A proper mix

The Modi government is  on three main pillars,a powerful PM an all pervading PMO and a  president singularly focused on winning elections.In the exclusive pursuit of growth and  the three - centered load bearing dispensation we may see the role of ministers,bureaucrats and  party functionaries much reduced. Though this may  enable  macro objectives of the government  being achieved but   the " last mile delivery ", of the benefits of growth will need a host of animated delivery agents, be it the minister,babu or the party cog ,to reach it to the common man.Top driven governance and a demanding nine-to-five regimen may assist carrying out directives on select  objectives of the day, but may not spur  local level imagination,innovation and job pride that are essential to complete the benefit chain. UPA  with its cargo of generous  inclusiveness  could not find its  berth in 2014, as the Congress lacked a vibrant party apparatus  to deliver .BJP has managed a strong set up today but if its apex leadership  does not factor in complementary bottoms-up participation  under more open decision making environs,it could well face a similar fate in 2019. 

Pub : Business Standard; July 16

China can not beat the dollar

                    A World Bank report says that the Chinese economy at $ 16.72 trillion is set to overtake the US, in PPP terms, by end 2014.Sounds impressive, but is  dry statistics.Certainly the dollar has  been declining for three decades now,losing  almost half its value against other major currencies since 1985 and  down 33% in the past 11 years alone. Yet it is  the tallest world currency.Also,even as the U.S. economy  remains sluggish their Fed presses on with  massive Quantitative Easing, an euphemism for printing of notes , for upwards of three years now .Such monetary recklessness ought to have pulled down the dollar value and yet, as other economic blocs are doing worse ,investors  continue to shift cash to US, boosting the dollar with increased inflows Doubling  up as the world currency, dollar acts  as an  incentive for safe parking and has it going both ways , in domestic and the  global economy !. 

           Under similar factors but on contrary reasoning,  the status of the Chinese currency  as also its apparent economic might ,is a far cry.Its profligate  subterranean shadow banking system fuels liquidity enormously  but  not being subject to regulatory / market scrutiny  as the dollar,a deep monetary malaise festers beneath.  Coupled to this,  its overt financial system burdened with  huge  non-performing loans, bad banks, inefficient state-owned enterprises and real estate bubbles, makes for a shallow and unreliable lead economy.Its Yuan / Renminbi is not  a trading currency and stays non -convertible. China's fiscal and monetary burden imposed by unhealthy levels of money circulation  hence  remains caged within and can not be passed to other economies .The dollar has long had the the " exorbitant privilege "  of  every other world economy  underwriting  its continued global pre- eminence !.

Perils of over urbanisation

 As urban areas exploded their peripheral farmer  was displaced away from the epicenter of mass demand as also from water sources that were commandeered for the city.Take for instance the  mundane earthen pot maker who lost his friendly soil and water in the city precincts and had to move far away to eke out his trade. A five litre pot sells in Delhi at Rs 120 but he must not be getting more than Rs 10, as his customer is 50 Km away.Reckless urbanization has helped only  the real estate mogul,never the artisan.
          The same with the  hapless farmer who  was moved far out of the city and was hence forced to look up to someone who would now meet his needs of transport, ready cash  and prompt off take of produce in the absence of adjacent storage facilities.The wholesalers provided him all this and extracted his cost from both the producer and consumer.Without him a farmer would be handicapped on all three counts.The end consumer in the city would like to see his vegetable spread at dinner come cheaper but merely tinkering with the likes of APMC Act,do not take away the basic logistics that the distant  farmer will continue to contend with.Setting up  self-contained farmers Kibbutz with storage,processing and direct marketing facilities, is one sensible way to profitably bridge centers of production and demand and cut on waste and delay. This will take  funds and earnestness. Governments quickly forget that the lowly onion had seen the back of them thrice already.

