Odd reading

At times in the dynamic world of human interaction it is good to follow a odd reading habit. I say odd with blinking  muse of three different worlds, yes three worlds within us-the society, the economy, and the politics.

I also find more useful and also peaceful to simply read things at lea-nth rather to co-opt to write and argue the same stuffs with different slang in languages.

Here are the recent odd reading:

Most of my last decade was spent working with nuts in govts.....At no point I can bear with good B.............ts as saying there are exceptions.

"eliminating good candidates and enlisting ‘educated’ idiots. If you want proof, please remember that Indian bureaucrats are world famous for being obdurate, arrogant and obsolete."

... there are too many people and too much paper money around.

Politics over new head of ICHR- I tend to agree more with S.Dasgupta than R.Guha.

From Guha's piece: "Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend — to student and lay reader alike — the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A.R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history."

From Dasgupta's piece: "as repeated controversies have indicated, history is too serious a business to be left to the “eminent historians”. For the past few decades, India’s awareness of its own past has shrunk on account of the growing insularity of its historians. Judging by the dense and jargon-infested prose, India’s historians are no longer communicating with the wider world but engaging in closed-door conversations. This has to change." 

Rajaji said to the governors: “You should not imagine that you are just figureheads and can do nothing… Our prime minister and deputy prime minister do not hold that view. They want you to develop your influence for good and they expect you to find means for achieving it without friction and without prejudice to the march of democracy.”

Very pertinent points

Indian historian on "historians (as well as citizens) may well come to regard Manmohan Singh’stwo terms as prime minister as wasted years."

SSA Aiyar on "Worse, the new judgment could set off an avalanche of political vendettas. Politicians often launch false cases against opponents, sometimes in connivance with partisan judges. This deplorable ploy may be strengthened by the latest judgement. We desperately need to cleanse Indian politics, but not in this manner." More here.

Quite surprising and shocking analysis. "Another disturbing aspect of American aid agencies is their support for violent groups like the Maoists. Maoists are able to wage a prolonged war and purchase sophisticated weapons only because wealthy nations support them with money and indulge in propaganda on their behalf. Indian Maoists receive support from Jimmy Carter and the international “human rights” lobby." 

Good views reading bad polity

I wrote a piece on UPA government's Food Security Bill in the Tamil magazine for this month. The online version is still not out. But the crux of the matter is described by various analysts in scattered way. Here is some along with other articles published recently which might be interest of you.

• Manmonia's FSB: 3% of GDP
• Why UPA's current economic policy vigour may yet make a good impression on voters
• Poor, powerless police
• "new Galapagos is in its infancy"
• Modi's food security test
• "the people of India will continue more vigorously in the realms of ideas and action—to pursue goals loftier than today's divisive and debilitating power politics."

"shake off the looming institutional crisis"

"The prime minister is honest, we will hear. But never before has someone been so thoroughly compromised through abdication. Sonia Gandhi stands for the poor. Never before have the poor been so brazenly used to cover a multitude of sins; and never before has so much emphasis been on policy that will condemn the poor to poverty." More here.

"a country with the oldest stock exchange in Asia but at the earlier stages of economic reform; perhaps the only nation to grant complete political freedom to its citizens but little economic freedom"

"Keynes himself was to a large extent responsible for giving this criticism of his work currency"

"So long as the central government continues to rely on mutually insulated bureaucratic silos, which prevent the convergence of more than 150 centrally sponsored schemes, and the Planning Commission fails to enforce its own circulars and manuals for planning, there can be no participation of people in programmes meant for their welfare development."

Food and BUREAUCRATS

"...a government survey shows that close to 99 percent of Indians say they are getting two square meals a day. This could also beg the question – is there a need for a universal food security legislation, as the UPA seems so keen on legislating?" More here.

Mostly, the laws, rules, regulations etc. enacted by the elected governments makes near perfect sense but lacks in commonsense. You can't ask the dead animal to walk into your door step to serve you for your own sake. I mean read this article by Yamini.

"The most painful experience is being in business in India."

Few years ago I use to regularly analyse the trends of doing business both country level and sub-region level and always felt that its extremely painful to look at the data in comparison with other country like China. 

Thanks to friend Athiyaman. The title of this post comes from this interview with noted Indian businessman. Its a must read one. Here is a bit from it:

Looking back, what has been your biggest regret?

I have been an employee for many years, and an employee-cum-businessman for about 10 years. And then, I have been solely a businessman. I have had different kinds of experiences.

I don’t regret anything. I take life as it comes. There is no point in regretting. You can ask me which experience was unpleasant and which one pleasant. Being in employment is wonderful. The most painful experience is being in business in India. The ease of doing business is one of the worst in India. The difficulties and pains associated with doing business is probably the highest in India as opposed to most other countries.

Why then are you continuing in it?

