An Indecisive Indian

Readers, I am not going to traverse the beaten path of, by now, the incontinent narrative on Atmanirbhar Bharat . Enough has been said and proclaimed. It may or may not be a discourse  full of sound and fury , signifying nothing , the thought of Shakespeare, uttered by  Macbeth.  We will know in good time. In t his post, however, I will try to bring in a simple, but hopefully, a pithy and meaningful message. Let me get the déjà vu, the been there done that away. I will not talk about the PM’s economic package worth Rs 20 lakh crore or 10 per cent of GDP or in reality merely 3 lakh crores and so on. Time will tell how significant the package was and whether it indeed helped every section of the society including workers, farmers, middle class and industrial units through various sops and measures.   In an interview to ET, the new  CII  president  Uday Kotak  emphatically says getting growth back is non-negotiable and a demand side push is nee...

  Ever since Indian Railways (IR) announced that bids were being called for privatization, i.e., operation of certain trains by private operators, t here is a strong narrative that this would hit the common man because of increase in fares. Let me start by allaying these fears. This discourse has arisen either out of lack of information or merely as a red herring. And this not because of a clear intention but because the exercise of privatization would succeed only in segments where you have travelers willing to pay more in return for value and therefore the common lower class travellers need not have any fear; privatization of trains with a large number of lower class coaches is not going to succeed. Once a cluster/route is privatized, as it seems, IR would get adequate revenue, perhaps more than what it gets now. So the question is not whether IR would lose passengers and revenue but whether good number of investors would be attracted to the business. One aspect is clear, no conc...