Passionate About India

When I wrote my previous editorial, “ Anna, my Prime Minister ,” many people pounced on me accusing me of writing it a bit too soon and getting carried away. It is true that I had written that piece on the second day of Anna's fast. But to us, Anna was not a new phenomenon. Twelve years ago, the IIPM Think Tank had initiated visits to Anna’s villages and had undertaken a study. For us, he has been a great icon since then and before too. And therefore, when he decided to come to Delhi, I instantly knew we needed to be behind him. Dr Kiran Bedi, whom I personally respect very much, had already come to our institute during the Bharatiya Manavata Vikas Puraskar ceremony – where she had also received an award for her longstanding commitment to changing India – and had given a passionate speech to support the cause. Arvind Kejriwal, to whom not just me but the entire nation also should be thankful (for fighting selflessly for the RTI Act) was also there with Anna; and so was Swami Agnive...

Shortage of a hundred and fifty million rural employment jobs. Shortage of twenty five million urban employment jobs… Additional Rs 1 lakh crore required to replace urban slums… And Rs 10,000 crore required every year for five years to give justice to every Indian by ramping up the judiciary… Another Rs 20,000 crore required every year to make universal primary education a reality and have equality in education opportunities… And additional Rs 10,000 crore required annually to give some basic access to health facilities… Welcome to India. A country where the hospital beds to population ratio is 1:1422, ranked 161 alongside sub-Saharan African countries, against an ideal ratio of 1:333 prescribed by the United Nations. A country with 2.4 million temples but only 1.4 million temples of education i.e. schools… A country with 30 million cases pending in courts, making life hell for the common man who wants justice, because our courts have only 12 judges per million population compared to 1...

In the first week of January 2010, most newspapers carried a stunning report. And the report was based on data from the Central Statistical Organisation, which revealed that Bihar has clocked the second highest growth rate in the country, only second to Gujarat, between the period 2004/05 and 2008/09. Although in the same period, most of the backward states have shown a reasonably decent growth rate, but none could match up to Bihar. And what is even more remarkable is the manner in which the state has turned around. It was only in 2003/04 that it had shown a (de)growth of a negative 5.15%. Five years hence, the state has an aggregated growth of 11.03%, beating all conventions. Initially, analysts were skeptical about the data, but once it was reported that the data had been released by CSO – a central government agency – all doubts were put to rest. What is more interesting is the fact that most of the growth has taken under Nitish Kumar’s regime – which also proves that howsoever poo...

While the government would make us believe that all is well with the economy, and that the Indian economy is resilient enough to withstand the shocks of global recession, one visit to any vegetable market in Delhi or for that matter anywhere in the country actually gives a very different kind of a picture. Food prices, in the last one year or so, have skyrocketed to such an extent that many items have become beyond the reach of the common man. For the common man in India, the staple diet consists of things as basic as potato, pulses and rice. But given the way the prices have increased in the recent past, today they can no more be called the ingredients of the common man’s diet. The price of pulses is almost touching Rs 100 per kg, while that of potato is hovering around Rs 40 per kg. Even a year back, pulses were available in the market for less than half the price and almost a fifth in the case of potatoes. So does it mean that all of a sudden the farmers of the country have decided ...

Dubai sent shockwaves across the world when the news broke out that Dubai World, Dubai’s chief investment vehicle, wanted to defer its repayments on all or part of its $59 billion in debt. Dubai World alone is responsible for almost 75 percent of the entire debt of Dubai, which stands at $80 billion. Although post 25/11, when the news broke out for the first time, the ruler of Dubai did release an official statement comforting global investors (specifically on December 1, 2009 – the global financial markets stabilized a bit after that statement), but the world is still keenly looking forward to December 14, 2009, as that is the day when bonds worth $3.5 billion for Nakheel – the real estate arm under Dubai World and the company behind the prestigious palm shaped manmade islands – become due. A great deal of Dubai’s future and global investors’ fate would be determined on how the company deals with the bonds issue! In fact, for getting the right perspective of what is happening to Dubai...

