"To move resolution for removal of ‘socialism’ from Constitution"

This news is really interesting to see through the Upper House of Indian Parliament Member's move "to move resolution for removal of ‘socialism’ from Constitution"

It has been now close to five decades that the word "Socialism" was forcefully inserted in the Indian Constitution and which was not there in the original Constitution approved by founding fathers like BR Ambedkar, Rajaji, etc.

Every time, the issue of removal of the word socialism erupts, almost all kinds of people sites the below para to ponder over how prophetic thinker Ambedkar was.

“Ambedkar had argued that the Constitution is just a mechanism to regulate the work of the various arms of the states, and that the matters like how the policy of the state and the society’s organisation in the social and economic side should be matters which must be decided by people according to the time and circumstances. He argued and won the argument that it should be left to people to decide,”

Some reading

India needs a new economic vision

A lifeline that rural India cannot do without

The other side of the demographic dividend

Small retailer never die

Finally, a modern pension system

India should follow the privatisation route that Britain under Margaret Thatcher had adopted and such a move will result in shareholder wealth increasing by almost 10 times. 

India-"genuine union"

"in Mahatma Gandhi we had our Lincoln; in B.R. Ambedkar, our King. Nehru made better speeches than either but, in hindsight, fell short in both political grandeur and moral stature.". Mre here.

"Our stupidity is entirely self-inflicted. Our state thinks of the poor as objects of charity, as if they have no agency of their own."

"Bharati’s Kuyil Paattu doesn’t offer lessons. It’s simply a remarkable illustration of the poet’s private voice."

Some links

"Hindus have attached greater value to the self over the State. This isn’t because of any insufficient attachment to wider dealings: the importance of trust in Indian business practices has been known and appreciated for centuries. Yet, there is a profound alienation from the ethical underpinnings of politics and governance which outsiders have noted and repeatedly taken advantage of."

"....being affiliated to a university or being recognised by the AICTE has nothing to do with offering quality education which can make one employable."

New Year 2013 reardings

"economics does not say that unfettered markets are better than state intervention or even state capitalism. The problems with state capitalism are primarily political, not economic"

Skilling the labour capital

" the next wave of public policy impact does not lie in poetry, but plumbing, because voters recognise that state governments control delivery systems"

Poke the media!

" Large sections have prospered without any state patronage and resent some cronies flourishing because of privileged treatment. The time is ripe to clamp down on corruption."

Good reading

More honour in love by Aamir Khan

Pakistan's TN Warriors

An Open Letter to Indian Graduating Classess

Go to hell, but NOT for Sonia Gandhi to PM post

"our institutions have no autonomy and are shackled by the State."

Social activities are wired

I some time think, normally when I am in complete leisure, that many of economic theories discovered or analysed in a new format in western countries in the last 100 years or so can be easily observed in Indian society even without any hardcore statistical data sets. 


What made to write the above lines is the article on "why we prefer social conventions to rigid rules" by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in today's Mint. 


In a sort of concluding way he argues that:

• "The entire debate on why the Indian government has been unable to spend enough on things that benefit all citizens may then have to be reconsidered in terms of our own social preferences, more specifically our historical inability to broaden the arc of cooperation. It is what could lie at the root of a common sight in our neighbourhoods: swank cars parked on broken roads or air-conditioned homes overlooking open gutters or loud music played outside the hospitals that treat us."

It does bring at the end the wired thinking rather I say rooted behavioural patterns of Indian society.

Kalam effects and Indian polity

From Shekhar Gupta's National Interest column.

• "The constitutional head of the republic is a political job and has to be performed as such, irrespective of where you find your incumbent from. If you have doubts, check the record of the Kalam presidency. He may have been trained as a missile engineer, but had to function as our most political president, handling — with moral authority and political elan — issues like Central rule in Patna in 2005, controversial judicial appointments, a national transition from NDA to UPA in 2004, and the Office of Profit Bill. And remember the first thing he did on being elected Rashtrapati on the NDA ticket? He went to Ahmedabad to talk to the riot victims as guardian of the Constitution."

PS: I reviewed Dr.Kalam's book India Vision 2020 in 2005 essentially saying its "fiction"!!!!.


Dr. Kalam also said in a different tone in 2011 that":

• “Politics should be a mixture of political politics and developmental politics where the former should comprise 30 per cent and the latter 70 per cent. However, today, our politicians are giving us only 30 per cent developmental politics. The day we are able to make our politicians work for developmental politics, our nation will definitely get on the right track and move towards becoming becoming a super power,"

Do also read Dr. Kalam's speech listing out 9 traits of creative leadership in politics.

1. vision.
2. passion to realize the vision. 
3. Leader must be able to travel into an unexplored path. 
4. knowledge  of how to manage a success and failure. 
5. courage to take decisions. 
6. nobility in management.
7. transparent in every action.
8. Leader becomes the master of the problem, defeats the problem and succeeds.
9. Leader must work with integrity and succeed with integrity.