It’s like getting on to a tiger, and you can’t get off. You have to make the best of the bad bargain, and this is the experience of all businessmen. The outside world thinks that the businessmen are happy, and that they have lot of money. The attitude towards businessmen should be that of sympathy and support. Unfortunately, it is marked by jealousy.

According to Raghuram Rajan, “government regulations aim for impossible”. A person who enters the business goes around these regulations, and finds a way to avoid them. Finally, he is caught, because he is avoiding these regulations.

You then try to put more regulations to see that he doesn’t avoid them. Regulations are the starting cause of bribery. Such a system is designed for corruption. All these regulations are created by government because there are too many employees, too many offices, too many departments and too many executives who have nothing positive to think.

Demo-cracy=politi-cians

How lynching art and culture came to be a popular sport in India today

Creating policy boldness

Some links

"We are working with 19th century file-based procedures which require every individual to pronounce sequentially on a file. All of that becomes open to questioning—Under Secretary wrote this, why did the Deputy Secretary write that, etc—and it is absolutely impossible to fix responsibility in the system."

"Good education can be imparted only by good teachers, whatever their caste may be. RTE will not work, so long as it prevents the most knowledgeable teachers from being recruited."

"Communism swept a large part of the globe to abolish feudalism in the name of freedom. According to The Black Book of Communism authored by many European academics, edited by Stéphane Courtois, the excesses under Communist regimes have taken 94 million lives. Democracy is a great liberating step from other forms of subjugation like dictatorships,"

Some links

 modern democracy is unthinkable without political parties

Delhi didn't have farmers, only bureaucrats!

No Kamaraj plan is dream come true forever.

Out that Toll Bellies

Some interesting reading:

The Bell Tolls for India’s Congress Party by Prof Jagdish Bhagwati & Prof Arvind Panagariya

Will economics unseat the great economist? by Ashok Malik

Why Our Elites Stink By David Brooks

India has long road ahead to catch up with West By Shikha Dalmia 

The ‘Busy’ Trap By Tim Kreider

The goodness of RTI Act

Do Government School Teachers in Tamil Nadu educate their own children in Government schools or Private Schools?

Blinking links

Despite PM's vow, govt ignores Chandra anniversary

National Interest: The Officer Raj

NREGA is not GOOD for dalits

IAS or PAS?

I have always enjoyed the comments by T.R Ramaswami. It has been about five or six years now!! Here is his yesterday’s comment in the ET:

"This refers to your edit ‘No, Minister!’ (ET, Jun 28). You have stated that ideally civil servants owe their allegiance to the country and Constitution. But take a look at the history of our bureaucracy. Ever since independence they have been working not just for one party (except for a brief eight years — Janata Party and then BJP) but also literally for one family. The senior-most batches today joined in 1974-77 — i.e., bang in the middle of the Emergency and they have seen the merits in aligning themselves politically. That’s why we always hear of someone likely to get this or that seniormost appointment because he was Collector at Amethi or Rae Bareilly, etc. The entire bureaucracy has virtually become a PAS — Parivar Administrative Service. On the larger issue of regulators to be drawn from a larger pool, it is also imperative that even those in the lower levels of the regulators’ offices be drawn from the respective industry and not just recruited as regulators straight out of universities. That’s why today some of our regulators appear to be like virgins trying to redraft the Kama Sutra."

My name is RE-FORM, the EVIL NO 1

• "Here are the two questions you are most likely to be asked these days: One, when was the last time India looked so rudderless and angry? And two, do people of India bother about corruption? Hasn’t it just been a way of life for ever? 

• The answer to all this is neither any apologies or promises from the government or the party, nor just locking up people in jail. It is not even the most draconian anti-corruption law and ombudsman ever in human history. You talk about hanging those involved in major scams? The Chinese execute hundreds for corruption every year, including governors of their provinces. Has that ended corruption? Transparency International ranks them higher than us on its scale of corruption: so even here the Chinese are ahead of us! 

• The answer is governance reform. India needs to launch a massive reform in every area where a citizen comes in contact with the sarkar, from getting ration cards to driving licences and passports, birth certificates, property registrations, municipal clearances, tax assessments and refunds and so on. Availability of quality schools and colleges, something the aspirational young Indian and her parents value most of all, hospital beds, has to be quadrupled in the next five years, and a credible programme needs to be launched now. Land records, registrations must be computerised, and a new system ensuring deadline-bound delivery of routine government services must be set up. It is more complex than reforming the economy in 1991, but the gains will be enormously greater. More important, this is the only way to bring back some of the constructive, if competitive, calm we were just getting used to in our society.

Of course from Shekhar Gupta article!!

What to name this post?

