A FIVE TRILLION DOLLAR ECONOMY IS NO PANACEA FOR OUR ILLS.

                         

   I drove back from my cottage in Mashobra( Shimla) to Delhi last week. It took me eleven hours- four and a half hours to Timber Trail and six and a half from there to our over rated capital city. In 1980 ( which was 40 years ago in case you too, like me, are numerically challenged) I used to make the journey in eight hours in my beat-up, second hand Fiat which used to heat up every hundred kilometers, requiring its radiator to be topped up regularly like some of my friends in the Gymkhana bar. AND I didn't have to shell out Rs. 350/ in toll fees. In these intervening years, thousands of crores have been spent on a new expressway, on four laning the mountain stretch, on fly overs and under passes. Thousands of acres of fertile land have been acquired, mountain sides excavated, millions of tonnes of soil and debris thrown into stream beds, choking them, thousands displaced from their occupations and businesses, hundreds of lives lost in accidents on these super highways. To what end if it takes me 40% more time to cover the same distance as compared to forty years ago? Its the same, if not worse, in the cities- traffic in Mumbai and Kolkatta moves at the same space as the horse drawn carriages a hundred years ago. In the early seventies I could drive from the north campus of DU ( there was no south campus then) on my Jawa mobike to my uncles's place in Greater Kailash in 25 minutes; today it takes at least an hour. We are nonetheless informed by economists and politicians of all ilks that this is progress.

   It's the same in all other areas of human/ economic activity. Our GDP has grown a zillion times since Independence, but we have more people below the poverty line than we had then, in absolute numbers ( forget the percentage argument, that is simply something economists use to cover the ugly truth). Life expectancy may have reached 70 years but deaths from diabetes, cancer, heart attacks have increased exponentially. Lakhs of crores of rupees have been invested in medical colleges and health care institutions but  more people are dying of diseases ( remember the recent Gorakhpur and Muzzafarpur encephalitis deaths of children?) than ever before. Aldous Huxley put his finger on it many years ago when he presciently observed: 'Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human life left."

  Food production has gone up a hundred times and yet 38% of children below the age of five are stunted/ wasted from malnutrition. GDP has been growing at a remarkable 7%-8% for the last 15 years but unemployment is at a 45 year high. 13000 farmers commit suicide every year even though they are given free power and water, subsidies worth Rs. 75000 crores every year, and periodic loan waivers. Inflation is at an all time low and yet consumption, industrial production and household savings are showing a persistent decline. The country has 900 large dams/ reservoirs but 60%of agriculture is still dependent on the monsoons. We have some of the most draconian laws in the world and yet rapes, lynchings, mob violence, assault on children continue to rise: according to WHO India has the highest number of child abuse cases in the world. We have pledged to achieve a green cover of 30% of geographical area by 2030, to bring an additional one million hectares under trees, but we continue deforestation on a colossal scale- 1.6 million hectares denuded in the last ten years, 16 million trees felled. Our culture worships women but we kill millions of infant girls every year- the national sex ratio is 896 girls for every 1000 boys: in the " progressive" state of Haryana the figure is 833. We proudly boast of India's trump card- the "demographic dividend"- but our education system is in shambles: students in class V cannot read class II texts and 67% of engineers are unemployable, according to a recent industry report. This is not a dividend, it is a primed grenade waiting to explode.

   These are only some of the paradoxes and failures of our pure GDP focused growth. There is something fundamentally wrong with the political/ economic path we have been following all these years. In following the same shibboleths of western economies we have dug ourselves into a hole and devastated our natural environment, all to no effect. Our national character, with the kind of role models we have in politics, industry, media and various professions, is unrecognizable from what it was when we proudly acquired independence in a different era. We have become a deeply divided, inequitable, heartless and lawless society and it shows in our ranking in the World Happiness Index- at 140 out of 155 countries. And the brutal, capital centric and materialistic policies of the present government are only making things worse. We are very much in danger of progressing from Lance Pritchett's description of us as a " flailing state" to a "failed state" in terms of values, principles and character.

   We need to move away from our unhealthy GDP obsession: it has to be balanced with wider considerations: of humaneness, equity, compassion, concern for the environment, responsiveness. Instead of being just a five trillion dollar economy, how about striving to become a Zero Infant Mortality Economy, or an Equal Sex-Ratio Society, or a Universal Health Care Economy, or a Zero Net Carbon Emission Economy or a Nobody Goes to Bed Hungry Economy? How about aspiring to go up on the Happiness or Environment Performance Index with the same zeal we show for the Ease of Doing Business Index?

