China.
Hence, agricultural land near the cities can easily be diverted towards construction of more housing without it having any signficant impact on agricultural production.
The basic problem lies in the fact that too much black money has gone into real estate and has driven up prices ( as I wrote in the last column) to previously unimaginable levels. This has led to builders and politicians who back these builders to sit on a huge amount of unsold inventory instead of cutting prices to clear it. They have got used to these high prices. Also, so much money has already been made that sitting on inventory till prices start to recover, doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all to them.
As an article in
The Caravan magazine pointed out few years back: “There isn’t a bubble of real homes…If all these apartments were actually built, and built fairly to schedule, I guarantee you that they would find real buyers. The demand is out there. But there is a huge bubble in imaginary homes.”
And this is because the ill-gotten wealth of politicians and their cronies has found its way into the sector through “benami” means over the years. However, there continues to be demand for reasonably priced property even in big cities. Only if there was someone trying to fulfill this unmet consumer demand.
To conclude, it is worth sharing this example that Ruchir Sharma talks about in his book
Breakout Nations: “Lately Indian businessmen have been regaling one another with accounts of a leading politician from Mumbai who is known to have amassed a huge wealth through property deals. At a private screening of a new Bollywood movie, this politician asked the producer to replay a particular song-and-dance number, over and over. When the producer asked if he was taken with the leading lady, the politician said no, he was eyeing the location and wondering where the producer had found such an attractive stretch of open space in Mumbai.”
And this is where the real problem lies. 

The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning on Jan 21, 2015