Meaning that 'public policy'

Prof Ila has a very interesting piece on the ultimate impact and true use of Aadhaar in India. Read NIPFP study finds large returns from Aadhaar project

The FTI Team has also announced huge prize for public policy competition. 

Back to Marx and banking in 21st century. Read "Marx would have been proud of bankers".

Blinking links

• Manish Sabharwal writes "...the most articulate non-economic case for urbanisation was made by Nandan Nilekani in his book Imagining India: “It has been fashionable in our cultural commentary to refer to India’s cities as places of vice, corruption and loss of innocence. But cities are, and have historically been, a powerful catalyst for political reform. Leaders such as B.R. Ambedkar recognised this and found the Indian city liberating after the sink of localism and den of inequity that was the village. Upward mobility for the backward castes is therefore most tangible in our cities because it becomes difficult to enforce silly notions of caste purity and pollution in the forced proximity of our city buses and trains.”

• Niranjan reviews a new book Grant Pursuit..."The Industrial Revolution had shown glimpses of a better future, though there was little historical reason to believe that societies could escape the poverty trap. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engelspredicted that capitalism would inevitably push workers into penury and the entire economic system would collapse in a heap. Engels comes across better than Marx in Nasar’s book. Marx, it seems, wrote about the horrors of industrial life without even once seeing the inside of a factory. He lived in London not too far away from two outstanding thinkers: Charles Darwin and George Eliot. He never bothered to either meet or correspond with them."

Excuse me please my NAME is Capital ‘C, & S, of course M!!

Prof Arvind on:

• Larry Summers, the recently departed Chairman of US President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, posed the following question before his trip to India last November: “What is the self-perception of the Congress as a political party?” In fact, this broad question provokes three specific ones in the domain of economics. Is the Congress the party of Jagdish Bhagwati or Amartya Sen; Nehru or Indira Gandhi; or Aruna Roy or Nandan Nilekani?

I highly recommend to read the full article here.

The CCT mania

• This doesn’t mean CCTs are a bad idea. Far from it, and several countries, including developing ones in Asia and Latin America, have successfully experimented with CCTs. Especially in education, there are also experiments with education vouchers in more than one state. However, what is the Nandan Nilekani task force going to examine? Is it a cash transfer or is it a voucher? From the nomenclature of the task force, we are talking about a cash transfer. But let’s think of a voucher first. A voucher offers choice, competition and efficiency. However, exercise of vouchers requires existence of choice on the supply-side. One can’t use food stamps if there is only one PDS shop within a radius of 10 km. Yes, supply-side responses occur, but they don’t occur instantly. 

• Moving on to cash transfers, if they are conditional, they are de facto not that different from vouchers and there will be universal resistance (on several counts) if we move on to unconditional cash transfers. On CCTs, shouldn’t we learn from what is now acknowledged to be a mistake, making NREGA payments mandatory through banks and post office accounts? That required a level of financial inclusion we don’t have. If we wish to successfully introduce CCTs, those pilots should be in so-called elitist and urban areas, where delivery is less of a problem. 

(From Bibek’s article on Saving a good idea)

The original notification of Task Force for Direct Transfer of Subsidies on Kerosene, LPG and Fertiliser to Individuals/Families Constituted is here.

U-I-D and It’s in and out stories

Like was in the 80s and 90s movements against computerization now there are considerable movements against the UPA II Government initiative of Unique Identity Number project (UID).

The beaten up Professor Jean Dreze!!! Argues that:

• “I am opposed to the UID project on grounds of civil liberties. Let us not be naive. This is not a social policy initiative — it is a national security project.”
• "I am not against technology, by I think linking the Unique Identity Number project to NREGA can be very dangerous,"

He also said:

"For a long time, many people may not get their UID's. And there will be total chaos in such a situtation. Also, why impose one more condition on the NREGA? Why not try this on a smaller scale first?

Read also Unique facility, or recipe for trouble? By Jean Drèze

And his close associates says:

• Dreze said the UID will help achieve unprecedented levels of surveillance on ordinary citizens and this may have dangerous consequences for privacy civil liberties and social justice. Echoing Dreze’s view, Roy said the project is a threat to democratic norms and civil liberties and it should be opposed.
• The UK Home Secretary had been quoted as saying that the “The national identity card scheme represents the worst of government. It is intrusive and bullying. It is ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty that does not promise a great good.”