   If the distortions and perversions that have us in a stranglehold are not corrected-soon- it will not matter if we become a 5 trillion dollar economy or not for, as Milton Friedman famously remarked:  "So what if it meets all criteria of economic success except one: you cannot live there!"

    

TIPPLERS DESERVE A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

   The Holy Cow is now an accepted reality in India- it is the de facto national animal as we speak, and will no doubt also become so de jure shortly, perhaps even acquire constitutional status once the cattle auctions for the Rajya Sabha are over. State governments have now started providing specific budgetary provisions for its welfare- UP has provided Rs. 600 crore for construction and maintenance of cattle shelters ( more than for school buildings) and  Himachal too has allocated a separate budget for it.. Both states have imposed a cess on liquor to garner funds for this noble purpose, though most reports would appear to indicate that most of this lucre is going to the gau rakshaks rather than the gaus- the deaths of hundreds of cows in cattle shelters in UP over the last week would appear to bear this out. But this milking of the milch cow is par for the course in today's politics and is not the subject of this piece; I am on a far more important point.

   In my blog last week [ https://avayshukla.blogspot.com/2019/07/no-more-animal-spirits-please.html ] I had referred to the cess imposed on all liquor sold in the state for the welfare of cows as the Animal Farm school of economics. A good friend of mine ( whose name I cannot reveal since he is still yoked to the sarkari bullock- cart) has made a very pertinent observation on this: why is it that the burden of bovine welfare is thrust only upon the alcoholics? Should non-drinkers not share this onerous burden too?- after all, the cow is their "mata" too. My friend goes even further- he suggests that this alcohol cess discriminates against drinkers, violates Article 14 of the Constitution, and, if challenged, is liable to be struck down by any judge, sober or drunk. He would like some upright member of the Bar ( the High Court bar, not the Gymkhana Club bar) to mount a constitutional challenge to this cess before other states also get into the spirit of this taxation.

  Come to think of it, my friend is right. Any tax should be equitable and should not be discriminatory. The onus of looking after the national animal should be the responsibility of all citizens and not only of Jake the Peg. In fact, a greater responsibility devolves upon milk drinkers and consumers of Baba Ramdev's ghee, for are they not the ultimate beneficiaries of this transmutation of alcohol into milk? I'm beginning to suspect that the gau rakshaks are not as stupid as they look, that their grasp of economics is perhaps just as good as their grasp of lathis, for this cess is a win-win for them: they have to pay nothing for the up-keep of the cows, they receive govt. funds for their gaushalas, and they get to drink the milk free! And they didn't even have to go to Harvard to figure this out- all it needed was some hard work bashing up a few cattle traders. No wonder the Prime Minister prefers hard work over Harvard - as they say in Yogi's UP these days: " Jiski lathi uski BA!" As for me, I'd gladly give up my daily peg for such a deal.

   No, sir, the alcoholics deserve a level playing field. Non-drinkers should either pay a cess on the milk they consume, or it should be made mandatory for every teetotaller household to buy at least two units of booze every month; they need not imbibe it, they can always sell it to a buddy ( like me or my anonymous friend) or to parched army guys whose quota has been recently slashed ( an unwise move, according to me, for it's best to keep retired army chaps drunk all the time, otherwise they may sober up and decide that if they can hold on to Siachen they can do the same to Lutyen's Delhi, that if the BJP can come to power on the army's Balakot shoulders then the army can do so on its own !). Of course, the mandatory purchase of alcohol by every household may have an unforeseen result: people may give up the lactose and switch to the golden Hippocrene. But that would not be a bad thing at all: it would mean more shekels for the consolidated fund and we would go up a few notches in the Happiness Index too.

  Patriotism would henceforth be defined, not by how many cattle smugglers you lynch but by how many pegs you tipple. Because it would all be- hic!- for the benefit of the cow. There's a lesson here for Mr. Prohibition Babu, the Chief Minister of Bihar.

NO MORE ANIMAL SPIRITS, PLEASE!