 Pub  --Business Standard Jun 25

Patent Phishing

  Last week the Apex court's ruling  in the Enercon vs Yogesh Mehra case, that a patent opponent cannot take multiple shots at challenging the same patent  but must choose between the various options spelt out in India’s Patent Act, has gone unnoticed. The ruling  is a welcome deterrent on multiple port patent litigation  by zealous patent lawyers.The subject case had involved hard core  designs for Wind Power equipment and Systems, which  made it perhaps  more conducive to legal examination than say those pertaining to software domains where patents are   litigated because of undefined boundaries, vague language  and unclear scope  . Much earlier in the wake of the legal shift from a focus on what the patentee actually built, towards  the  concept of " boundaries of invention ",  lawyers made out  claims in broad functional terms and sought a lien to own rights, not to a particular machine or even to a particular  method of  achieving a goal, but to the goal itself !.This  ill conceived development led to costly  defensive patenting ie,acquiring patents mainly to pre-empt the risk of litigation .Technology companies in particular,  spent fortunes  on building defenses .Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion ,mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for $4.5 billion.The  current SC ruling hopefully  helps tilt the balance back ,in favour of innovation and to discourage " Patent Phishing 

Privilege of the dollar

.Strangely even as the dollar has steadily been declining for three decades now,it  lost almost half its value against other major currencies since 1985 and is down 33% in the past 11 years alone,it is still the tallest world currency. The U.S. economy  is growing very sluggishly and to top this, their Fed is pressing on with  massive Quantitative Easing, an euphemism for printing of notes by the US, for upwards of three years now .Such monetary recklessness ought to have pulled down the dollar value and yet, as other economic blocs particularly the eurozone ,are doing worse ,investors  continue to shift cash  to the U.S boosting the dollar through increased inflows,which  occur not as much by export sales as from  foreign investors who see better opportunities or seek a safe  parking for  their cash . Further,the dollar  doubling  up as the world currency as well, acts  as an  incentive .The US dollar thus has it going both ways ,in its domestic as also in the global economy. In effect every other economy has become an unwilling underwriter to the mighty dollar and this, is its " exorbitant privilege " and may well  remain so, till other economies gather sufficient economic clout over time to challenge its unique status.

Pub  --- Business Line Jun   25

Treasure our languages

The decisive win of the BJP is a factor for attempting to re position Hindi.Politically dominant tongues like English,French ,Spanish ,Chinese,Arabic etc. being prone to greater usage at a given era ,subordinate others, dictated by the needs at that given time What is paramount is ,when  a particular language passes into sunset,in takes away that vital hue or nuance that  it alone was capable of providing,leaving the human canvas that much poorer.It is natural that the history and culture of the times in which man records or propounds his experiences or ideas, gets seamlessly merged into his creations much like  an indelible hue  to a work of art..States south of the Vindhyas,first resisted Sanskrit for its  Aryan roots and later as the language of the Brahmins. Hindi was met with similar antipathy, the anti-Hindi agitations being of recent memory.In time ,the compulsions of modern day technological advances had many states embrace English  All our Indian languages are the bridges to treasures of the past,the older the language,richer the treasure and that should be reason alone to safeguard each one of them.Thought must over-ride form and as long as we are enabled to think in mother tongues and transact in an alien language,  their ingrained  ethos will sustain our vivid culture.Little sense in trading our hoary linguistic treasures for lingual pragmatism,if not to singular dominance.

Pub -- Economic Times Jun 24
Pub ---The Telegraph Jun 28

The lonely columnist

 A diminishing tribe of  Page 10 columnists 10  assiduously  cater to select readers who  wish  to firm up on an opinion or strive to upgrade  their ken on matters of larger concerns .An ideal journalist is one who stays as close to the middle of a black and white divide only indicating the trend of a swing  to either zone and  rarely seen to  push his arguments to  extremes.  He is the  amicus curiae  placing  facts evenly  with an intention to illuminate across a gamut of perceptions,yet  leaving  the prerogative of a conclusion to the reader. In this era of Twitter where within minutes of an event people reach widely varying judgments   and even pass instant verdicts ,  the task of the columnist is arduous and at a risk of  sounding contrarian, most of the time.Precisely why such men are vital to an informed democracy.

