According to UN estimates, India has the largest number of hungry people. Over 200 million, or about one-fifth of India’s population, is chronically hungry. This is an apparent paradox in a country which is food-surplus on the aggregate. The Wall Street Journal of June 25th 2004 reports that according to Indian government sources, by 2001 India had a national stockpile of around 60 million tons of rice and wheat. It goes on to say:
But with inefficiency and local mismanagement plaguing distribution, it couldn’t move the grain fast …

Caught a glimpse of the front page of The Times of India while commuting to work this morning. I noticed that they are now peddling pornography to increase their circulation. No wonder they are referred to by some as The Slimes of India. The top left hand corner of the front page declares in bold print:
Internet Hawker Puts Brittney Sex Video Up For Sale
A few weeks ago it was confirmed that the newspaper has paid editorial-page content that masquerades as honest reporting. I wonder how much they …

When I feel angry about India’s lost opportunities and feel especially despondent about the Indian economy, I sometimes compare India with its neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, just to get a sense of balance and say to myself “but for the grace of our un-countably many gods, goes India.” India is not ruled by intolerant monotheistic morons (an expression I picked up from the Department of Redundancy Department) — at least not yet.

A friend of mine with whom I had dinner last night at a restaurant in Colaba has an interesting job. As he puts it, he gets women pregnant and is paid handsomely for doing it. He is a doctor and runs an in vitro fertilization clinic. There are more than one way of making babies (18 ways, according to his website Malpani Infertility Clinic) and he knows them all.

Niket in a comment raised the issue of the skewed sex ratio in the context of population control. To my mind, the differential preference for boys over girls is a consequence of overpopulation as well. If the population problem were to be addressed, the skewed sex ratio problem will also be addressed. For my views on the causes and consequences of the skewed sex ratio, check two earlier blog entries. The first, The Skewed Sex Ratio where I wrote:

The causal connection between population and poverty is widely researched and understood by many economists and demographers quite well. There is a causal link between poverty and population which is mediated by a third component which is broadly labeled the local resource base. Poverty cannot be understood without reference to the resource base that the population has access to. The three components of population, resources, and poverty are interrelated and influence each other in complex ways that vary across time and space. How these factors influence each other without any …

Some time ago in a piece titled Dutch Disease Disturbing the Universe I had written:

Now it is time to follow up on the comments and responses to my last post, A Promise and a Challenge. First a clarification: my offer to buy dinner for anyone who is able to persuade me to change my position on the market-based solution to India’s looming population crisis clearly states that the dinner will be at a restaurant of the winner’s choosing. That is, the winner does not have to travel anywhere to collect on the wager. If you are in Timbuktu, and wish to have the dinner …

I appear to have stirred up a hornet’s nest in my last entry The Market for Reproductive Rights. I sort of expected the reaction from a few people. Much of the reaction has been of the knee-jerk variety. So here is a promise and a challenge.

Yesterday I proposed a Population Planning Authority of India which would have the mandate for formulating policies for population control and for enforcing compliance. Today I would like to outline a policy very briefly and then over time spell it out in detail.

At its core, the population problem can be characterized as an instantiation of the classic tragedy of the commons. If there is one problem that is very well understood by economists, it is that of open-access resource which leads to the tragedy and consequently the solution to the …

India faces a myriad of problems. Fundamental to solving
them is the problem of an exploding population. It is easy
to tell that I am obsessed with the problem.
Continuing on from
my last ruminations on India’s population problem, I
now propose an instrument for beginning to address India’s
most pressing problem.

First, let’s recognize that the political will
is critical for any sort of change to happen. Something may
be a great idea but unless it is politically acceptable,
that great idea will not see the light of day. So the
solution I propose has to be one such …

Today’s Business Standard carries Rajesh Jain’s article on Transforming rural India, the hub way in which he discusses the RISC model.

Continuing from my last post, The Art of Living, I would like to explore the question of why the population problem is important. To start off with, allow me an analogy. Consider a tub made of staves of differing lengths. How much water the tub can hold is then dictated by the length of the shortest stave. If one were to pour water into the tub, the water level will continue to rise but only until the level reaches that of the shortest stave, when it starts overflowing. To increase …

If you have been following this blog for a bit, you would have noticed that I lay quite a bit of stress on the population problem which I believe underlies much of India’s present problems and I argue that unless that problem is addressed, India may never be able to become a developed nation.

Yesterday’s post about the government’s anti-Midas touch concluded with the question of what explains the sordid performance of practically anything undertaken by the government. I believe that the answer has to do with what is called the objective function of the government.
Loosely defined, an objective function embodies the goal of an economic agent and which the economic agent attempts to optimize in some sense. So for a commercial enterprise, the objective function could be to maximize market share, or it could be to maximize profits. For a consumer, it could …

Continuing on where I left off the last time time, let’s once again quote Mr Bardhan:
In a state like Delhi, for instance, can any private power distributor without an established work force be able to carry out electrification?
The answer to that is of course no. No distributor, private or public, can carry out electrification without an established workforce. But if that question was intended to demonstrate that only the government can have an established workforce, that is patently false. One doesn’t quite know where to begin …

Continuing from where I left off the last time, I quote again Mr A B Bardhan:
I am against privatisation of the state electricity boards. I simply do not understand the merits of the decision of setting up state regulatory commissioners even as private distributors increase costs repeatedly. In a state like Delhi, for instance, can any private power distributor without an established work force be able to carry out electrification?
I am not sure what it is about Delhi that makes it so unique in the whole universe with regards to …

The June 2nd Business Standard carried an opinion by Mr A B Bardhan, Secretary of the Communist Party of India, on the question “Should the disinvestment ministry be scrapped?” He said,
Even Lord Keynes would not have approved of disinvestment! Even he believed that there are some areas the government should not step out of. … Disinvestment means privatizing profits and nationalizing losses…. Profit making public sector units should not be privatized for two main reasons. First, because they are major contributors for taxes, and, second, they …

Some time ago, I had posted a blog entry on the logic of outsourcing which quoted Russell Roberts of BusinessWeek Online. All very serious and good. I recently came across Dave Barry’s take on outsourcing and he does not disappoint.

The name of this blog is Deeshaa where there are two e’s and two a’s. The reason I point it out is that I notice that many people make the mistake of thinking it is “Deesha” and they end up either not finding this blog or not being able to reach me on email. The name ‘Deesha’ was already taken and therefore we spell deesha as Deeshaa.
This is a dummy post. This post will have the words Deesha Deeshaa Atanu Dey RISC Rajesh Jain Vinod Khosla Rural Development Population …