Category: Random Draws

The government of India is trying to gag people. You might object that that is as novel as the news that the Pope is Catholic. I agree. A socialist government cannot but rest on an uninformed citizenry. Truth is as welcome to the corrupt government as sunshine is reputed to be to Count Dracula. I don’t mean to imply that the government of India sucks the life’s blood out of its citizens although that may well be true.
Continue reading “Attempting to Censor the Press”

For every election cycle that the Congress gets to govern India, India suffers a generation’s setback. The dozen or so elections since India’s political independence that the Congress has won the right to rule India have set back India’s development by around 200 years. In that period, hundreds of millions of Indians have lived lives of utter destitution. Today one of out every two children below five is malnourished — the implications of which are so staggering in terms of retarded mental and physical development that it makes one weep bitter tears for the utter and needless waste of human potential.

Contrast where India is now relative to where it could have been — a developed nation — and it is easy to argue that the Congress must be responsible for hundreds of millions of premature deaths and billions of human years of misery. The cycle of poverty and misery gets one more boost today, another generation worth of opportunity lost, another couple of hundred million lives forced into horrible misery whose only redeeming feature would be that thankfully they will be short.

That’s the big picture and as I argue below, a short-term big picture. But it is better to take the long-term view of the big picture and if we do that, the view is not that devastating.
Continue reading “The Long View of the Big Picture”

What’s up? Thoughts on the election results which we should be getting in today?

How’s the weather? What you find interesting? What you find boring here? What you find interesting elsewhere?

Say what you will.

The Mumbai domestic airport terminals are quite presentable. I like the way that the infrastructure has been done. Yesterday I was there to catch a flight to Hyderabad. I am in Hyderabad today as part of a working group which is looking into how the urbanization of India has to be managed. As Reuben said (quoting someone), urbanization is “the second green revolution”. More about that later.
Continue reading “Designing Systems”

People respond to incentives. That’s probably the most powerful lesson a study of economics provides. It appears to be trivially true but it is quite surprising how often that is neglected by policy makers, analysts, and indeed by the average guy on the street.

Fortunately, every so often you do come across happy examples of properly designed incentive mechanisms that elicit the desired (and expected) behavior from the public without the need for authoritarian meddling. An item in businessGreen.com reports that a combination of charges and loyalty points have reduced the use of plastic carry bags at some retailers by as much as 85 percent. (Hat tip: Kashyap Patel)
Continue reading “Plastic Bags and Incentives”

Continuance of the UPA in power will jeopardize national security, according to Lt Gen S K Sinha, who retired as the Vice Chief of Army Staff. He is referred to as the “Scholar – Soldier”

An email received from Cdr P.P. Batra, describing the lecture by Lt.Gen(retd) SK Sinha, on 03 May 09, at the Constitution Club, New Delhi, is reproduced below the fold.
Continue reading “Lt.Gen. Sinha on the Danger the UPA Poses to India”

For 55 years, the Congress has been the party in government of India. India has been a command and control socialist economy, which implies that politicians who controlled the license-permit-quota-control raj had the opportunity and the means to collect rents from businesses and put them away off-shore. This is not the most surprising thing in the whole world.

I am sure that if I had the opportunity to grab billions of dollars, I would have been sorely tempted. I most certainly don’t claim to be totally incorruptible. If the system permits it, and if the temptation is large enough, who can blame another for giving in? The important thing then is to make sure that such tempting opportunities don’t arise in the first place. The institutions we build matter more than the character (or lack thereof) of individuals involved in government.

Arun Shourie has done a masterful deconstruction of the arguments that the Congress put forth in response to Shri Advani’s recent insistence that the Congress-led UPA government has been dragging its feet on the issue of following up on the matter. Shourie is a master of the written word and his logic is impeccable. So even if one does not know too much of the story, just reading his deconstruction is enough for one to get the facts.

Below the fold are some excerpts from the piece by Shourie, “Congress Caught in its Own Web.”: Continue reading “Shourie on Indian Money in Tax Havens”