Pub --Fin Express Jun 23

The choice before Congress

The GOP has seen ups and downs in six decades. In the 2014 LS election, one in three voted for BJP and one in five for Congress.  BJP and Congress together could garner just over 50% , others  collected the rest. BJP got majority at the lowest vote share ever, given our strange incompatibility between seats and vote share .BJP is expanding into hitherto seat barren states even as Congress is receding . Without regional allies Congress can not climb back to substantial clout in next five / ten years.Leadership for the Congress thus would need to operate on two planes- one for keeping the central core together and the other which is state centred .The latter needs to patiently cultivate the electorate as also other regional political entities. .A state Congress  leader has to be of great mettle. Given its overbearing central leadership thus far, the Congress has an uphill task on this score.But there is no alternative.
         Congress can also look at the brighter side.  BJP  may find it a tall order to run a diverse nation on the strength of improved governance alone.A growth led economy will take time to  stabilise and changing factors of global economics would provide  room for errors..Congress era welfare schemes will have their place. BJP would be averse to go against its ingrained tenet of laissez faire that detests subsidies and as  people  battle a widening  socio- economic divide, the Congress will be fondly  remembered .

Inured to suffering,yet hopeful in strife

The Euro crisis reiterated a lesson, that fiscal policy / monetary-policy regime influence  the depth and duration of  economic downturns  and the time for its recovery. A plethora of big ticket welfare schemes by the UPA-II riding a hubris of growth  in its earlier avatar, laid the ground for ponderous deficits  leading to an adamant inflation that stunted growth. Food inflation is a different story altogether and a change of government alone is no remedy and we will have to endure it till growth is re railed.That makes  IIP of more material concern . This is showing steady improvement The fiscal adage  that  current spending  be balanced by taxation and that  reducing deficits on current spending is justified  only if it be  replaced by capital-spending programs will hold.When  carried out in tandem , the nation would ensure that its people can buy and its industries can produce Money and effort spent on Power and other infrastruture in the coming months will serve  the economy well.True the next six months would also see us dealing with an afflicted monsoon, volatile crude and a new government settling in and straightening out its priorities.If we can manage to downtrend inflation and uptrend growth ,even in small steps ,we might  wake up to a happy new year.
Pub Business Standard Jun 18
http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/letters-inflation-and-growth-114061701273_1.html

Our vivid political palette

The wheel of politics keeps turning. The Congress peaked in UPA-I , on an ascendant growth curve. The UPA-II then ,inexplicably switched over to the extremes of ' inclusiveness ' losing sight of growth and touching nadir.The BJP has since  come back riding high on the   the growth arc  of the cycle  this time.While its majority strength and its innate economic tenet might well enable a GDP recovery ,the weak Opposition makes NDA vulnerable to socio-political and economic imbalances as the regime progresses, because of the ideology derived from the Parivar. If governance suffered under the UPA due to a diffraction  in authority, the NDA in turn could  be susceptible to too much of it being centralised.Even the best political outfit and redoubtable leaders must go through a learning curve.Modi and his NDA -II too will travel this path and political entities will cyclically keep following one another.

  That the Left could manage three decades of rule in Bengal only on inclusiveness and no growth, will remain a political enigma.In the process it has been reduced to a political bonzai  and may well stay that way for a long while.The AAP was born amidst the rush of national concerns that both the Congress and the BJP failed to address in their decade long battle of political one-upmanship. One reason why this fledgling party though high on spirits is lost in self contradictions ,unable to identify its core purpose / ideology.Lost in  prioritising  its agenda, it is internally divided .The good thing its founders seem to be determined to stick together and the party should  duly evolve over time.It is essential it does as the vacuum created by the Left is better filled by a political entity than by the likes of 'Arab spring '.It was with much effort that political the center stage was reclaimed by Parliament, from Jantar Mantar !.
Pub Financial Express Jun 12

Left-A bonsai now ?