On the issue of brain drain, he had also said, "I don't believe in brain drain. India produces three million graduates every year. If 10 per cent of them leave the country, it is not brain drain."   

Calcutta into London

A resident of calcutta writes in "....let me tell you how the last four British prime ministers have been portrayed in cartoons in London newspapers: John Major, always wearing his underpants outside his trousers; Tony Blair, as a one-eyed monster, sometimes as a one-eyed poodle trotting after George W. Bush; Gordon Brown, as a square, financial thug and bouncer; David Cameron, repeatedly, as an empty, blown-up condom. Along with these, they have also repeatedly had George Bush as a rampant, psychopathic chimpanzee, (once actually wiping his bottom with the UN logo), they’ve had Nicolas Sarkozy as all sorts of ferret-like animals, Berlusconi as a lecherous octopus and, recently, Angela Merkel as a dominatrix in skimpy black leather costume and fishnet stockings, wielding a financial whip over the exposed backsides of other European leaders. Besides this, one of the most widely read British satirical magazines, Private Eye, almost always has actual photographs of leaders and royalty with fictional speech bubbles coming out of their mouths, saying the most outrageous things. Let me tell you, no one has ever sued about these portrayals, no one is beaten up, no one is arrested, no one even lodges a written protest."

Blinking links

SA writes; "Political philosophers tracing the evolution of society define the period before governments as the State of Nature where every man was a law unto himself. It is the period before social contracts, commandments and rule of law came into being to bring order in society. It is only after the evolution of social contract, defining rights and obligations, that society migrated from the State of Nature and accepted the Nature of the State. If one looks at the headlines of the day and raging rant beamed into living rooms, it does often seem that India is drifting into an ungovernable chaos. The Nature of the State is seemingly regressing into the State of Nature."


The demand doctor who killed the world economy in the past and is still killing the same.


TCA on the quality of chief economic advisers who served in the Indian Federal Finance Ministry. Just to note (from TCA column):

"The good, the bad and the undeserving

Sometimes, you tend to look back and wonder about this and that. My time has been largely misspent in the company of economists who, I have concluded, are of three types: the good, the bad and the undeserving.

The best amongst the good ones speak in murmurs, the bad ones do regressions and the ugly ones preen like a brigade of frogs at a beauty parade. I write this because recently I had to put up with some very self-congratulatory talk.

My own view, after having studied the matter in depth, and at close range, is that the worst of the last group are the ones who served as chief economic advisors (CEAs) between 1982 and 2002.

During this period there were five and a half, the half being a “chief consultant”. He was the best by far and therefore ousted after 15 months. In the 1980s, one left after two years and another after about a year and half."

Lose your job and beg at my feat!

Learn how to destroy the jobs created by people themselves through Central Government schemes like NREGA which is fully funded by tax payer’s money.

The State is not antidote, it itself is big problem

Here is what P V says:

“For eight hundred years, from the time of the Magna Carta, legislators have fought for outright powers to decide how much to tax and in what way it should be collected and how that money should be spent. That authority is now sacrosanct and nobody questions it — except when it goes against the Constitution. Unfortunately, legislators decide what the Constitution should be. Hence, that check too is limited.”

It does matter whoa you are!

When Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the Finance Ministry, called for a certain class of bribes to be legalised, ‘civil society' simply shut its eyes and brain. The National Campaign for Peoples' Right to Information — a flag bearer of civil society — maintained a studied, shameful silence. Professor Basu was not pushing this idea in his private blog. He put it up on a Government of India website. Yet, thundering anchors who ‘skewer' politicians in television interviews uttered not a squeak. Had this insane idea come from a Ramdev, or even a Lalu Prasad, and not from a certified PLU member, imagine the fun the media would have had trashing it.

We want to pay them!!

And yet, instead of encouraging people to set up more schools—public, private, not-for-profit, for-profit, how does it matter?—we’re trying our best to kill private schools thanks to the onerous Right to Education Act which specifies the size of rooms in schools as well as the salaries to be paid to teachers. As a result of what we’ve done to restrict growth on one ground or the other, while the private education business is estimated at around $40bn today, the amount spent by Indian students abroad is around $6-8bn! Imagine what we’d do for education, and India, if that kind of money was spent here instead.

Buck back to us

Mr.Nitin Pai has very interesting column in DNA wherein he writes: 

• The earliest Indian traditions view the role of the State as protecting its citizens from the predatory world of matsya-nyaya, the law of the fishes, where the strong prevail over the weak. The state, through the establishment of danda niti, the rule of law, ensures that the rights and freedoms of the individual are protected. Citizens surrender a part of their freedoms to the State, so that it may ensure that they can enjoy the rest. This deal is the fundamental premise in the world’s constitutions, including our own. In other words, we citizens have appointed the State as our security guard. It is absurd for the security guard to outsource the job back to us, for then, why do we need the security guard in the first place?

