With the rupee falling and economic growth at a nine-year low, the
last thing India needs is a credit rating downgrade to junk status.An Indoor Positioning System
is a term used for a network of devices used to wirelessly locate
objects or people inside a building.Here's a complete list of oil painting supplies
for the beginning oil painter. But that's precisely what Standard &
Poor's warns of in a new report this week that suggests that India may
become the first "fallen angel" among the BRIC economies.
New
Delhi's response has been to plug its ears and proclaim that everything
is A-OK. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee declared himself "fully
seized of the current situation" and "confident that there will be a
turnaround in our growth prospects in the coming months." How exactly
this will happen is anybody's guess.
By now, pundits have
churned out a small rainforest of newspaper op-eds and research papers
on what needs to be done to revive India's economy. Suggestions range
from implementing a long-awaited goods and services tax to slashing fuel
subsidies.
But the deeper problem isn't policy but politics.
India will not end its malaise until its national politicians learn to
do something they've never really tried: sell the reform story in a way
that's intelligible to the masses.
The historical record is not promising. India's first prime minister,Kitchen Floor tiles
at Great Prices from Topps Tiles. Jawaharlal Nehru, was a Fabian
socialist who was enamored with state planning. His daughter Indira
Gandhi raised leftist rabble-rousing to an art form, campaigning as a
messiah of the poor in the 1970s even as India's per capita income and
human development slipped behind its East Asian peers.
Between
them, Nehru and Gandhi, both of the Congress Party, ruled India for all
but four of its first 37 years of independence. They created a political
discourse centered on government intervention and largess that persists
to this day.
Thanks to this legacy, no Congress-led government,
including the one that launched reforms in 1991 against the backdrop of
a balance-of-payments crisis, has treated liberalization as something
to celebrate. Rather, it was something to be done by stealth to keep
international creditors happy or a distasteful means to acquire the
resources to fund welfare programs.
In 2004, a reasonably
reformist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government broke
the mold with its "India Shining" campaign—and was promptly turfed out
of office.We have custom plastic Injection Moulding Manufacturer
in our Austin. Indian politicians across party lines have since come to
believe that endorsing economic reforms is political suicide. The
Congress-led coalition that came to power in 2004 boosted welfare
spending and slowed reforms. Its 2009 re-election reinforced the message
that handouts are the most reliable route to success.
It's time
to reconsider this conventional wisdom. In reality, nobody in India has
tried to sell reforms on a national scale. Thanks to his
freedom-fighter's halo, Nehru scarcely faced credible opposition in his
lifetime. Indira Gandhi's right-wing opponents in the 1960s and '70s
were more interested in defending hereditary privileges for princes and
Hindu religious sensibilities than in making the case for free-market
reform.
As for the infamous India Shining campaign, the BJP
arguably lost the plot when it claimed that India had already arrived.
That was a laughable assertion in a country still marked by widespread
poverty. Things could have turned out differently if the party had
campaigned on the promise of a better future.
So how should reforms be packaged in a country where about a third of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day?
Reformers
can't afford to cede the language of poverty eradication to their
opponents. Reforms in India make sense not because they place more
Indian billionaires on Forbes magazine's rich list, but because only
faster growth can pull millions into the middle class. According to
World Bank estimates, high growth rates reduced the percentage of
India's population living in poverty to 33% in 2010 from 42% in 2005.
Without reforms this progress will sputter.
There's also no
evidence that Indian voters care particularly about concerns like
inequality that leftists regularly tout. This is why Communist parties
have been confined historically to two states—Kerala and West Bengal.
Passers-by from the slums of Mumbai gather outside Reliance Industries'
chief Mukesh Ambani's $1 billion home to gawk admiringly, not to throw
rocks. For most people, what matters is a chance to live productively,
and that their children's lives are better than theirs.
What
prevents politicians from explaining pro-market arguments is a failure
of imagination and courage. Why not oppose the Congress Party's flagship
rural jobs scheme by pointing out that it's unproductive and riddled
with graft? A smart politician can make a moral case that New Delhi
shouldn't pour billions into loss-making Air India that could be put to
better use building schools and roads. Yet it's commonplace for even the
smartest in parliament to spout the language of sops and benefits.
Some
politicians at the state level are already demonstrating that growth
and reforms work. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Gujarat's
Narendra Modi have been re-elected because they delivered high
growth,Your website will have an accredited third party payment gateway provider relationship in place. along with clean governance.
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