An all inclusive socio-political dispensation requires a definitive Left leaning,but in today's global economy ,growth and development are sustained by as much of a  swing to the Right .The CPI(M)-led West Bengal experiment in its later phase far from being a weapon of class struggle,  degenerated into a class collaborationist dispensation and an instrument for crushing people’s resistance to pro-corporate policies. While it became increasingly indifferent to its initial promise of providing the masses with urgent relief, in the era of  globalisation it went overboard in granting competitive favours to corporate investors in the name of attracting more investment to the state. Karat &Co as the 'Old Boys of the JNU' in the CPI-M have managed to undo what had taken decades under comrades Basu ,Surjit and others to build.hat the Left could manage three decades of rule in Bengal only on inclusiveness and no growth, will remain a political enigma.In the process it has been reduced to a political bonsai  and may well stay that way for a long while.

Infosys today,others next

The Infosys stock was languishing from 2011.The relentless exodus of its top men reflects the  pessimism on its growth potential. The company  even after its multi- exponential growth, persisted with its founders as the CEO with   centralised control over commercial decisions.This multi billion dollar megalith  felt no need to fill up the position of COO since May 2012 !.In the last  decade like others ,Infosys too acquired a more intellectually evolved set of hands. But these men were never  brought into the line for grooming  as the baton kept  passing  on from one founder to another.The company's loyalty to its founders had perhaps continued to rate above the interests of its share holders.

                              The advent of Sikka,a rank outsider that too with a technology background, will be a twin experiment for Infosys that grew on providing  service support.Today's IT is not even about  tomorrow but the day after and beyond. If today Infosys is evaluating itself, others like Wipro would be better off to start their exercise at the earliest on similar lines.The only enemy in IT,has been time .

Not by governance alone

The congress had gone into shell shock far earlier. The party and its government were just unable to gel ,be it policy , governance or coordination within  This is when UPA -I had done reasonably well on economy and welfare and the BJP  had been endlessly tying itself in knots from 2004. UPA.should have had the good sense to resign and go for fresh elections in 2012-2013 which would have saved  them the ignominy of crashing from 206 to 44. In trying to save balance 18 months of UPA-II , Congress has lost a decade. This fatal error provided for the the advent in July 2013 of Modi as the messiah for BJP and Kalki for the Congress' downfall. 

  If at 31 % vote share the BJP garnered 282 there is much leeway for the Congress  to reinvent itself  this time ,with a mix of dynasty and guided grooming of its satraps.The BJP too will find it a tall order to run a diverse nation on the strength of improved governance alone. It aims  cutting subsidies across the board in the hope  of balancing the socio-economics by a resurgent babu led governance. It might well do so but that will take time and changing factors of global economics would provide  room for errors.BJP travelled ten long years to reassert itself politically, helped along in the end stages by a bumbling UPA-II. The Congress too would resurrect itself  mostly by its own efforts and no less by the failures of NDA-II in the coming years.

Uber,a welcome entrant to Apps

.Innovative IT lives in a make believe world with its business largely  crystal -ball led.The recent $19 bln  buy out of Whatsapp  will remain highly  mystical ,the transaction  being largely on stocks and  far less in cash ,till we get to see it either as a classic  bubble or a case of brilliant  business insight .As a disturbing pointer to the former ,we had steep erosion in the prices of some internet and social media stocks recently ,pulling  down Nasdaq Composite Index  by 10 per cent -Twitter stock that gained 70% on listing day  fell 46 % from its peak even as Facebook and LinkedIn  ,followed suit and back home , Justdial and Info Edge tumbled sharply.The Uber story is hopefully an illustration of the latter. The rationale of its valuation at $18.2 bn  can be argued separately, but unlike other esoteric App initiatives,Uber spins out a business of moving men and material and generates real money that adds to the growth of the middle income group.One would rather have an affluent cabbie enabled by Uber than an idle one trading his woes on Whatsapp with a fellow sufferer. Amidst increasing fears that California  could well be hosting its second gold rush post 1858, this time in the IT Shangri La of Silicon Valley , Uber and its ilk ought to be a welcome relief