Now where Mr Dreze was beaten up is here!!

In ET, it was reported:

• A development economist, Mr Dreze has taken his academic persuasions to the real world — he not only played a major role in designing the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), but also got beaten up by vested interests for trying, in the guise of an activist, to get the scheme implemented as intended.

This was in 2005:

• A close aide of Sonia Gandhi was mistaken for a Maoist guerrilla and mercilessly thrashed by the police in Balrampur near the Jharkhand-Chattisgarh border, a leading daily reported.
• Ananda Bazar Patrika said in a front page report yesterday that Jean Dreze, a noted Belgian-born economist who is a member of United Progressive Alliance chief Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, was on a tour of the backward region accompanied by 35-40 students of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University when he was roughed up.
• On Saturday night, security personnel stopped a bus carrying Dreze and JNU students who had come for an on-the-spot-assessment of the federal-funded Rashtriya Rojgar Yojna, or national employment guarantee scheme, in the tribal Surguja-Gumla belt.
• Apparently, the police first dragged a few students out and beat them up. When the bearded Dreze tried to intervene, he was kicked and punched until he revealed his identity and pleaded with the men in uniform to stop beating him.
• Dreze and his boys cut short their traumatic tour after they were assaulted and flew back to Delhi.

Vices against UID:

1. Historical Reasons Against UID//Aadhar Project By Gopal Krishna & Prakash Ray
2. Eminent Personalities Against unique identity number’ (UIDNumber)-mostly socialists!
3. Against insecurity-Mint Report
4. A unique liberal dilemma
5. UID bill skips vital privacy issues

Nandan-Tomonomics

That is how it sounds in the ET Now interview with Nandan and Tom. At least the following three questions are important:

Is accessibility going to be the driver of inclusive growth?

Tom: One of the learnings about the flat world is to tie things in. If you can get three things right, you will do great. Good governance, economic policies in place and third and very important is education because you need skilled workers to be in place as the collaborators to be in the right place in the flat world. Nandan is, for example, working in that element of the flat world, which is governance and bringing it to the people.

Do you think Obama's going to be constrained this time due to the political storm brewing back home?

Tom: I think he is actually looking forward to the India trip to get away from the political maelstrom back home. Obama is going to be President for two more years and two, there is no Republican at the moment who I would argue can beat him in an election. He has to figure out how he gets the most out of his tenure.

Yes, what will those be?

Tom: India cannot afford a hostile China and we are not advocating that either. But there is India's socialist legacy. There are communities here that are uncomfortable with globalisation. We in America have to be very humble and approach this brick by brick. I think that's what you are going to hear Obama talk about. Let's work in agriculture, healthcare, let’s work on open trade to take the relationship beyond civil, military, nuclear to something really deep between the two countries.

An alibi for trade unions to sabotage

If anyone have read Mr.Nandan Nilekani’s book of Imagining India would know how many lawsuits Mr. Manish Sabharwal have been facing in the various aspects. It is more than 1,500!!!

OK, Mr.Manish Sabharwal of Teamlease Services writes in today’s ET about the trade unions tragedy in understanding of free market and financial:

• “THE trade union arguments of class struggle and tyranny of capital are well-known, ancient and stale. But Indian trade union leaders have now updated their rhetoric with wrong lessons from the global economic crisis — a recent letter to the prime minister said, “The global financial and economic crisis is structural and the current free trade paradigm is a major part of the problem. The financial crisis has shown that free markets and free trade cannot correct themselves.” Global unions are not far behind, with the International Trade Union Federation saying, “We warned business and politicians of dangerous instability in the global economy, but most were more than happy to continue to reap the short-term benefits of the failing model of deregulation. Business and governments created this crisis on their own, but they won’t be able to solve it unless they work with unions to stop the global jobs haemorrhage, kickstart the world economy and put a proper regulatory framework in place.”
• “Thus, the average person in the world of 1800 AD had the same life expectancy as the average hunter gatherers of 100,000 BC. Stature, a measure of quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease was actually higher in the Stone Age than in 1800 AD. But modern free market economies are now 20 times better off than the 1800 AD average.”
• But trade union prescriptions may be worse than the disease because they confuse financial markets with free markets and mirror image the error of market fundamentalist in recommending that the state should substitute for markets or reduce their volatility. This misunderstands the sources of prosperity and job creation.
• It would be a tragedy if the global financial crisis becomes an alibi for trade unions to sabotage our march of entrepreneurship and poverty reduction.”