   The joke goes something like this: A physicist, a NASA scientist and a World Bank economist are sitting in a bar discussing their respective contributions to the discovery of the Universe. The NASA guy boasts that they were the ones who  made space travel and discovery of planets possible. The physicist claims that NASA's work would not have been possible if physics had not revealed the science behind the creation of a universe out of the cosmic chaos. The economist remains silent.

" What about you guys," asks the NASA man, " what is the contribution of economics to the universe?"

The World Bank economist smiles: " Who do you think created the chaos?" he asks.

   We in India can vouch for the fact that no truer word was ever said, the confused economic goulash dished out  since 1947 is ample proof of that, and the last five years leave no doubts whatsoever. Our economists, both the home grown variety and the imported IMF/ World Bank types, have tried out every known theory and school of economics on us: classical, neo-classical, Marxian, Market economics, Chartalism, Behavioural economics, New Keynesian, Post Keynesian, even Modinomics ( which is more a political doctrine than an economic one, for it ensures that the BJP keeps winning elections even as the country goes to the dogs). We have been lectured to ad- nauseam by the desi economists of National Advisory Council fame and by the international eminences taking a toilet break in India on their way from Geneva or Davos to Harvard or Berkeley. But nothing seems to have worked: we still have more than 200 million people below the poverty line, 40% of our children are stunted from lack of nutrition, 13000 farmers commit suicide every year, we are amongst the most inequitable countries in the world, endemic unemployment continues to haunt our youth, and now we can no longer even rely on our economic statistics or budget figures! It is, therefore, no surprise that our newly minted Chief Economic Advisor has now offered us the latest nostrum: Animal Spirits. What India needs, he has declared, is an infusion of Animal Spirits into our economy and society!

   This advice from the Animal Farm school of economics may not surprise us, but it is certainly a cause for alarm. For if there is one thing India has a  surplus of these days it is animal spirits. Its earlier version had resulted in Mr. Somnath Bharti's dog being interrogated in a Delhi police station, the Jallikattu bull being elevated to the status of a Holy Cow in Tamil Nadu, and an Interpol Look-Out notice being issued for Mr. Azham Khan's missing buffaloes in UP. In more recent times this unholy ardor has resulted in the mob lynching of dozens of people, the rapes of more than 30000 women every year, the culling of alleged criminals by gung-ho cops in choreographed encounters, the transformation of Parliament into a latter day Colosseum, the conversion of state Assemblies into fish markets where regular auctions are held for newly arrived minnows, and similar activities more suited to a jungle than a civilised society. Any more infusion of animal spirits into our economy will, to carry the analogy further,  result in even more squirreling away of the national wealth in Antigua and the Cayman Islands, and wildebeest type of migrations of our uber rich to greener pastures abroad. No, sir, we don't need more of animal spirits; what we could do with instead is a touch of the human spirit, something which both our economists and politicians have forgotten about.

  Perhaps the Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, Mr. Jai Ram Thakur, has got it right: he has ignored the animal bit and concentrated on the pure spirit part. Spirits- the 80 degree proof type- is the new vehicle for Himachal's development: he has imposed two cesses on all liquor sold in the state- one to fund " gaushalas" or cattle shelters, and the other to fund a new Film Policy. In addition, every vend and bar now has to sell a minimum quantity of liquor or face stiff penalties! This is Himachal's spirited version of Minimum Income Guarantee or Minimum Support Price- the MBC or Minimum Booze Consumption. Liquor is the new milch cow of the state- how's this for combining economics and gau raksha? It may be time to appoint Baba Ramdev as our Chief Economic Advisor.

SHIMLA-ITES MUST OWN RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MESS THEY ARE IN.

          SHIMLA-ITES MUST OWN RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MESS THEY ARE IN.

   Last year it was a water crisis, this year it is the traffic chaos and accidents. Post the bus accident in Khalini area of Shimla on the 1st of this month which claimed the lives of two young girls and the bus driver, it would be amusing- were it not so tragic- to observe the knee jerk reactions of the citizens of Shimla: Ministers rushing to the hospital, residents vandalising parked cars, the High Court issuing notices on children safety, inquiries being ordered and so on. Deja vu again, for we have seen it all a dozen times before and more than 1300 people continue to die in Himachal every year in road accidents. Everyone blames the state government, and rightly so, for ALL governments have been criminally negligent and culpable in making Shimla the mess it is today.