Need for AAP

The AAP was born amidst the rush of national concerns that both the Congress and the BJP failed to address in their decade long battle of political one-upmanship. One reason why this fledgling party though high on spirits is lost in self contradictions ,unable to identify its core purpose / ideology.Lost in  prioritising  its agenda, it is internally divided .The good thing, its founders seem to be determined to stick together and the party  ought to evolve over time.It is essential that it does as the vacuum created by the Left is better filled by a regular political entity than by the likes of 'Arab spring '. It was with much effort that political the center stage was reclaimed by Parliament, from Jantar Mantar !. The Left in its enigmatic  three decades of rule in Bengal purely on inclusiveness with  no growth, has since been reduced to a political bonsai  and may well stay that way for a long while.

Infosys

The relentless exodus of its top men is not because of   market's pessimism  on its growth potential, but is  the other way round. The company  even after its multi- exponential growth, persisted with its founders as the CEO with   centralised control over commercial decisions.This multi billion dollar megalith  felt no need to fill up the position of COO since May 2012 !.In the last  decade like others ,Infosys too acquired a more intellectually evolved set of hands. But these men were never  brought into the line for grooming  as the baton kept  passing  on from one founder to another.The company's loyalty to its founders perhaps ,continued to rate above the interests of its share holders.Today's IT is not even about  tomorrow but the day after and beyond . It would require a much younger and energetic pursuer of dreams than  doyens of vintage,much less of the  founder lineage, to be in sync with the rapidly emerging possibilities in modern day IT.Infosys is no doubt making profits ,perhaps on its past reputation. But its top soil needs to be urgently replaced with fresh ones, with  imaginative additives to promote vigorous growth. Else, the markets may not be as kind to it, when GDP picks up  in a couple of years under the new political dispensation.

Food inflation

The crux is that UPA-II  was crucified carrying the cross of inflation like three earlier governments were .The persistent high food inflation, impacting 45 % of the net earnings of the average Indian, is the sword of Damocles that even a majority government can not wish away. Thus the government's top most  priority  must be to tackle the food inflation in the economy. As of today neither the combination of connected ministries nor the men heading them is able to provide a clue to be effectively  tackling food prices. Of course these are early days.The best of Budgets may not help. The PMO must unfold the plan to take firm grip on supply /regulation /distribution and monitoring of food items without loss of time. With Modi's go-getter reputation, this in itself would put a check on speculative trends that invariably lasts well into the festive season of Oct-Nov  and has been the bane of food related inflation even  in normal times.The threats from El-nino should only add to the seriousness and urgency of combating an enemy that has been stalking the nation for upwards of three years now.

GoMs -No anathema

.The new PM has done away with an old administrative tool,the GoMs .These are no anathema. Vajpayee ran a 24-party coalition and the Groups of Ministers was an active system for handling  divergence of  views  but he could do with fewer such groups.In UPA regime, GoMs became less of an exception and more of a rule . UPA-I  had done well with  far  less GoMs than the UPA-II, that met  a sad end.
         One reason would be that the dual charge of the Chairperson UPA and Congress President conceived  for whatever reason, resulted in the  dilution of both responsibilities ,that of on inter-party and intra - party issues.As a result the GoMs, meant purely for administrative expedition, wasted time over policy differences that ought to have settled  in the first place by the Congress / the UPA collective. That the Congress party at crucial moments left its PM to tackle ministers of the allies all by himself ,compounded the folly.
           The Modi brand of a PMO driven  governance would need to be  insulated from  political squabbles to provide  him ample elbow room for administering the affairs of the nation. State elections down the line,may not be  too dependent on Modi factor  and  internal party differences that had been the bane of BJP, may recur.  BJP must learn its lessons. Its party President and Convenor NDA  must remain separate to enable handle their respective jobs well and  furthermore,that the Sangh  Parivar has as much role in the success of the Modi government, as Modi himself.
Pub Fin Exp ;June 5
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/letters-to-the-editor-l-t-shows-the-way/1257319

