Callous leaders ?

How callous can our leaders get ?

Here is an illustration. From Deccan Chronicle - epaper : Page 4


This comes a couple days after the bomb blast in Hyderabad. It was in a all party meeting to discuss the blast. Wonder if the Chief Minister & his colleagues would be laughing so loud if their friends/family had been victims?

Markets headed further down ?

From Forbes : BNP Paribas Freezes Funds

One of Europe's largest banks, France's BNP Paribas, said on Thursday it had frozen three of its investment funds, citing volatility in the U.S. asset-backed securities market. The funds' exposure to risky subprime loans means the bank can no longer calculate their net value.

BNP Paribas blamed "the complete evaporation of liquidity" in certain areas of the U.S. securities market for its inability to calculate the fair value of the three funds in question

Hmm.. So any fund that has invested in these three funds will now no longer be able to accurately calculate their net value. So should they also be frozen ? That would trigger a cascading effect, which likely will result in no mutual fund any where in world being able to calculate their net value.

Here is the normal way in which this would have been handled. These funds would probably treat their entire sub prime mortgage investments as wiped out and calculate their net asset value accordingly. Investors would be allowed to redeem at this calculated net value. New investment in the funds would be stopped to allow existing investors to gain if there is any value left in the sub prime mortgage investment.

The fact that this wasn't done leaves room for speculation that losses from the sub prime part of the funds could have been unbounded i.e the entire net value of the funds could have been wiped off. A scary thought for markets already under some strain.

Disclosure : I have no short position in any markets.

Disclosure vs License permit raj

Business Standard today has a wonderful editorial on higher education. This is the first time that I have heard of any one advocating a disclosure based approach to institutions of higher education.

The basic idea is straight forward. Instead of the mandarins of the HRD & its affiliates deciding who should offer, what courses, to whom and for what consideration, it is left to consumers of education to decide. To enable the consumer to make a rational choice, the editorial calls for disclosures from institutions that offer education. The idea has been borrowed from the Indian capital markets, which has moved from a restrictive Controller of Capital issues to a SEBI mandated disclosure rules for companies raising money in the capital markets. And the results are there to see.

Direct transfer is the way to go

From the Indian Express

To a question by Lord Meghnad Desai — why can’t we transfer money, say a dollar a day, directly to the poor? — Chidambaram said, “Cash transfer Publish Postdirectly in the hands of poor is the single most popular program to poverty alleviation until we provide them jobs. But we need to have the money for it. We will need to dismantle the existing schemes and the system. I will do my sums tonight to see if we have the money.”

Mr. Chidambaram need not do the math. He can have all the information here
My calculations shows that each BPL (below poverty line) family can get Rs 2500 per month by cutting the subsidies which have been instituted to alleviate poverty. An biometric based Unique Identification Number is the way to go to prevent fictitious claimants for these transfers. Tying this to PAN & making PAN mandatory for all financial saving transactions can weed out the pretenders.

Regional Parties Bachao Front

There has been a call from the highest level for a two party system in the country. This has set alarm bells ringing in the head quarters of the regional parties. They have now united under a single banner to safe guard their interest.

The Regional Parties Bachao Front ( RPBF) have been strongly opposed to the unrestricted entry of national parties in elections. Meanwhile several national parties have entered the election frey and are expanding their operations aggressively. These developments in the regional politics are having an adverse impact on a large section of people who are represented by regional parties across the country. In this backdrop the Regional Parties Bachao Front is putting forward a proposal to adopt stringent regulations on the entry on national parties in various states.

• The RPBF proposes that a system of licensing should be introduced for national parties. Any national party contesting more that a specified number of seats needs a license from local licensing board.
• A dedicated committee/board/department should be set up by the local bodies, with representation from regional parties, which should be empowered to grant licenses to national parties.
• Licenses should be given on the basis of a population criterion, i.e. not more than X number of national party candidates per Y population. The criteria may vary between states and cities depending upon the nature of the elections and the votes needs.
• Besides a system of licensing for national parties, a number of steps need to be taken by the Government to prevent the emergence of monopolies of national parties in elections. A single national party should not be allowed to capture a large vote share share. For this it is important to restrict the number of candidates that a single party can field in a city, state as well as region.
• In order to prevent the development of big national party monopolies, it is also important for the Government to ensure its presence in the elections. Several regional parties have become defunct , which need to be revived. Government should fund these parties. Partnerships between existing regional parties can also be considered, in areas where synergies exist.

I can already hear screams from my fellow country men that this restricts the choice that our voters will have. My fellow country men would also argue that the intelligent Indian voter can be trusted to keep the regional parties alive, just to keep the national parties in check etc.

So my question to my fellow country men is, if the above proposal sounds ridiculous from the voters view point why is not this proposal ridiculous?. This restricts the voters ( and non voters) economic choice. Why are we slow to condemn proposals that restrict choice in the economic space, but are quick to condemn restrictions of choice in the political space?