The Functional Dilution

A well know economist Bibek Debroy has a piece in today’s Indian Express on Unique Identification Authority of India. Its worth to read at least in two ways one he links with what the Present said in her 4 June Speech to Parliament and Secondly, more importantly, he links with one of the Chapters Nandan Nilekani wrote in his book published last November. Apparently that is the only book I read within a month after the release (as of now).

In way if anyone read all the national English newspapers in the last decade or so the book offers them nothing new. You take any issues-economic, political, social, environment, etc.

Important paragraphs from Bibek’s article:

• “Getting rid of our phantoms: single citizen ID”. This section said, “India’s ministries and departments are also quite isolated, with separate fund flows and intricate, over-hyphenated authority levels. As a result these systems require paperwork-choked processes each time citizens approach the state... Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID and linking them across a set of national databases, like the PAN and passport, can have far-reaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately. Unique identification for each citizen also ensures a basic right — the right to ‘an acknowledged existence’ in the country, without which much of a nation’s poor can be nameless and ignored, and governments can draw a veil over large-scale poverty and destitution... No one else can then claim a benefit that is rightfully yours, and no one can deny their economic status, whether abjectly poor or extremely wealthy... A key piece of infrastructure that must sit on top of an interconnected grid is the electronic flow of funds... Linking smart cards to such accounts can open up the banking system to hundreds of millions more people.”
• Paragraph 13 of her June 4 speech to Parliament stated, “The Unique Identity Card scheme for each citizen will be implemented in three years overseen by an Empowered Group. This would serve the purpose of identification for development programmes and security.” Some Cassandras did wonder about paragraph 32 of the same speech, where it said, “Targeted identification cards would subsume and replace omnibus Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. NREGA has a job card and the proposed Food Security Act would also create a new card.”
• here is a person who not only has impeccable credentials, but also believes passionately in the single ID business. He should be able to bring about the third most important transformation, M.S. Swaminathan and Sam Pitroda being architects of the first two. I wonder why Nandan Nilekani used the expression phantoms in his book.
• A phantom is an apparition, a spectre. Whenever I hear the word phantom, I think of The Phantom of the Opera and Lee Falk’s The Ghost Who Walks. No one reads the comic strip now. But since Nandan Nilekani and I are roughly of the same age, I am sure he must have devoured Kit Walker’s escapades once upon a time. The point about the ghost who walks is that he never died, his successors carried on the phantom’s role. By that token, we will never get rid of our phantoms and we will never have a single citizen ID. Those ministries and departments will never give up their turfs and their silos. Wasn’t that what the president was hinting at in paragraph 32?
• Paragraph 64 of Pranab Mukherjee’s budget speech stated, “The setting up of the Unique Identification Authority of India is a major step in improving governance with regard to delivery of public services. This project is very close to my heart... The UIDAI will set up an online data base with identity and biometric details of Indian residents and provide enrolment and verification services across the country. The first set of unique identity numbers will be rolled out in 12 to 18 months. I have proposed a provision of Rs120 crore for this project.”

1.5 lakh crore ID project: Relevant and Risk

Some excerpts from Karan Thapar CNN-IBN interview with Nandan Nilekani

• “…the London School of Economics did an analysis and survey of a similar project that was being considered by the British Government and this is the conclusion that they have come to: “The technology envisioned for this scheme is to a large extent untested and unreliable. No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in the world. Smaller and less ambitious systems have encountered substantial technological and operational problems that are likely to be amplified in a large scale national system”.
• The second problem inherent is the problem of cost. Once again, the London School of Economics (LSE) did an analysis of a similar project that the British government was thinking of, and that remember is a country which is one-twentieth the size of India and the LSE concluded that the probable cost for Britain would be between 10 to 20 billion pounds.
• ‘Frontline’ magazine believes that the government in India has a guesstimate of somewhere around Rs 1.5 lakh crore. Is it worth it at that cost?
• ..the LSE came to when they reviewed a potential British concept along the lines of what you are doing in India: "The success of a national identity system depends on a sensitive cautious and cooperative approach involving all key stakeholders, including an independent and rolling assessment and regular review of management practices," and the LSE concluded that did not exist in the UK.”

