Reforms,Governments and Dildo's.

Reforms,Governments and Dildo's.

When the 1991 economic reforms were announced, India was the ugly duckling of the world’s economies, with forex reserves less than $1 billion and economic growth close to stagnant.India is now among the top contributors to world Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with a share of 5%, after USA (22%), China (13%) and Japan (7%).
India’s at the top of the heap as far as growth in per capita income is concerned too. For the period 1997-02, India’s national income grew at 19%, second only to China, which grew at 39%. But its growth is double that of the US. Moreover, in terms of acceleration of growth rates, India is second to none. India is the only country in the world that has shown rising growth rates over the 1992-2002 decade. During the current decade 1992-2002, India’s per capita income grew by 46% from the 36.5% growth rate observed during the decade 1982-1992.All other biggies have shown negative growth rates.
India’s services sector, a 51% contribu! tor to India’s GDP, has the fastest growth across 130 countries while the same sector has seen dwindling rates in all other big economies.
In December 2003, India’s foreign exchange reserves crossed the $100 billion mark. With strong economic fundamentals behind it, high inflow of foreign capital both direct and portfolio investments, India is poised for a take off.Maybe our time has come.
The combined effect of the three important components -- agriculture with 4.1 per cent, manufacturing 6.8 per cent and service, led to an overall 7.0 per cent growth in GDP during April-September 2003-04,and a sparkling 8.4 percent growth rate in the second quarter of 2003.
The rupee has gained by over 5% (241 paise) during calendar ’03 – from Rs 48 a dollar on January 1 to Rs 45.59 on Dec 31st .This is the first time it has gained in a year since 1993, when partial convertibility was introduced.
Manufacturing was the big comeback story of 2003, with every other engineerin! g company proving its mettle in the global markets, including China. Costs were reduced, productivity was hiked, quality was improved, operating margins increased and, most important of all, India Inc’s engineers and workers gained the confidence that they could produce goods on par with the best.Investment bankers and CEOs expect cross-border deals to double as more Indian companies venture abroad to acquire customers and markets, as well as gain greater control of the supply chain.
In outsourcing, estimates are that tens of thousands of more jobs will move from the US and other western countries to India, from plain vanilla call centres to much higher forms of work such as equity research, medical diagnosis and chip design. It’s already reached a stage where angel investors in Silicon Valley won’t touch a proposal unless there is an India back-end to it.
It would be foolish, and irresponsible, to try and predict where the market’s going. But if the buzz i! s to be given some credence and the number of IPOs in the pipeline are to be taken cognisance of, the bulls far, far outnumber the pessimists. The sensex has gone from 3377 to almost 6000 in 2003, while the broadbased BSE 500 index has doubled between Jan 1 and Dec 31. A 73 percent rise,thats twice or more than every possible market in the world except Thailand.The Nikkei,Strait times,Hang Seng the erstwhile stock market superpowers have grown by 22-34 percent only.The NASDAQ and other exchanges need not be mentioned.Thailand has grown by 116 percent but we need to take in account a Prime Minister who loves to splurge money to the poor,lower interest rates and an economy that still isn't among the worlds elite.

All that took some time to be compiled,but that isn't what i wanna talk about.Is our government in any way responsible for the growth that has taken place.Of course in the coming polls the huge election battlecry is going to be how the government supposedly turned around the economy.
Some observers say fragile coalition governments are incapable of purposive reform. Yet the Gowda Gujral and now the NDA governments have given us liberalisation, at a faster pace than the Rao government. Once Information minister Jaipal Reddy declared that minority governments are better reformers than majority ones because they are anxious to perform in the limited time-span a vailable to them.Most businessmen now say economic policy has been delinked from politics, so political instability affects them little. India has typically been driven by crisis rather than ideology.Someone might sneer at this. 'You really think you can fire more accurately with an unsteady hand ! than a steady one?' they ask. No, I am saying something different: that the man with a steady hand often believes he need not fire at all.
Digging in the past,figures have always suggested that India was always on the brink of a breakthrough.Reform is more than a change in policy, it is a change in mind-set. A successful country needs a large and vigorous number of economists, bureaucrats, journalists, technicians and businessmen who believe in change and can help transform the mind-set of a country. India had all these for decades, even if they represented a minority view. Come 1991, they became the new intellectual elite. Their coming to the fore represented an internal change with strong indigenous roots, not one foisted from without.That represents the triumph of the new Indian thinkers.
India has been lucky to get two finance ministers like Man Mohan Singh and Chidambaram who understood the need for reforms and fiscal prudence.Yashwant Sinha doesn't fall in that gro! up.The efficiency of the economy has improved. This is why, with very little increase in our investment rate, we have increased our GDP growth rate from 5.5 per cent in the 1980s to 7 per cent in the 1990s.Now the investment rates too are booming.The government can't possibly take all the credit for all the homework that was done by the earlier finance ministries.Its immmaterial that the Vajpayee government is leaving no stone unturned to to project the country and especially its economy as modern and progressive.The election commisson soon saw the gimmicks and made the govt stop those " commercials of development".
Business reforms have been taking place in India irrespective of political stability or rather the lack of it.The interference by the red tape,bureaucrats,babugiri is all that connects the reforms and the governments.The connections obviously differ from party to party.That to me just means that the government cannot claim to have a huge slice in the reform revo! lution.The way when you deal with a dildo,u can't say its my dildo just because you own it.(fight club!!!).It just remains a dildo.
Where do governments figure in the development than?Accountability,and at all levels.That is what a good government do for a economically prosperous India.

We need accountability not only once in five years at election time but in all the months in between. This has to be achieved by the rule of law, not be even more elections. Those who break the law must suffer swift penalties. If instead they become king-makers and chief ministers, then accountability, the true purpose of democracy, tends to disappear. Election' cease to represent the will of the people and instead become a sort of beauty con test for the mafia. Now, competition between bandits is unquestionably better than rule by a single bandit, so Indian democracy is not a total sham. Yet it falls well short of what a democracy is supposed to deliver.We urgently need judicial and administrative reform to produce a system that speedily puts crooks in jail. Unfortunately, bandit-legislators are unlikely to give any priority to reforms that will put them in jail.What happens when a democracy gets sabotaged in this manner? Typically, there is internal revolt s! omewhere. In India, we are seeing a revolt of some institutions like the judiciary, which are no longer prepared to acknowledge the moral authority of elected politicians. This explains why the Supreme Court has held that the Central Bureau of Investigation should report to an independent Chief Vigilance Commissioner rather than the Prime Minister or Home Minister.

Maintaining public order is clearly a political matter, and so police dealing with public order must be under the home minister. But why should criminal investigation be under the Home Ministry, or under any political control at all? It should be an independent operation, which politicians are helpless to affect. The police should be divided into two streams, one to deal with public order and another to deal with crimes.

How will this change politics? A great deal. The attempts of a Laloo Yadav or Jayalalitha to subvert prosecution will no longer threaten the life of governments. The political process will gradually be purged of criminal elements. A better class of individuals will find it worthwhile to enter politics. Governance and accountability will at last improve.

Stability without accountability represents a kernel of autocracy, covered by the husk of elections.

Pleasure,Naviin.

"When a woman becomes a scholar there is usually something wrong with her sexual organs."
Friedrich Nietzsche