B R Ambedkar on RESERVATION

Just as only a woman can tell you what being raped or groped means, only a Dalit knows how discrimination works both overtly and subtly.

During the Constituent Assembly debates, B. R. Ambedkar pleaded that reservation be allowed for a fixed period of 40 years only, with no possibility of extension. Typical of our short-sightedness, the Constituent Assembly rejected his wise suggestion and said that it should be for ten years only, but could be extended if necessary. Sixty years have passed and there is no hope of the system coming to an end.

Others

A useful organising principle to understand innovation in the last 250 years is the sequence of three industrial revolutions.

Indians tend to have an ambivalent attitude to new technology, with initial suspicion eventually being replaced by eager acceptance. While there is much public discussion on big bang technological change, far less thought is given to the deep changes that everyday technologies can bring about in society. Be it the ATM machine, cable television, typewriters or bicycles, consumer technologies can empower ordinary people.

1729=125 and others

The 1729 and 125 Men!

"Certainly the media paid for and bought by the Antonia Maino Congress still have to go through the motions and talk down Modi’s stock to earn their living. Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Vir Sanhvi, Sagarika Ghose and the rest of the loathsome bunch have to do what they have to do to earn their keep which amounts to dumping on Modi."

Kirana shops or jobs

"Why do tragedies at the individual level translate into massive gains at the national level? Because if our overall aim is to have higher incomes for everybody, that entails more capital per person and newer technology per person."

Organised crime by The State

Often I find myself rarely agreeing with eminent educationist and Prof Krishna Kumar. But in the present case I have not option except to agree with him for what he has said very profoundly in this article:

• Neither the United Nations convention on child rights nor the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) can rescue him in that moment. In any case, the state cannot be of much help, for it is the state under whose authority and supervision the two adults beating him mercilessly have been selected and appointed to serve as teachers.

• …It hardly matters whether they are serving in a government or a private school, for both kinds of schools draw the legitimacy of their access to the child’s mind and body from the powers entrusted to the state…

Feted globally…

Just taking the main quote portions only from this interesting piece for the benefits of readers:

• In a confidential memorandum in December 1991, Lawrence Summers, World Bank Chief Economist, urged his colleagues: “‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (Less Developed Countries)? I can think of three reasons.”

• Mr Summers elaborates: “The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”.

• Second, he says, “The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste”. Put simply, he regrets it is not economically possible to transfer waste and pollution wholesale to the developing world.

• Finally, he asserts, “The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable”.

Tragic paradox

There is something very terribly wrong with this interviewer's mind. The interviewer statement like the below one is highly debatable given the double game played by authors like Mr Ramachandra Guha. My problem with the statement is the word "liberal". In my view it does not suit Mr Guha enough to put it straightforwardly. I do follow his works in social and economic issues in India:

• "Meet Ramachandra Guha, one of the few intellectuals in India, who is a liberal in the classic sense of the term." 

Nonetheless, for the below statement he has to be congratulated for his boldness:

• “Rahul Gandhi is completely mediocre… He has no original ideas, no heart for sustained and hard work. He should find another profession,” 

It is really worth to read the full interview here.

More number games

"ll of this talk of secularism, communalism is rubbish."

Not all that true with the below statements.

I read in some book that the only place where India’s economic reforms were debated was the pages of the Economy and Political Weekly, a magazine that very few read. All the others publications were obsessed in that period by non-issues like Bofors and Babri.

AAP is still malleable and, in a way, still finding itself. ..........................Well-regulated capitalism , open economies and free markets have created wealth across the globe. We should allow the same to happen in India. 

"Vajpayee was the liberal face of the BJP, and had immense charm "

"all statistics are handmaidens of propaganda"

15-volume series on the history of Indian business

Gurcharan Das talks about a 15-volume series being published by Penguin on the history of Indian business

In this interview with Mint Mr Das says:

• I raise a question on the notion of property. What was it? In many countries the king owned everything. But in India, the Arthashastra says very clearly to the king, “You don’t own the kingdom. You have a bhaga and it’s shath-bhaga (one sixth).” In other words, that is the moral, the right tax rate, for a kingdom. And so, whenever kingdoms had higher tax rates, such as in the Mughal empire, when the tax rates went up to 40% and 50%... they collapsed. That’s a lesson that India pretty much forgot for 40-50 years. Our tax rates during Indira Gandhi’s time had gone to 97.5%

Freak truths

This needs to be noted!!