Vision overrides legacy

Pandit Nehru's 50 th anniversary has gone unnoticed. Not because Congress is not in power but our sense of history is fading, being over written by aspirations of the day.In the decades of the 1940's and ' 50s, large number of nations either gained independence or went through great politico-economic changes.India ,  large and socially diverse and given the global politics of the time, perhaps rightly chose under Nehru's stewardship, to hold on to the twin strands of growth and socialism as did other megaliths Russia and China. The smaller nations like Japan and S Korea that were more fortunate and better placed with  two broad classes in terms of earning power, could opt and manage to go in for enlightened capitalism.

        For two decades and more we did well to pursue the Nehruvian doctrine of Public sectors  with its 'Commanding heights " mantra .We ought to have started tapering down this sector  and rapidly moved over to the Private sector led economy much earlier and might well have done so but for the 1962 war with China that put us  on the defensive,politically and economically, for as long as three  decades. By the time we picked up the strands of growth in the 1990's through a liberalised economy,we had a large and languishing Public Sector that even today is a millstone.The last three years of UPA-II in analysis, might well be an updated version of the three long decades we  lost prior to the ' 90s.Nehru perhaps pursued a politico-economic line best suited to those times ,but the lesson for a progressive nation is that it matters less as to where it happens to  start but   more on where it intends to go and how quickly.

Patience in politics-A virtue

A fledgling AAP had captured the imagination of people with a  cache of 28 seats in Delhi and the electorate had exulted at its  vicarious empowerment against  entrenched polity . Be it just 49 days, but citizens of Delhi had savoured the power of their franchise. So has Punjab in the recent LS polls.Our much flaunted democratic ethos may yet be diffident to encourage fresh entrants to politics that has remained a prisoner to the close knit coterie of political entities that had been  laying sole claim to represent people.The embers of the Kejri movement has since wafted to occupy peoples cerebral podium from the noise and dust of  street platforms . The AAP  ought to realise this and must firstly believe in itself and  that its embers may not die easily and could   flame any time, with or without Kejriwal and his miscalculations / idiosyncrasies, in the hands of a mature electorate.Seeding peoples empowerment  has been no mean achievement for a small group of determined men and women in the space of just  two years.The BJP with all its Jan Sangh pedigree of 1951,had won just 2 seats  as a distinct political entity in 1984. It has had a long wait to  climb the peak in 2014.Politics takes its own time even as parties old and new,are as impatient.
Pub Fin. Exp June 3
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/letters-to-the-editor-calibrating-emission-burden/1256727

Internal myopia

The invitation to SAARC leaders at the Modi inaugural  is hopefully less of a show of BJP's solid presence in the LS and more of  the PM elect's instinct to break away from a decade of moribund foreign policy initiatives.One reason why the Pakistan  may also  be inclined  to use the event  in keeping the passage for dialogue open The same with Colombo.The anxieties of the Dravidian parties across the aisles  must matter when the nuts and bolts of vexatious bi-lateral issues come up for discussions.The purported move on settling the Teesta waters issue with B'Desh could however be seen as an attempt to drive home to Didi that the era of a PM dependant on allies is over ,but then its fits well in the current mood of  all round rapprochement .If it takes a CM of Gujarat to seek a marked change in his  views on our immediate neighbours only couple of days to being anointed the PM, it does not follow that Jayalalithaa or Mamata ought to mellow down only when  they would in turn look to occupy  10 Race Course Road !.Modi's external broad band vision  must necessarily entail correction of  a narrow internal myopia as well and that would be some effort.

Pub Economic Times May 24