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 a very large extent, these include those who voted the commies into the driver’s seat. Karma is a bitter pill to swallow, eh? Anyway, for the record, I include two snippets.
Category: Why is India Poor?
Why don’t they feel the pain?
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 aircraft from the U.S. The deal, valued at about $1 billion, could be the biggest arms deal ever between the two nations.
There you have it. The rich sell arms to the poor and the poor pay for it through the blood, sweat, and tears of its starving millions. To be sure, it is not the starving millions who are interested in fighting the poor of the neighboring countries. These millions of poor unfortunates are merely the slave labor that supply through their toil goods that the rich buy in exchange for the arms they ship to the armies of the poor nations.
Continue reading “Why don’t they feel the pain?”
Panchayat Raj
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 highest bidder.’ It is chilling reading and here are some lines from that article.
… Devaki Bai, 30, had been sold to another man for Rs 5,000 … Women were auctioned during Panchganga, a panchayat held to hear matters of dispute … Women were asked to lower their saris and stand with stones on their heads. Continue reading “Panchayat Raj”
Cognitive Dissonance
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 die at Kargil.
Let’s have a rail link for people to people contact. Never mind that it also gets terrorists in by the trainloads. And not just terrorists, it also makes it easier to transport the truckloads of fake Indian currency from there.
Common currency? Surely, it already exists: Pakistan prints them already and ships them to India without any prompting.
Pious hopes. Deja vu all over again. Panchasheel and Chacha Nehru and the Chini-Hindi Bhai Bhai. Next thing you know scores of thousands of poorly equipped Indian soldiers are being slaughtered by the Chinese.
The problem is that the leaders don’t have to pay for their folly: only the poor soldiers die in the frozen wastes of the Himalayas.
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
The generals sat and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
So sang Pink Floyd. The politicians and netas make the decisions that doom the foot soldiers. And not just them, the costly weapons that the country has to constantly buy condemns millions to a miserable existence.
Cognitive dissonance.
That is what I believe is the primary cause of all this craziness. Disconnect with reality. Not being totally clued in to the real nature of the world, interventions are suggested based on some idealized rosy view of the world.
It is a second best world out there. There are multipledistortions and divides. In such a world, attempting partial solutions can often transfer one from the frying pan into the fire.
Let me save you from drowning, said the monkey to the fish, as he put the fish up on a tree. Good intentions are not sufficient for achieving any utopian vision. More often than not, good intentions without a correspondence with reality, pave a path to hell.
Time for a reality check. Pakistan is precariously close to lobbing nukes at India. At the drop of a hat, there is talk of 1000-year jehads against infidel India. And in this salubrious enviroment, common currencies are being proposed.
Deva! Deva!
Everybody Loves a Good Digital Divide
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.
Continue reading “Everybody Loves a Good Digital Divide”
Education for a Nation
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, none is so basic as primary education for a nation. Primary education is the essential basic public good engredient without which there is no known receipe for development. Continue reading “Education for a Nation”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 