Some good reading

How a corrupt Judge continued in the Madras High Court-"Katju’s story, three CJIs were complicit in continuing, confirming and promoting an allegedly corrupt judge"

NGO mania in India: "Between 1993 and 2012, the number of registered associations (NGOs) rose from 15,039 to over 41,844, but through all these years only 54 per cent to 64 per cent filed details of foreign remittances received. In 2011-12, 16,756 had not filed returns. Those that did had receipts climbing from Rs 1,865 crore to Rs 11,548 crore. The principal donors in 2011-12 were from the United States of America, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. "

About 53% of AIIMS graduates actually leave the country, most permanently, and you cannot really point a finger at them

Two stories of my Courtroom

Some readings

Not a bad analysis about the prospects of Modi becoming a Prime Minister of India.

Do four Delhi think tanks matter disproportionately in India?

India’s demographic challenge: Wasting time

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"

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"

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.

Ruining the drive from sitting backseat

Mr.Manish  writes:

• "Today, policymaking in Delhi has seven backseat drivers — the judiciary, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), the Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), the CBI, the National Advisory Council (NAC), non-government activists, and the media. Each of them is trying to outdo — and out-scream — the other in second-guessing every policy decision of the past with the benefit of knowing what finally happened. However, fraud, incompetence and plans not working to plan are three different scenarios."

Weak-leak in every corner

The prospects of Indian economy is punchered continuously.


The industry top-cons are rounding few policy makers to get their share of a cake and try to eat it alone.


The media of varied types tunes with the porn words of infamous politicians who wanted to be in the minds of public because otherwise nobody cares them, who the hell are they.


The NGOs (including the liberal one) are doing the business of multiplying the unaccounted evils and ills in the name of improving the poor people's lives.


Elaborated articles here for your consideration.


For a smarter mind by Dr Ashok V Desai

Why Are the Suits Crying? by Manu Joseph

India Singhs the Blues by Sadanand Dhume

Merchants of Policy

That the post of this title is a long way walk.


I buddy of mine landed in city. After works, I had a long walk today. Probably we might have walked for not less than 12-15 km. All in a single park! The conversation between the steps in walk was pleasant and so the walk was so long then expected.


The conversation was not about politics or economics or who gets elected as next president. But it is all about the good writer versus bad writers in the world and at home in India.


This buddy of mine had a experiences which is of different sort in a developing society like India.


Here is a piece wherein he describes his journalism career. The case in point is compelling to read and ponder how bold is the buddy.

• "I saw one charlatan after another coming to my apartment on various pretexts. The accountant who believed that siphoning off funds is an acceptable norm begged that he should be spared. The chairman and funding organisations refused to look into the evidence, despite my persistence. But there was not one person who was willing to give me a written disagreement. The German foundation funding the think-tank thanked me for the information, but hiked the funding generously the next session. Though few think-tanks are above swindling their donors, this is rarely necessary. In many cases, the ‘illicit relationship’ is mutually beneficial as the funds are often the hapless taxpayer’s.
• There was an underlying rationality to all this irrationality. When a young anarchist friend pointed his finger at the tax amount on the bill at a coffee shop in South Delhi and said, “I really hate this, but my salary cheque comes from here,” I felt it perfectly illustrated a fundamental problem associated with the think-tank industry. He had just joined a government think-tank that did empirical research. But he did not believe in empirical research or mathematical modelling. He loathed the tax collector. I gathered that he was slightly embarrassed about the whole affair. Wasteful spending in the name of noble intentions is bad enough, but what if the intentions were not noble in the first place?
• There are many who do not share the embarrassment, and lean on the cowardly excuse that it is hard to be honest while working on policy matters. A think-tank president had once confided to this young man and another intern that his innermost convictions contradicted his organisation’s open agenda. Not long back, I read the experience of an author who lectured at this organisation’s seminars. The think-tank long owed him some money, but the president was not willing to reply to his mails. What differentiates many of them from outright criminals is the respectability in the perception of simple-minded men."

'India's decentralized principalities have been merged into one bureaucratic morass'

Thanks to Sauvik! Excerpts from The Daily Bell article:

• This is the conclusion to the article, and while it sounds reasonable, it seems to us that the assumptions on which the article is built are not necessarily accurate. For one thing, the article glosses over the fairly Draconian authoritarianism of the anti-corruption movement.
• For another, the article assumes that the current Indian vitality is the result of inexorable cultural and entrepreneurial shift. We would argue this is entirely incorrect. India's resurgence is driven by central banking money printing and may not be seen as a natural expression of industry and society.
• It is extremely important that the progress of the BRICS be placed in perspective. Brazil, China, India, even Russia, all have aggressive central banking policies. China and India, especially, have economies that are obviously being stimulated by excessive money printing. Both countries have a problem with price inflation as a result.
• Progress built on printing money from nothing is ephemeral. In America and Europe, thanks to the debasement of money and the vast resources it grants (temporarily) to government, economies can seem quite healthy  one moment and then ill the next.
• Money printing hollows out economies. It distorts business and job growth. It makes people feel wealthier than they are in reality. In both China and India, economic implosions will eventually take place. It cannot be otherwise, because central bank money stimulation inevitably leads to an exaggerated business cycle and subsequent busts.
• For this fundamental reason in particular, the Wall Street Journal article is flawed. India has not necessarily experienced a resurgence of business and market creativity. It is simply going through the same cycle of monetary stimulation that the European PIGS and America went through recently.
• Such monetary stimulation inevitably leaves behind ruined and fractured societies. In the case of India, the anti-corruption movement will likely make things worse, as it is in no way an expression of ancient Indian culture, which was decentralized and extraordinarily tolerant.
• The India of today, based on reports having to do with the anti-corruption movement, would seem to be inheriting the worst parts of Western socioeconomic systems. India's decentralized principalities have been merged into one bureaucratic morass.
• Money printing, in fact, is fooling the Indians into believing their economy is far stronger than it is – and also increasing the corruption of the bureaucracy. The anti-corruption movement is providing the Indian middle class with a simplistic approach to dealing with such problems.
• The real issue of the way the West has organized Indian society from the top down, starting with central banking stimulation, are not being addressed. The solution is seen as one of authoritarianism rather than a reconfiguration of India's basic institutions.