I’ve always been an admirer of China. I have also been an admirer of Mao Tse Tung – despite the scandalous (true or untrue) details of his private life – and believe that today’s China, good or bad, is an absolute direct result of his vision. What I have admired the most about China is the way they have been able to pull out millions of people from below poverty, in a matter of a few decades. This feat of China is unmatched in recorded history. What has made them achieve this unbelievable feat is their macroeconomic bottom-up model, wherein they focused on creating purchasing power directly within the poor. This has enabled them to become one of the formidable forces in the world today. They also know that if there is one nation which could pose challenges in the path of Chinese glory, it is India. So some time back, I came across an intriguing article, which generally got overlooked by most. It was reported by almost all mainstream newspapers that a Chinese strategist has contended th...

Although on paper, we are one of the largest democracies in the world, but in a lot many ways, we are functionally more feudal. Otherwise, there is no other reason for such a hue and cry about the current austerity drive carried forward by the Ministry of Finance. In fact, the resistance against such a drive is justified simply because over the past sixty years, people’s representatives have indulged themselves so much in wasteful expenditure and made it such a norm, that any minor deviation from it looks abnormal. And here, the Ministry of Finance is all set to aggressively jam the brakes on every such expenditure. To begin with, the Ministry plans to cut the expenditure on domestic and foreign travel, publications, advertising and purchase of vehicles, by a whopping 10%. These heads are just a part of the non-plan expenditure, which is pegged at a staggering Rs. 6.9 trillion. Going forward, the Ministry also plans to cut the other components of the non-plan expenditure (excluding int...

Imagine the worth of the 70 Taliban fighters that Pakistan is claiming to have killed in its latest, but disputatiously reluctant assault over the ever expanding and over ambitious Taliban. Well, hold your breath – it’s an incredible US$1billion! Yes, that’s the amount that the US government has gratifyingly pledged to give Pakistan for carrying out its indolent military operations against the Taliban, which was within touching distance of Pakistani nuclear establishments. While Pakistan is too happy to oblige the US dictums for the bait of $1 billion, what is completely getting ignored is the fact that this operation in the districts of Buner, Swat and Dir is nowhere near to routing the Taliban. And yet, Pakistan gets the money! During the Bush regime, Pakistan had to embrace the American war against terror in the post 9/11 era and had to perfunctorily fight those very rogue elements which it had incubated, nurtured and nourished over decades. In return to this so called ‘favour’ that...

Yes! Indeed the western recession is really the beginning of good news for India! But to understand that, I’ve to take you away from the topic of western recession for a while... to the Japanese recession! For years, I’ve admired the Japanese style of management as a management teacher and given its examples in scores of my workshops. However, over the last one decade or so, I’ve been continuously facing one key question from my workshop participants – mostly CEOs from top corporations of India Incorporated. Their question to me invariably has been, ‘If the Japanese management style is as wonderful as described, then why has Japan been in a recession for the last decade and more?’ This question is what I guess one needs to understand first, if one has to really understand the beauty of the current western recession. My answer to this question has always been very simple. I believe culture plays a very important part in shaping up economies. What succeeds in one culture fails somewhere ...

In the current Union Budget, while the UPA government was increasing the allocation for its flagship NREGA program – from Rs 16,000 crore to Rs 30,000 crore, resulting in a hike of an incredible 87% – it was again surreptitiously trying to ignore the CAG report. The CAG, or the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, has been consistently criticizing the government for alleged misappropriation of funds, faulty record maintenance systems and rampant corruption that have become synonymous with NREGA and similar other government initiatives. For example, for the financial year ended March 2007, out of an outlay of Rs 12,074 crores, all that was spent was Rs 8,823 crores for NREGA. Not just this, the CAG report also indicted the government for making available only 37.05 man-days of work against the promised 100 man-days. For the year 2007-08, the more shocking revelation that was made by CAG was that while the government had allocated more that Rs 51,000 crore to NGOs for implementing w...

The vote on account budget is a very tricky budget. If the ruling party gives too many freebies in it, it will immediately be rapped for using the budget as a tool to unfairly influence the coming elections. Yet, never before perhaps, in the name of Parliamentary propriety, was such a brain dead, irrelevant and unimaginative budget presented... that too when the entire nation was looking up to the Finance Minister for some relief from the seemingly unending woes of economic slowdown! For two hours, the Finance Minister spoke about what the Manmohan Singh regime achieved; but didn’t give anything new on a real time concrete plan to deal with the present crisis of recession. A day before the budget, when it was made clear that it would be Mr. Pranab Mukherjee who would be presenting the budget speech, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I was extremely appalled at the scarcity of quality people in the Congress. In the last one year or so, it has always been Pranab Mukherjee who has come t...

