<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
CCI probe proves MNCs, others not holy cow<\/p>\n
The nation has to act to act holistically, discuss the problems and stop the slowdown from portals of Parliament to all public fora<\/p>\n
It is almost turmoil. India’s administrative system is groping in the dark. Tax system, including toll, fee, charges and duties are becoming oppressive. Banks despite mergers are in crisis. The bid to sale institutions, industries, airlines and heavy losses in many are taking the country to abyss.<\/p>\n
It is a matter of intense discussion. The governance is drifting away from the governed. The state is becoming too powerful. It takes decisions not in favour of the voters but who can manage votes. Over the years the system is becoming myopic. It does not want to listen to the governed and comes out with decisions that hurt them more. Job losses are considered natural and the diagnosis is missing.<\/p>\n
Views are strange. A country creates jobs with people-friendly decisions but the job losses are attributed to “lack of skills” of the workers. Atrocious income tax and GST are justified as the people’s holy duty but if they lose jobs, the state turns a blind eye. Social security steps like MNREGA or PM Kisan are not proving to be panacea.<\/p>\n
The remedy is not easy to find. The necessary dialogue with the people is missing. A powerful system does not enter into deliberation on critical issues. Occasionally a voice is heard in parliament. State assemblies hardly meet to hear their MLAs. The chief ministers even of failing Telangana, Andhra or Tamilnadu are terrors. No member either of his party or opposition can dare talk. Unfortunately, the syndrome does not change with the change of regime. <\/p>\n
Every successive regime carries on the same way as the previous one. Changes are limited. It goes to new set of supporters or hangers on. Democracy in provinces is limited to the rights of the chief minister. The government machinery is slave to the CM. As in states like Madhya Pradesh, it is alleged that the former and present heads run the show.<\/p>\n
In such situation, they invent methods to strengthen their families, hold Saifai, the home of former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, family shows at the cost of the state while people continue to languish. <\/p>\n
Such whims and fancies led to bifurcation of a thriving Andhra Pradesh. Bifurcated Telangana now is in a mess as the despotic chief minister’s family hold is killing its economy. As it tried to privatise the state road transport corporation (SRTC), its employees went on a 52-day strike. In many other states, the SRTCs and other similar undertakings are tried to be privatized so that influential families could benefit.<\/p>\n
The disease is not restricted to the states. Similar despotic attitude by some ministers led to the investment in faulty power programmes like Enron or collapse of thriving Indian Airlines and Air India. The ostensible reason was to give boost to the rising private airline or power industry. That benefitted many good families. <\/p>\n
And in a short span Jet and Kingfisher type airlines with huge debt from public sector banks (PSB) collapsed. Now Spicejet is in crisis. Individual families in these cases with despotic patronage from the powers that be minted money, looted people’s savings. The nation has lost for such whimsical privatization at the cost of the profit-making public sector.<\/p>\n
Privatisation per se is not wrong. But for its sake killing the public sector built with taxpayers’ money is the sin the nation is being forced to commit. The today’s slowdown, which finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman says is not recession, is planned. Even she is not taking steps to save the public sector under the strange pretext the government cannot do. <\/p>\n
The political attitude of “can’t do” has to change. Despite many follies of the leaders of 1950s to 1980s, the public sector contributed to the nation’s economy. Institutions were built. Systematic divestment and conspiracies against closure of many others including the HMT that made the finest watches and machine tools has led the country to a Manmohanomics collapse.<\/p>\n
With the rise of Manmohanomics another culture of interfering in the PSBs has led to the biggest swindling of banks, LIC, GIC and closure of many including the UTI and IL&FS and consequent end of many smaller financial institutions.<\/p>\n
No white paper on the loot of PSBs or financial institutions has come as yet. The nation’s knowledge is limited to the JPC report of the stock scams. The recent reasons of mergers details are partly known. A white paper is needed for the nation’s memory and find out plugging and corrective methods of such recurrence. <\/p>\n
The Reserve Bank’s NPA reports are not complete without going into the methods applied by various individuals or officials as it is apparent from PMC bank near-closure. The Employees Provident Fund lost Rs 1300 crore of workers’ funds and DHFL swindled Rs 46,000 crore poor people’s savings called retail investors. <\/p>\n
In such situation why RBI should cut rates instead of increasing it is a wonder. It also needs to come out specifically on note-ban decision.<\/p>\n
This kind of unstructured decision has led to imposition of illicit road tolls for building roads to its normal standards. A culture of building bad non-toll roads has also crept in to justify tolls\/ now being called fee. <\/p>\n
Toll is part of exploitative multiple road tax – registration money, road tax, parking tax and now junking of vehicles to suit those in power or help the automobile industry. There is no reason to junk ten-year-old vehicles.<\/p>\n
Each of these methods is killing the Indian economy. The decisions are taken ad hoc without a holistic approach.<\/p>\n
The job losses are the result of impractical experimentation with privatization and creating systematic leakage of public finances to boost it. <\/p>\n
The number of jobless is rising to 9.2 percent for all these reasons. Even rural jobs are being lost and consumer purchasing power is officially dwindling. <\/p>\n
That private corporate are not holy internationally has once again been established with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) probe into Tata Steel, Sweden’s SKF and Germany’s Schaeffler collusion of pricing bearings or Volkswagen pollution suppressing software.<\/p>\n
The country has to correct the ills to be internationally competitive and have a people-oriented strong economy to sustain the targeted growth projections of the Narendra Modi government. It must act now.<\/p>\n
Shivaji Sarkar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Govt \u2018can do\u2019, Don\u2019t kill PSUs to boost private<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[397],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columnist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}