The coming months will be more interesting to see what happens with UID and Mr Nandan Nilekani.

How do you corroborate Nandan’s risk with IG Patel’s when he was Director of LSE?

Let’s not surrender to The State

After taking over as a “Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India” Nandan M. Nilekani said in his blog post that “I can no longer comment on government policy.” This is a bad intension in many ways than one good intention.

True liberals can not do this or should not do this at any cost. Although he has a lot of good intentions but the present one is terrible bad intention.

I read his book in last November quite revealing one. Reading a book will not take more time than writing a good review. I am still writings the review.

After all I am not depressed but disappointed when he posted this post.

lose-lose option-Imagining India - Transportation Sector

For British India, infrastructure meant building roads and rail that focused on colonial requirements, rather than responses to popular demand.

Organized labour mobs………

The Financial Express

It was not surprising to me when I saw a group of mob was selling the “unreserved” seats in a train while I was boarding from Delhi. Apparently all the security men were simply watching the mobs. The mobs sold upper seat for Rs 100 and the lower seats (where at least four people can only sit) were sold for Rs 50 each. 

Only one railway police came inside the train and was begging the mob to move out but they could not. I was told that these mobs were having a deal with railway police. 

This bring me what Manish Sabharwal writes in the FE “…our train trips from our boarding school in Ajmer to Delhi when we travelled in the unreserved train compartment and the only fight bigger than the fight to get inside was the fight to keep other people outside once we were inside. Today’s labour markets are not very different from that unreserved train compartment where only a few aspirants get in and those in do everything they can to keep others out.” 

If any one read Mr Nandan Nilekani’s book Imagining India would know that Mr Manish has been facing more than 1000 lawsuits!

Three tales to tango-Outliers- Tiger -Ideas

Well, we have just passed three months in the year 2009 and now the spring has come once again. Many are thinking how the “Green shoots of spring are all very appealing but will they really spread and grow into a solid recovery?” (Spring fever). 

I had good time to read books that was published in 2008. Two are from Indian authors one went to win The Man Booker Prize. 

Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century by Nandan M. Nilekani, and 

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga 

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 

All three are well written with consciences.   

Nandan’s book is well searched and thought out book especially I enjoyed his lucid coverage of language issues in India. 

For me the Adiga book is a great history of Indian Economic Thought as he rightly emphasised the brutalism of the great Indian Socialist darkness India and emergence of lights. As Freakonomics author STEPHEN J. DUBNER says if your read White Tiger “you learn a great deal about modern India”. 

Gladwell’s book is a full of insights with paradise of imagination. It thrills me like when I traveled first time in plane from New Delhi to Srinagar for an international conference. 

DAVID BROOKS said in his review in NYT “It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew. 

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature.”

All three has a significant common focus on ‘entrepreneurship’ which is a industry born with human intuition or ethics. 

I will shortly post my reviews. But first I wanted to post a serious of posts on The White Tiger as he has covered a great amount of The Great Indian Socialist Darkness.

Oprah talks to herself, did Mr M K Gandhi also talk now?

In The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord re-opens the idea of Mr M K Gandhi. 

• “There's something to be learned from Mr. Gandhi, something capitalists everywhere in America should seriously ponder. They are being targeted today just as surely as were the citizens of India all those years ago. Gandhi taught his fellow citizens to think outside the box, to simply refuse to cooperate with their persecutors. 
  
• From urban street corners to suburban malls to lonely outposts in the rural plains, eventually it dawns on a startled populace. There are no trucks out there hauling American products or, for that matter, products from anywhere. The truckers too have kissed off the Obama bureaucrats who want to raise their gas tax and tax them by the mile. And so, they simply stayed home or, caught on the highway, pulled to join the lengthening train of motionless trucks forming a peculiar guardrail for passing cars. 
  
• Accessing a mostly frozen Internet is done by the pulse of dying, un-rechargeable batteries. There is no Fox, which makes liberals chortle, until they realize there is none of anything else on the nation's suddenly blank screens”. 
  

