Since moving from the Movabletype platform to the WordPress platform, posts prior to the reform appear all misshapen and ugly. I am fixing then as time and mood permits. Recently worked on a post from over two years ago called India’s Wonderful Reforms. Nothing much appears to have changed.

[Continued from Part 3.]
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe, said Abe Lincoln. Astonishing how much profoundly practical wisdom is packaged into that simple declaration. Time spent in sharpening the tool is time well-spent; so is time spent in thinking through a problem and thoroughly understanding the problem before rushing off to solve it. And in most cases, since there is almost nothing new under the sun, there are already known solutions to many problem. So the most …

[Continued from Part 2.]
The recent performance of India’s private sector has underlined an important economics lesson, that competitive markets work where too often the command and control system founders. Within your arm’s reach is a device which is a miracle of modern technology—the cell phone. It took the government telecom monopoly 45 years—from 1951 to 1996—to install around 14 million land lines. Between 1996 and 2000, with the liberalization of the telecom sector, India’s installed capacity doubled to around 30 million lines. In the next five years, India’s telephone …

{Continued from Part 1}
Reading Lee Kuan Yew’s lecture is edifying at various levels. As an observer, he is incomparable. But he did not merely observe; he hinted at solutions and did so without being rude. You know the Hindi saying, samajhdar ko eshara kafi hota hai (to the intelligent, a mere gesture suffices). Unfortunately, his talk to the Congress and other assorted disciples of Nehru must have been as useful as a bicycle to a fish. Nothing that LKY prescribed for India is surprising or counter-intuitive. Yet it is good …

Lee Kuan Yew was invited to deliver the 37th Jawaharlal Memorial Lecture on 21st Nov 2005 in New Delhi. He called it “India in an Asian Renaissance.” I am an unabashed admirer of Lee Kuan Yew and I should also add that I am a very severe critic of Jawaharlal Nehru. So I decided to read Yew’s lecture and also read between the lines and make a few comments

Haldiram’s is perhaps the only brand known around the world which comes from Nagpur (my home town). They make a great variety of wonderful namkeens (traditional Indian salty snacks), sweets, and other stuff which can be lumped as Indian junk food. It may be my cultural chauvinism which is speaking but I think that Indian junk food (like Indian food in general) beats any other variety of junk food hands down.

An item in the Nagpur local newspaper The Hitavada caught my eye as I had breakfast. “Surjeet, Bardhan to visit Pak next week” read the headline. Surjeet is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Bardhan holds the same post in the sister communist organization, CPI. The paper reported that they were to be felicitated and accorded the status of “state guests” by the Pakistani Government. Warmed the cockles of my heart, reading that piece. Here at last, I said to myself, is dedication being finally …

My brother came to visit me at our offices in Lower Parel in Mumbai this afternoon. He was duly impressed by the spanking new buildings that occupy what used to be Morajee Mills land. I guess I can understand why he was impressed because usually he ends up in seedy run-down offices trying to do business. He has a bunch of dealerships for equipment and materials required for large-scale public sector enterprises. As part of his business, he has to visit the offices of his customers who …

Ever wondered why exactly India is an astoundingly poor overpopulated illiterate starving nation of a billion people? I do. It need not be one specific reason of course. It could be a combination of several factors. For instance, it could be due to divine decree: the gods said that India should be pathetically poor. Can’t argue with that if the gods indeed decreed it. Or it could be that aliens from Mars conspired to make India what it is. Or it could be that foreign powers and their evil agents …

Well, now we can all sleep soundly. Justice and reason have triumphed against the formidable forces of evil that had threatened to undermine the very basic fabric of our millenia old civilization. Our future is assured, our children can now grow up in a land of milk and honey, we can walk the streets without fear and with our heads held high. We can now proclaim with pride Mera Bharat Mahan and truly believe that India is Shining.
For those who have not heard the momentous news, let …

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 …

They are succeeding mightly in dragging India back to where it was, oh say, about 55 years ago so that they can repeat the good old days of dismal 2 to 3% “Nehru Growth rate”. The market went down the tubes and the proverbial stuff hit the big rotating blades as soon as the commies opened their mouths. One feels sorry for the impoverished hundreds of millions who would suffer down the road due to this, of course. But that sorrow is partly mitigated by the realization that to …

Ever wonder why poor nations are poor and rich nations are rich? I don’t. I believe I know why the poor stay poor and the rich get rich. Consider this from The Wall Street Journal of Jan 19th. The report is titled India and US to Improve Ties. Here is an excerpt:
Washington also sees India becoming a big buyer of U.S.-made arms. In the past two years, India has purchased roughly $200 million of American arms and is in negotiations to purchase P3 Orion maritime-patrol …

The anniversary special of the newsmagazine The Week of Dec 28th, 2003 has lots of stories of the warm and fuzzy feeling variety. I went through the breathless prose of a large number of luminaries in it, including that of President Kalam’s. What especially caught my eye was an article in the section BestofTheWeek2003 section from their Jan 26th issue — the Republic Day issue — titled simply SOLD.
The story was about panchayats in rural India, specifically about women being ‘fined, humiliated, and sold to the …

So here is something that does not surprise me in the least: Vajpayee has called for a common currency for the Indian subcontinent.
Actions recommended and taken on the basis of pious hopes are par for the course. Let’s be nice and in turn they too will be nice, that is the pious hope. Let’s take a bus yatra and shake hands and recite some neighborly poetry and they too will respond in kind. Yeah, really. Never mind the fact that a thousand of our miserably equipped soldiers had to …

The subtitle of a recent Infoworld article India Plans to $2.7 billion IT investment is Government embarks on four-year effort to bridge digital divide and it fills me with dread.

An old Chinese saying (I assume all Chinese sayings are old except the ones that come from the little Red Book) goes:
If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
In the context of development, I think the last bit should be “if you are planning for a nation, educate people.” Especially, primary education. For among all the factors that are necessary for economic development, …