We the people need some answers

The image below says it all. We would like to hear from our candidate what she has to say about these allegation. If they are a part of a smear campaign, let her say so. We do not want to hear from spin masters Jayanthi Natarajan, Abhishek Singhvi etc . Let the candidate speak !

Dawood Ibrahim's RTI plan

Here is how Dawood Ibrahim should plan his RTI ( Return to India, quite a few NRIs seem to have been bitten by this bug ).

Step 1: Float a party. Use the usual technique of bribes & intimidation (carrot & stick ?) to win a few Lok Sabha seats.
Step 2: Bargain with parties that want your support for Governor posts. Yes that is right, forget bargaining for ministries etc. Since political parties have not much use for Governor's role, they will happily give you as many as you want.
Step 3: Get your self appointed as a Governor.

Now you are done. You can now come to India, run your empire from the hallowed portals of the Raj Bhavan without any fear that any one can stop you or your activities. You cannot be prosecuted for activities in the past too!!. So as long as you are a governor you should be safe.

And here is why you can do it
From Article 361(2) of the Indian Constitution. [ Thanks realitycheck for pointing that out ]

No criminal proceedings whatsoever shall be instituted or continued against the President, or the Governor of a State, in any court during his term of office.

Did our founding fathers envisage such a scenario ? They did not. They expected Presidents & Governors to be above board. They envisaged this more in the context of the Raj Pramukh.


Here is an excerpt from the discussions of the constituent assembly

Shri V.S. Sarwate (Madhya Bharat):

Coming to the Constitution itself I may say that every man residing in Indian State would have been happy if the Rajpramukh had not been linked with the Governor and the President. I am reminded of a jibe at Panini, the Sanskrit Grammarian and in one of the aphorisms he had said:

Shwa yuvam dyonah (original in Devanagari)

He applied the same rule to a dog, to a young man and to God Indra. Something like this has happened in this Constitution. I would refer to article 361. The section says: "No criminal proceedings whatsoever shall be instituted or continued against the President or the Governor or Rajpramukh of a State in any court during his term of office". It was quite all right as far as the President or the Governor was concerned; but the clause does not fit in with the Rajpramukh, whose office terminates only with his life. Take a worse case. Supposing a Rajpramukh commits a murder. There is absolutely no remedy against this in this Constitution.

Shri T.T. Krishnamachari (Madras: General): May I point to my honourable Friend that the Rajpramukh will hold his office only subject to the President allowing him to do so and if he commits a murder, he will be removed from the office

Ps : I think Shibu Soren should fire his legal team & his advisors.. Instead of bargaining for coal ministry he should have asked for post of governorship of some state.

55 Million new jobs and not a whimper

It looks like the OECD report, which concluded that India on an average created over 11 million net new jobs a year between 2000 and 2005, got buried under a ton of debris that passes of as news in India. All major newspapers ( barring the Hindu, which seemed to have ignored this story altogether) ran a story about this in the inside pages. Google blog search throws up very few references to this.
This has triggered my curiosity. 1) Where did OECD get its data from ? 2) Why is the Indian political class ignoring this ?

The answer to the first question is simple.
From Page 30 of the report.

Data reported in the tables and figures are from successive five-yearly rounds of the National Sample Survey – a country-wide survey of households – covering the months of July to June, for the following years: 1987/88, 1993/94, 1999/2000 and 2004/05


So it is from data released some time back. The reports uses the current weekly status as the data to measure unemployment. One could quibble about the specifics, but over all data seems good enough to make estimates


2) The second question is more puzzling. One would have expected our politicians to have been the first to jump in and claim credit for the employment growth. The Congress is understandably hamstrung in claiming this credit. It was in power for very short time during this period and more over it mistakenly believes that it got voted in because the 'aam aadmi' did not see any progress in the early 2000 period. Statistics seems to fly against this belief, but the Congress is unlikely to publicly move away from its belief.

The BJP on the other hand should be jumping in and claiming credit, so why is it not doing so ? Has it also been brainwashed into believing the 'aam aadmi saw no progress' theory peddled by the Congress & the Left ? Can any blogger, who may have an insight into how the BJP thinks, explain this puzzling behaviour by the BJP ?

Arjun SIngh : Time to take a bow

This is my comment in response to offstumped's post on Mayawati's victory

I think we are not giving enough credit where it is due. Arjun Singh should be credited with destroying BJP in UP. His Mandal 2 forced BJP to side either with their traditional upper caste votebank or to pick the emerging OBC votebank. BJP picked the OBC, paving way for Mayawati to run away with the upper caste votes. If this upper caste disenchantment with the BJP spreads to the rest of the North India, BJP may increasing start looking like the Congress, a party in the wilderness.

I will try and elaborate this point in a post in the near future