From Shekhar Gupta article:

• "You need the NAC to make sure power does not go even to his head, and also to keep him off-balance by attacking his government and policies, and continuing to throw one idiotic law after another in his court. Why blame Anna Hazare when it is the Congress party itself that outsourced law-making to its darbari jholawallahs? This is not a team of modern-day Ambedkars, but mostly of IAS drop-outs and retirees who approach law-making with the “wisdom” of sincere undergrads. You have any doubts, take a look at the draft of the incredibly stupid Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill 2011 (www.nac.nic.in/pdf/pctvb_amended.pdf). A Modi or Togadia can see in a minute the wonderful opportunity it presents them. It is totally violative of the states’ rights, is subversive of the Constitution, and will never pass parliamentary or judicial scrutiny. But it will polarise people on a communal basis just when they seem to be getting over that sad past. This bill will not pass. But if the UPA continues to push it, it is guaranteed to polarise the Hindu vote and give the BJP a shot at power that any appeals to Ram Lalla cannot in 2014. This could indeed become Sonia Gandhi’s Shah Bano moment."

A case against income tax-now in India!!!

Of the 2 trillion rupees ($44 billion) net direct tax collected by the end of Dec. 2010, the personal income tax contribution was just over750 billion rupees ($16 billion). Now that’s a huge number and one would assume that our country needs such a large sum of money to sponsor the rapid urbanisation and infrastructural development. Well yes, it does but that’t not where these 750 billion go! Instead, as I mentioned earlier, they go in plugging holes – you and I pay our hard-earned money to keep alive the mismanaged, loss-making government enterprises! We pay for our government’s incompetence. Simple as that. We pay to make good the over 45 billion rupees loss of Air India, over 400 billion rupees loss of public sector petroleum companies andover 350 billion rupees loss incurred by the power sector among others.

For more read here (Indian Liberals.org).

Business of fear and favours

…. fears are being expressed by no less than Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh regarding crony capitalism. Economists like Raghuram Rajan have called it oligarchic capitalism in which few businessmen have a close nexus with the policy establishment and have made fabulous fortunes in land, real estate and natural resources like iron ore and coal in which proximity to the government obviously helps.

Have corrupt bureaucrats done more harm to our nation than corrupt politicians?

Bureaucrats who try to clean up the system at their level and stand up to the politicians are cannibalised by their own cadre, as happened with Arun Bhatia who was transferred 26 times in his career of 30 years. After one such transfer from the Pune Municipal Corporation in 1999 which was effectively challenged through a writ petition in the Bombay High Court, the chief justice described the transfer as "outrageous". He said, "We wish to emphasise that during the present days when, unfortunately, corruption and dishonesty are at their peak, honesty and action as per law deserve a pat, rather than punishment. The transfer of Bhatia, in our view, is in the nature of punishment".

Good ‘night’ at Vienna

That a fool and his money are easily parted is a well-known saying. No one proved this better than a man called Victor Lustig who, in 1925, sold the Eiffel Tower twice — once successfully. What Lustig did was brilliantly simple: he got hold of a bunch of greedy scrap-dealers and, on the basis of a forged government document, told them that he was the deputy director general of the department of Posts and Telegraph and had been asked by the French government to sell the tower off as scrap as it was too expensive to maintain. Since originally the tower (built for the 1899 Paris expo) was to have been dismantled in 1909, everyone believed him. Lustig charmed the scrap-dealers off their feet and warned them that they were not to talk about the sale as the matter was a top state secret. But he had already decided on the buyer, whom he had correctly assessed as a greedy and corrupt fool, and convinced him saying that, as a government official, he was open to a little lolly on the side. Lustig then took his money for the tower and went off to Vienna — only to return some months later and try the same stunt again, believing rightly that the first buyer would not spill the beans. However, this time he did not succeed because word had gotten out. But Lustig was never arrested.

The trickle down theory of bureaucracy

Prof Jagdish Bhagwat writes: 

•  Even a blind man will tell Transparency International: “I saw him take a bribe with my own eyes.” Indeed, a distinguished Indian bureaucrat, a man of unimpeachable character, once told me that his mother had told him: “I believe you are not corrupt only because you are my son!”  

• ……..when the East-Asian financial crisis broke out, there followed a systematic attempt to pin the blame on the affected countries: ‘crony capitalism’ allegedly had somehow crippled their economies! In other words, the acquaintances and benefactors of the East-Asian leaders were ‘cronies’ , whereas those of US leaders were ‘friends’ ? 

• In fact, it was clear that the culprits were the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury, which had encouraged a shift to capital-account convertibility without understanding that the case for free capital flows was not symmetrical with the case for free trade.  

• Once the system had taken root, corruption percolated downward , from senior bureaucrats and politicians, who could be bribed to do what they were not supposed to do, to lower-level bureaucrats , who would not do what there were supposed to do unless bribed. Clerks would not bring out files, or get you your birth certificate or land title, unless you greased their palms.

Read also India's corrupt civil servants courted as potential grooms

• "There is widespread acceptance of graft in the society. No parent gives a damn about monthly salary, all they are concerned about is whether he [the groom] is at a position which allows him to take bribes," he said.