Mere populism

“The small-is-beautiful communitarians often ignore the many cases of local communities tyrannizing minority groups (Forms of lynching reminiscent of the U.S. South continue today in the ethnic villages of Africa and India.) And small local producers often cannot benefit from economies of scale and technological upgrades or invest in high-risk-high-return projects, which require risk pooling with non-local entities. As a result, they remain on the margins, mired in low productivity. While there are scattered examples of dynamic small producers, they don’t represent a viable systemic alternative. When real capacity to create wealth is missing, social activism is often reduced to mere populism, which in the long run can be wasteful and counterproductive.”

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.

NGO Mania and Money

Tavleen Singh writes:

• So a lot of very corrupt people have made lucrative careers out of becoming NGOs. 
• As someone who has observed NGO activities for a while now, may I add here that nearly all the NGOs who set out to save India’s environment are frauds with almost no understanding of what the real issues are.
• So rewarding is the NGO industry that senior police officers and bureaucrats often become NGOs as soon as they leave government service.
• ….can we please admit that when it comes to corruption, our NGOs are pretty much in the same boat as politicians and high officials.

Getaway from this cynicism of Professor T T Rammohan

At the root of solutions such as an omnipotent Lokpal is the belief that the politician is the arch-villain in our system and that we must look to non-political actors to solve our fundamental problems, including corruption. This is an offshoot of the neo-liberal ideology that government is evil and all is best left to the market. If government is evil, then so are those who run government.
The above paragraph is completely misunderstood one.

Bribe to god or earthly sins

Kiran Karnik, on Promise of Philanthropy:

• Thanks to an overpowering government, bureaucracy and an increasingly materialistic society, corruption has been growing. Apparently so have the attempts to bribe God, judging from the booming collections at religious shrines.

• The ‘Tirupati syndrome’ — putting money, gold and jewellery in the hundi at the temple, presumably in the hope of being thereby absolved of earthly sins —extends to giving money for all kinds of religious and ritualistic causes. However, donations for social causes are difficult to come by. The large and growing middle class, despite the prosperity brought by economic boom, is yet tight-fisted when it comes to non-religious charity.

• The industry-government relationship has moved from antagonism to cooperation (sometimes, sadly, only for personal benefit) and spurred economic growth. It is time for industry to now take the initiative and forge a strong partnership with civil society to take forward the agenda of going beyond economic growth, even beyond inclusive growth, to real and holistic development.

Of NGOs and Think Tanks

From ET ‘Citings published on 5^th April, 2010

“Consider that 20 years ago Indonesia had only one independent environmental organisation. Today it has more than 2,000. In Bangladesh, most of the country's development work is handled by 20,000 NGOs; almost all of them were established in the past 25 years. India has well over a million citizen organisations. Historically, these organisations have been defined in the negative — as non-profit or non-governmental organisations. Today they are understood to comprise a new “sector,” variously dubbed the “independent sector,” “non-profit sector,” “third sector,” or, the term favoured in this book, the “citizen sector.”

“kya kare, chalta hai” no no.. you can not eat the cake of social-sector schemes too

An NGO CEO writes about the NGO’s politics and bureaucracy in Indian society, of course it purely private!!

• It is sad that at the end of 2009, almost 25 years later, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission reiterates that Rajiv Gandhi was right — indicating that over the last 25 years there has been a constant siphoning off of huge amounts of money meant to be spent for the benefit of the poorest of the poor.
• By most reports, the NREGA scheme has been the most successful of government schemes — what that means is perhaps, not 50 per cent, but a lower amount is being siphoned off. Let’s face it, the scheme is dependent on the Block Development Officer and the sarpanch to identify and confirm the beneficiary before payment is disbursed; what are the checks and balances in place to ensure that a nexus between these two does not lead to siphoning off of funds to non-beneficiary accounts? The BDO post is reportedly being auctioned off for as much as 5 crores these days, giving lucrative police station house officer postings stiff competition.
• A worthwhile exercise for the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) would be to undertake a state-wide exercise to identify the number of NGOs that are founded by politicians or bureaucrats or through family members or fronts. Ideally, identify where (say) more than 0.5 per cent of the sanctioned funds for any one scheme in a state were sanctioned and then identify the organisations that received the funds. Then depending on the findings, to investigate those organisations where politicians or bureaucrats were involved to see how the funds were spent/disbursed, or at least to show the data on their website for others to study how the funds were actually spent. If these large amounts are being siphoned off it would need people in power to initially authorise the projects to the NGO, and then to sanction the payment to them — which could be fictitious.
• The shocking truth is that approximately 60 per cent of the central schemes are sanctioned directly to NGOs and social organisations, where the CAG has no purview for an audit (because these funds do not pass through the consolidated fund of the respective state)!
• The CAG reports go to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which have been known to stall or delay action on these reports. PAC meetings are held in camera. Why hold them secretly? The public should be engaged in the PAC process — when did they receive the CAG report? When and how did they act on it? The need is for transparency here.
• After years of a public perception that there was a nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and corporates that was responsible for the major corruption in our country, perhaps the new nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and the social sector will reveal corruption at an even bigger level.