It is worth to read but at least it is not fully clear to my mind that what could be the way or method to bring those hard or core change to masses when classes determine the fate of those masses. 

It freedom sense, it is crime, to do so, but our rulers did every year after the independence. 

We are still patient waiting for a good doctor to cure the ills created by our own home grown political pundits (including some foreign origin). 

If at all I agree with Mr Nandan Nilekani‘s argument of “the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster”, it is this sense that the young age population which goes with criminal politicians during election rally, unwanted strikes, party mobs, etc without mindfulness of their business which obviously become “a demographic 'disaster” for the country which is often said ‘young’. 

Thanks to politicians for making folly of this young population otherwise mind their business in life even if they don’t bother to listen, their parents or elders advice, or teachers etc.

Final chance for (to) whom…..?

Now, Mr Nandan Nilekani is a gust blogger and he says how wrongly-it seems to be cut short vision. 

The Indian economy is going to play a major role- no matter how the ups and down. No doubt few will play like a king maker-and the blood shade will make easer for pink newspaper editor for their head line news. It does not surprise to me at least who is going to be terrible, good or bad policy maker for at least next five years. Many elections came and gone. History has shown how many representatives have had voted Bills which are not in interest of people who have elected them. 

What is called prime resource now was called walking dead bodied at least a few years ago. I mean the population in general and the young age population in particular. No doubt the truth will triumph with its own time. Those who have questioned wrongly about the unproductive population now premise to save or attempt to make them productive. I mean the “demographic dividend”. 

Mr Nilekani says in front of the coming general election “Without quick action the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster'. The next five years is our final chance”.

I do aware that nowhere Mr Nilekani said population is a problem including in his Imagining India book, which I read this January. 

Four years ago my M.Phil theses professor said during one of our class discussion. I said many studies have shown that the Public Distribution System is dysfunctional in India. And only 10 or some percent of ration reaches the poor people or targeted ones. The rest is smuggled in between politicians and government official hands. He said the 10or some percent is great achievement of PDS system we should welcome it! 

So this is how the UPA has given Job guarantee scheme which is unproductive, in the last five years, many have already questioned the UPA government achievements. Mr Nilekani put it differently “….they have in essence, done everything short of what is truly necessary” and ….”We have stumbled badly in the last several years when it has come to creating organized sector jobs and expanding access to education and skills training to the people who need it”. 

It is also true that when we all looking election after election what our government can do for us from unimagined taxes that it collects from us but we all failed to realize what it can not do, really. Indeed. The world has shown us the several other alternatives to development good society. Are our elected representatives ready to learn? The answer is no as the history has shown. 

In sum, there is no such thing as a “final chance”. Instead we must believe that every criminal who got elected in our democratic system should get no more chance to fool us. In other words, we must make fool of them not as business but in every walk of life. When I say this I stuck with the kind of police and court system we have now, will that save our life or the criminal life? 

Voting system will never tell that but everybody hope for that day and say look our democracy is living here.

Must have thought

The following text was published in the Business Line. 

Excerpts from Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century by Nandan Nilekani 

“The 1980s was a period that marked the rise of software firms in India. Right out of college, I had joined Patni Computer Systems (PCS), a family firm, whose CEO Narendra Patni came from one of India’s traditional business communities. I met Narayana Murthy here, and when Murthy’s plan to set up a small, new software company inspired six of us to join him, we walked into a minefield of regulations. We did not need much from the government, but the rare times we did have to travel to Delhi to get permissions to import a piece of hardware, we would be trapped in bureaucratic paperwork for months. Once, when one of the co-founders, N.S. Raghavan, went to Delhi to change the ‘port of arrival’ from Madras to Bangalore in an import permission letter, he had to hang around in the lobby outside a bureaucrat’s office for eighteen days. The corridors of these government buildings felt like a maze you could not find a way out of.

Additionally, since India had huge shortages of foreign exchange through the 1980s, every trip that we made abroad required the approval and sanction of dollars from the authorities. One time I had to make two trips to the United States in quick succession, and the clerk at the Reserve Bank of India demanded to know why I was travelling abroad so often—he did not see the need of it, and must have thought I was a hedonistic wastrel.