Prof Indiresan says:

• The fact is that it was Muslims who caused the initial provocation. There can be different shades of opinion on who first initiates riots and the response from the other side. The media treatment of such sensitive issues is also open to debate. But the biggest problem is our tardy and ineffective judiciary. If culprits are punished promptly, there would be little reason for Muslims to get irate; then there would be no retaliation too. It is also a fact that over two hundred persons have been convicted about Godhra, whereas not one person has been punished for the Congress-sponsored anti-Sikh riots in 1984.

P T Bauer vs Nehru

"P.T. Bauer (London School of Economics) demurred. For all else, planning had become an article of faith."

A bit more to muse through from the above piece by Prof Varshney:

• Central planning, clearly, did not achieve that goal. In the three decades of rigid planning, India’s economic growth rate was abysmally low — and its poverty rate remained unchanged. Should Nehru, then, be castigated for India’s economic failures until the onset of the 1980s? Could India have adopted a post-1991 style economic policy framework in 1950?
• These questions require nuanced reasoning. We need to ask whether economists and intellectuals, not simply Nehru, trusted markets in the 1950s. What ideas were available to economic policy makers at that time?

Technoeconomics

Sachin Tendulkar: A Ricardian analysis

Economics, science fiction and the inequality debate

The Left has always been more committed to its ideology than the demands of the economy.

Some links

"In 1991, opposition parties swore to reverse the reforms when they came to office. But once the reforms were seen to be working, these parties quietly shelved their objections." 

How can conditional cash transfers be a bigger reform than the 1991 reforms?

"template for ushering in the dictatorship of the idiotic, ill-informed majority"

Midnight’s children or reform babies

Manish has a very genuine assessment about the lively impact of foreign direct investment in retail sector in India. Most people who take interest in FDI in retail debate misses the below points which are extremely important at this juncture in Indian economy.

•  We know that kirana (unorganised retail) shop owners are a much smaller population than exploited kirana workers. We know that unorganised retail is the biggest user of child labour. We know the tragic costs of informal employment (no PF, no ESI, no appointment letters and no minimum wages). We know that 100% of net job growth since 1991 has been in informal jobs; the slavery of the 21st century. We know that kids don’t view employment as a lifetime contract (mai-baap) but a taxicab relationship that is intense, intimate and short. We know that 10 lakh kids will be joining the labour force every month for the next 20 years. We also know that a sales job is the most blue-collar white-collar job. The notion that agricultural jobs or manufacturing jobs pay more, provide higher job satisfaction or offer better physical environments is not a myth; it is a lie. I am not sure where the romanticism of shop floor or fields comes from but our economy is driven by domestic consumption—strength as the global crisis enters its sixth year—and that means sales and customer service will be the biggest job creator in the next two decades. So, there is nothing horrible about “India becoming a nation of sales boys and girls”. This will be a less poor India.

Fervent intentions

"Ambedkar tested every big and small, old and new religion available to Indians, trawled the texts and tenets of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, and indeed made himself an entire career as a scholar of comparative religions alongside his enormously busy public life as a mass leader, a politician, and an intellectual. He was far more systematic than Gandhi as a self-taught student of different religions in India, far more thorough than Nehru as an amateur historian of India, far more imaginative and conflicted than the talented Tagores in his attempt to identify or construct an acceptable past for the emerging nation. Even as he stood every received theory about the origins and evolution of the caste system on its head, he declared his fervent intention to "annihilate" caste. It is no wonder that Ambedkar remains the least understood of the great moderns that India produced, and who produced India." More here.

Neo-colonisers

Here is my latest piece in the Pragati. This time I have a new role in the Pragati. I would be writing a dedicated column in the magazine mainly focusing issues related to public policy in India. The below para is the concluding one:

• If anything, the time has come to understand the real or the main activities of some of the liberal think tanks and civil society organisations in the country and try to see whether these institutions exists just for the sake of receiving money from abroad, or whether their work really helps in strengthening the fundamental values of liberty among people. The basic liberal values are rule of law, individual rights, private property rights and economic freedom. These values are embedded in the Indian society historically. At present, it seems that the institutions which are supposed to work for these values have actually turned a blind eye to them. This has to change before the entire movement results in new order of chaos in the society.