   But the bitter truth is that the residents and citizens of the city are equally to blame and they cannot adopt a holier than thou posture, or pose as hapless victims of government apathy. Over the years they have been vocal and active participants in the degeneration and uglification of this once lovely city and have stoutly opposed any effort to preserve its natural assets or improve its functioning and infrastructure. They consequently live in a mess of their own making and have lost the right to complain.

  Take, for example, the issue of rampant, illegal constructions, of which a recent survey recorded more than 20000. Instead of pressing the government to demolish them the citizens have repeatedly forced the authorities to regularise them: so far there have been five such regularisation ( retention) schemes; the sixth one, passed by the previous Congress government, has been struck down by the High Court but the present dispensation has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court ( it is telling that the present government is a BJP one- when it comes to rank populism politicians are like peas in a pod!). Such rampant vote pandering only encourages more violations.The National Green Tribunal's orders banning further constructions in the city are openly flouted, the limit of two and a half storeys does not even merit a fig leaf, and people are building what they want, where they want, for the next regularisation policy is only an election away. Hundreds of illegal home stays ( the latest tax evading racket) add to the chaos, congestion and parking woes.

  Shimla is being asphyxiated by the sheer volume of traffic on its roads which can neither be expanded nor widened because of the topography. A population of about two lakhs boasts of 1.25 lakh registered vehicles, a density higher even than that of Delhi. Add to this another 5000 tourist vehicles and 600 buses entering the city every day. Everyone happily goes about buying cars, with no thought given to where they will be parked. Rules require  every building to have parking areas/ floors but these are only shown in the building plans: once approved they are converted to regular floors. Houses are constructed on 60-70 degree gradients, without proper access, and the cars simply left on the roads. The government is of course culpable for even approving such building plans, but surely the citizens too have to bear responsibility here: they cannot break the laws deliberately and then blame the government alone for the inconvenience and accidents. All reports indicate that the Khalini accident happened because the road was reduced to half its width because of illegally parked vehicles. Half- hearted attempts to declare some arterial roads as one way are resisted, everyone wants a permit for their vehicles to ply on restricted roads, attempts to cap the number of taxis or to install meters on them are met with protests, nobody wants to walk, as in the old days.

                                             

                                                  ( SPOT  THE TREE IN  SHIMLA.)

   The slopes and forests are littered with plastic and waste; Shimla's nallahs (watercourses), which once flowed the year round and charged innumerable springs and cascades, are now smothered in garbage. A recent clean-up initiative by the district administration and some  NGOs resulted in about twenty tons of waste being excavated from these watercourses. Not all this garbage can be ascribed to tourists: the residents are equally responsible. All attempts at door-to-door collection or segregation have failed. It is, after all, much easier and less expensive to just chuck the bloody thing down the hillside. The monkey menace in the town is directly attributable to this open dumping of rubbish, but the good burghers will not admit to this; instead they demand that the monkeys be either shot as vermin or exported for medical purposes! Water harvesting has been made mandatory but it is neither adopted by the building owners nor implemented by the government.

   It's the same with Shimla's rapidly disappearing green cover. Blessed with perhaps the world's largest urban forest, the city is losing it all to construction and road building. Its only remaining forests lie in the 17 green belts ( comprising 400 hectares) which were notified in the early 2000's, and where no construction of any kind is permissible- without these forested areas the town would look like the seventh rock from the sun. And yet many citizens continue to resist these restrictions in the green belt, eyeing their commercial potential. They are supported by a vision-less and spineless government which has tried everything to open up the area for construction activity. Fortunately, the High Court and the National Green Tribunal have ruled in favour of keeping these areas closed.

   Finally, it appears that civil society does not exist in Shimla. One cannot, of course, expect any  expression of concern at this deterioration from the bureaucracy, cocooned in their privileges and conduct rules, but one would have expected some push back from its prominent citizens, the many retired officers and veterans, NGOs like INTACH. But sadly, the former are more interested in their bridge at ADC and golf at Annandale and Naldehra, and the latter at being on the right side of the government lest the invitations to govt. functions dry up. Which is a tragedy in itself. Democracies and civil society are sustained by its citizens and not by just the government of the day. If the citizens do not demonstrate civic values and ethics, if they do not observe laws and rules, if they do not hold a government to account, then they have only themselves to blame when things begin to go wrong. As you sow so shall you reap. A Biblical adage the citizens of Shimla would do well to remember before it is too late.