We also witnessed how much people favoured working in the Indian public sector at the time. Soon after Infosys moved to Bangalore in the early 1980s, we had hired a few bright young engineers from IIT Madras. Within a few weeks, one of them came up to me and said he wanted to quit, to join a public-sector company in Bangalore—he told me that ‘a government company will never go under, and the job I have will be for life’.

It took one more crisis to change our small steps towards reform in the 1980s into a single leap to the other side. India’s particular nemesis has been the oil price rise, which sent the economy reeling towards bankruptcy time after time. In 1991 yet another oil price rise triggered a crisis that I would call ‘third-time lucky’. It was one that transformed our attitudes towards India’s entrepreneurs. 

India was staring into an abyss by the end of the 1990s—thanks to reckless government borrowings, our foreign debt had more than tripled since 1981 to $64.4 billion. Then came the Gulf War and high oil prices. With the Indian economy on the ropes, the finance minister Manmohan Singh introduced a reform agenda… the baton for growth passed from the government to ‘the human spirit of creativity, adventure and enterprise’. 

A flurry of activity 

In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly every Indian middle-class home had a cupboard made of wood or steel, with multiple locks and several small drawers. The favoured brand was Godrej Storwel, with its hard-to-pick lock. Most Indian families kept their savings and jewellery here. People avoided putting money in stocks because of the ‘wealth tax’ on such investments. When the ‘wealth tax’ was eliminated, money came out of these cupboards and into India’s stock markets. This combination of stock-market modernization and a vibrant market enabled an explosion of new entrepreneurs, who could tap into market capital to compete across industries, and turned many once-oligopolistic industry sectors, such as airlines and telecom, into highly competitive ones.

The businesses that emerged at the top of the heap after this struggle were different from the ones before—half of the top ten companies in market capitalization in 1991 had disappeared from the list by the decade’s end. Some of the most prominent entrepreneurs who emerged post-1980, such as Sunil Mittal and Dhirubhai Ambani, had built their firms from scratch, and were a breed far apart from the closed circle, family entrepreneurs of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Leading the way 

It is also interesting how the Indian government has begun to leverage the strength of India’s IT industry in its foreign relations with other countries, as IT companies have established offices and made acquisitions across the world. In the Middle East, for instance, India has pushed governments to locate and deport terrorists, while using investments by India’s software firms there — and the threat of pullout — as leverage. As the technology economy has expanded in India, IT companies have also shifted from software exports to addressing domestic opportunities. 

Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India”

Big Government means high social costs

M.N. Sabharwal and Manish Sabharwal quote “As Nandan Nilekani says in his exceptional book Imagining India: “Our failure to create opportunities can turn our demographic dividend into a crisis. We have already experienced these problems through the 1970s and 1980s when unemployment and the lack of income mobility for working-age Indians fed into criminality and extremist movements across India such as the extreme-left Naxalite and extreme-right Bajrang Dal movements, as well as the rise of the underworld in major cities. Key players in Mumbai’s underworld, for instance, were people belonging to discriminated groups and the impoverished underclass—Chota Rajan was the son of a Dalit sweeper, Abu Salem’s mother rolled beedis for a living, Chota Shakeel grew up in a Bombay slum and Arun Gawli’s father was a textile worker laid off during the mill strikes of the 1970s. While these circumstances do not exonerate their actions in the least, these are signs of how economic bitterness can create high social costs.”

Is there any one?

Nandan says that (he) “I was keenly aware that we have always responded best in crisis. Indian economists and policy analysts remarked to me time and again, of our lethargy unless we are faced with economic disaster”. 

I don’t think any one warned as strongly as Professor B R Shenoy about the credibility of planning in India and what Government can do and can’t do. 

It is quite interesting to know who are those economists and policy analysts remarked as boldly as professor BR?

Ideas and policy is like “where access is easier.”

Nandan Nilekani interview in the Indian Express make fair comment; the following are drawn from his interview:

• Learn the right lessons, not the wrong ones, like in Sonia Gandhi’s speech yesterday….. 
• ..our labour system is dysfunctional. We’ve created a monster. 93 per cent disorganised, 2 per cent unionised. It helps every interest group, and shafts the common worker. 
  
• …haven’t presented reform as a matter of access for the common worker. It’s about opportunities opening up, about destroying vested interests. This is a failure of communication.