Swaminomics

A liberal society is based on rules applicable to all, not on the whims and discretion of rulers. Payoffs in return for favours are ant-liberal. Liberalisation is not simply about delicensing an activity or two. It is about empowering citizens by empowering citizens by replacing government diktat by competition within a set of fair rules. More >

Businessmen and NGOs sometimes ask me what they can do to improve the deplorable state of education in India. I believe that primary education must and can be done only by the state. But industrialists d NGOs (who get plentiful foreign funding today) can play an important supplementary role. Many businessmen have set up schools, More >

At a time when the Planning Commission says 54 million people have risen above the poverty line, state governments seem to have fallen below it. Many can barely pay employees’ salaries, some not even that. In consequence, urgently-needed investment in primary education, infrastructure and rural development is not taking place. The states say they have More >

Last week, I described the emerging war between generations in the West. The western welfare state taxes workers to finance pensions and health care for the aged. But the ratio of the aged to the workforce is rising relentlessly, and will increase fourfold in some countries by the year 2040. So either taxes per worker More >

A great new social struggle is emerging in the world. The old struggle was between workers and capitalists. The new struggle is between the workers and the aged. Forget about class wars, we are now in a war between generations. Just look at the strikes paralyzing France, the good showing of the Communists in the More >

One reason why India remains mired in poverty is that the political class gets worked up if anybody makes an excess profit of Rs 100 crore, but does not turn a hair if the public sector wastes Rs 100,000 crore. Nowhere is this clearer than in the latest ruckus over telecom licences. Opposition parties accuse More >

For all those following the debate on poverty trends since the reforms of 1991, there is encouraging news from the National council of Applied Economic Research. Its latest consumer survey for 1993-94 shows that: The proportion of low-income households has diminished after the economic reforms of 1991, a continuation of the declining trend evident since More >

The Parliament has witnessed a furore over Mr Sukh Ram’s attempts to favour Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL) in basic telephone licences. The Opposition parties have declared that this is a Rs 20,000-crore scam, and plan to make it part of their election platform. This estimate looks inflated. And Opposition parties are wrong in singling More >

It looks as though the Enron drama is going to have a happy ending. Many details of the re-, negotiation are secret, but certainly the total project cost has been stashed, its size has been expanded, and the levelised power tariff may plummet to just Rs 1.89 per unit, against the earlier Rs 2.62 per More >

A part from the government and business, non-government organisation (NGOs) are rising as a third major force in the socio-economic scene. We have 20,000 to 30,000 NGOs handling around Rs 3,000 crores per year, two-thirds from foreign donors and most of the balance from the central and state governments. The staff strength of NGOs runs More >

Most people are worried, even alarmed by the sudden drop in the value of the rupee en late October. Panicky {businessmen are predicting a forty-rupee dollar by the end of the year (which is pure rubbish). But I welcome the rupee crisis. In India, governments go into torpor when there things are going smoothly, and More >

THE latest gyrations on the swadeshi issue are bizarre. Sundry groups, some of whom are Hindu nationalist, are attacking Kentucky Fried Chicken as junk food. Shiv Sena Supremo Bal Thackeray has declared he will not allow such food to be served in Maharashtra. Hindu nationalists remain silent on one basic issue—that the very concept of More >

Another Gandhi, Jayanti has arrived. The great man’s ideals have largely been forgotten. The one saying of his that has suddenly become fashionable, and is repeated endlessly by the greens, is that nature has enough for everybody’s need but not enough for everybody’s greed. Charles Darwin, author of Origin of the Species, would have told More >

Much of the economic reforms so far have been half-baked, but in one area our economic structure has truly been transformed. Exports, which used to be only 5 per cent of gross national product (GNP) in the 1980s, have now risen to 10 percent of GNP.That is a major achievement. In the absence of any More >

For decades, we have regarded large power stations as essential and small generating sets as expensive stand-bys, to be used only when grid power fails. This is why we have been so keen on setting up new megaplants, of which some (like Enron’s) are mired in controversy. Yet the power cost, project cost and construction More >