The Beast G, back Ahead

Some excerpts from a review article by Francis Fukuyama on new edition of F A Hayek's 1960s book The Constitution of Liberty. The current President of Mont Pelerin Society is Prof.Kenneth Minogue. He said to me (during the February's MPS Asia Regional Meeting which I attended) that this book is Prof.Minogue's favourate and the best among Hayek's books!! 

• In an age when many on the right are worried that the Obama administration’s reform of health care is leading us toward socialism, Hayek’s warnings from the mid-20th century about society’s slide toward despotism, and his principled defense of a minimal state, have found strong political resonance. 

• Unlike Beck, Hayek was a very serious thinker, and it would be too bad if the current association between the two led us to dismiss his thought. Hayek always had problems getting the respect he deserved; even when he was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 1974, the awards committee paired him with the left-leaning economist Gunnar Myrdal. With the passage of time, however, many of the ideas expressed in “The Constitution of Liberty” have become broadly accepted by economists — e.g., that labor unions create a privileged labor sector at the expense of the nonunionized; that rent control reduces the supply of housing; or that agricultural subsidies lower the general welfare and create a bonanza for politicians. His view that ambitious ­government-sponsored programs often produce unintended consequences served as an intellectual underpinning of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s and ’90s. Now that the aspirations of that revolution are being revived by Tea Partiers and other conservatives, it is useful to review some of the intellectual foundations on which it rested.

• Hayek’s skepticism about the effects of “big government” are rooted in an epistemological observation summarized in a 1945 article called “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.” There he argued that most of the knowledge in a modern economy was local in nature, and hence unavailable to central planners. The brilliance of a market economy was that it allocated resources through the decentralized decisions of a myriad of buyers and sellers who interacted on the basis of their own particular knowledge. The market was a form of “spontaneous order,” which was far superior to planned societies based on the hubris of Cartesian rationalism. He and his fellow Austrian Ludwig von Mises used this argument against Joseph Schumpeter in a famous debate in the 1930s and ’40s over whether socialism or capitalism offered a more efficient economic system. In hindsight, Hayek clearly emerged the winner.

Choice in India

Some excerpts from this article

"Research in India, however, reveals that choice has neither the same positive consequences for individuals, nor the same negative consequences for society. For example, research by Ritu Tripathi at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and Daniel Cervone at the University of Illinois at Chicago examined whether choice motivates Indians to work on a task. They found that Indian corporate professionals were willing to volunteer as much as 25 minutes for an unpaid online task when they were directed to volunteer as much time as possible, but only 5 minutes when they were asked to choose how much time they wanted to volunteer. The researchers argue that performing one’s duties and meeting obligations is more energizing for Indians than focusing on personal choice."

If the similar survey is done in the government, the conclusion will be opposite!!!

"In India, in contrast to the US, individuality, independence, and personal self-expression have not been historically significant concerns. Instead, Joan Miller, a psychologist at the New School of Social Research, has shown that many Indians are more concerned about meeting their responsibilities and obligations to other people than in expressing themselves through unique choices." 

Government of Civil Society

Anuradha Dutt writes:

India, as per an official study, has the largest number of NGOs, about 3.3 million till 2009. The number must have swelled since then, with the real figure far exceeding the official estimate, which only counted bodies registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 and some state acts. The study avers that Maharashtra leads with 4.8 lakh NGOs. Other States with a high NGO presence are Andhra Pradesh (4.6 lakh), Uttar Pradesh (4.3 lakh), Kerala (3.3 lakh), Karnataka (1.9 lakh), Gujarat (1.7 lakh), West Bengal (1.7 lakh), Tamil Nadu (1.4 lakh), Odisha (1.3 lakh) and Rajasthan (1 lakh). These 10 apparently account for over 80 per cent of registrations. The Government is the biggest donor, with `18,000 crore being allotted for the social sector in the XI Five Year Plan. Foreign contributions come second, with an estimated `9,700 crore being raised in 2007-08. But NGO sources reveal that annual funding varies between `40,000 crore and `80,000 crore.

What The Government Should Do in India? by Prof Raghuram Rajan

The experiences of industrial countries as well as our own experiences suggest we need to rethink the role of government. We need to get government out of businesses the private sector can provide effectively, retaining a presence only if it provides effective competition to the private sector without subsidies or favors. We also need to get the government to focus more on creating a transparent enabling environment where competition can flourish. Our democracy, our vibrant watchdog institutions like the judiciary, NGOs, and the free press, our capabilities in technology, and the presence of some good, honest people in every echelon of the government, should give us the confidence that we can achieve the necessary reforms.