On 20th of January, 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of United States of America, delivering one of the most outstanding speeches ever, many would have thought it to be a tokenism, as reversing the economic fortune of the current order is easier said than done. Only time would perhaps prove how much he would succeed eventually. But if one has to go by the precedence being set on each passing day, Obama is perhaps not just on the right track, but is also indicating why he is the only person who deserved to be there in these times. By announcing his intentions in clear cut terms of curbing the salaries of top executives of companies to a ‘maximum’ of $500,000, which have been seeking bailout packages from the US government to remain afloat (under the Troubled Asset Relief Program), Obama has made it clear that the much needed change of fortune of the US would not happen unless the highly skewed income disparity is arrested and the culture of carrying on with obs...

I was quite young when the Harshad Mehta scam hit the headlines and the stock markets crashed. Since I was never fascinated by gambling money in stocks and was busy chasing my own dreams, I did not pay much attention to the hysterical front page stories that used to come out in newspapers! But yes, I was concerned about the direction of India both as an economy and a society. The abysmal GDP growth rates reported in those days used to make me think about the future of entrepreneurs in India. India’s pathetic education, health and infrastructure scenario used to make my blood boil in anger and frustration. I sometimes thought India doesn’t have a future. I still get angry at the state of India. But now I am convinced that India has indeed a great future – particularly at a time when we seem to be getting bad news from everywhere. For a while, I was flabbergasted when some colleagues informed me about the downfall of Satyam and Ramalinga Raju. But then I thought for a while and realized ...

Ownership through paper (shares) has always been and will always remain the biggest illusion of ownership. Real ownership comes through sweat and hard work and never diminishes in value!!! As I sit down to write this editorial, the selling pressure in the markets have been so intense today that the Sensex broke the 8,000-mark and slumped to a low of 7,697 – down a whopping 63.7% (13,510 points) from its all-time peak of 21,207, touched on January 10 this year. I remember having written the last time on the same subject for the 3rd February, 2008 issue, when the markets had fallen to around 15,000 in an edit titled, “If you can, invest to become an entrepreneur instead of investing in stock markets!!!” As the index falls to almost half of what it was then, there is nothing more important that I feel like sharing again with my readers. Readers of TSI know that over the last few months, I’ve constantly been focussing on the impending global crisis, the subprime crisis and the failure of t...

I am taken back to the year 2000, when during the then American President Bill Clinton’s historic visit to India, I had started my seminar series called “The Great Indian Dream – India can beat America,” with a front page advertisement in leading dailies welcoming Clinton on the day of his arrival to India. The header of the ad said, “LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN SUPREMACY.” It has been seven years since then, and the time has come for people to realise the unfolding of the same in front of them and grasp the reasons behind the same. The time for the great power shift has come – the time for power to shift from the American hands to the Chinese, Indian and, dare I say, the Middle Eastern hands. As I wrote in my editorial two issues ago in The Sunday Indian magazine, on account of the cataclysmic losses that each of the US financial behemoths has been suffering, many of them have been incessantly bailed out by Middle Eastern petrodollars. So, while the investments of Kuwait Investment Authorit...

The American financial system has hit its worst crisis ever. The crisis has been evident from the fact that in a given day, Dow Jones lost more than 4 per cent, which has been its steepest fall ever since the 9/11 attacks! It all started when Lehman Brothers, one of the largest US investment banks, filed for bankruptcy protection. As if this wasn’t enough, another equally big investment banker, Merrill Lynch, resorted to a merger with the Bank of America, and along with all this, the world’s largest insurer, American International Group (AIG) was also found gasping for breath! In fact, the signals for such an impending crisis were visible from the time the sub-prime meltdown had started, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac literally getting buried under the debris of bad mortgages. No wonder, this is just the beginning; and the big question in everyone’s mind is clearly: who is going to be the next casualty, and how far would this crisis extend. But more than what meets the eye, as far as ...