1) No public transport.vs. Car majors opening plants and more there.
The poor have to walk in the South even villages don’t force this on their citizens. The rest of us drive around.

2) Major freeway construction vs poor quality of internal roads.

3) Malls malls everywhere vs. Local shops losing middle class customers plus worsening roads and transport making them unaccessible. While creating higher expectations. Dangerous.

This is the bullshit which most of the self proclaimed libertarians use. BJP was never a pro-reform party till it was forced to take the stand after they got power. Even their 1998 manifesto was full of criticism about reforms. Mind it, the very first budget by Yashwant Sinha was not so “pro-reform”. It was a budget made to satisfy RSS bigwigs. Eventually they settled down to realize that reforms are the way to go and then tried to hijack the results of liberalization with their India shining campaign. I am seeing this many of the “libertarian Indians”. They seem to think that BJP was the reason why India is on the reform process and the current state of Indian economy. In fact, the revese is the case. BJP and communists are the reasons why Rajiv’s half hearted reform efforts failed. BJP joined hands with communists in opposing Manmohan Singh’s reform process. Their election manifesto before they got power in 1998 was anti-reform. The economic wing of the socially right BJP, RSS etc is Swadeshi Jagran Manch. This is a bullshit propaganda that BJP was pro-reforms party. Also I don’t understand how many of the supposedly libertarians support a morally authoritarian socially right wing party like BJP. I see this as a case of hypocrisy.

I’ve also already said that noboday actually designed it as an experiment. It happened that way because of the dynamics of the decisions. Are you saying that just mentioning classes of people puts me in the socialist camp?

I am not opposing privatization. In fact I would dance with joy if the government sold off or shut down every one of its PSUs, including the railways. Failing that, I will be happy with whatever reforms I can get. I just wanted to disabuse people of the notion that there was some grand design behind the sequence of reforms.

And as for Gandhiji, I offer you a bet. If the government whispers something about dereserving SSIs, the op-ed pages and the letters to the editor pages will be filled with critical articles and most of them will invoke Gandhiji.

Beyond the quibble on if the reforms are a cruel experiment that the GOI is playing on poor people while allowing the rich and middle class to prosper (even if you can decide it is an experiment or not, the thesis sounds pretty socialist, or class-based, to me). And apparently cell-phone use by poor, mentioned prior, doesn’t count.

Just because it is easy it does not mean it is wrong. Privatization (and trade, licensing, and financial sector reforms) started 15 years ago and is still done yet. The farm, SSI, and reforms that impact manufacturing are not happening not because of opposition from the rich and middle-class (I doubt they care who makes their chappales and weaves those baskets) nor by the poor (who usually don’t have any say in anything anyway). Even if the communists weren’t there (they are now mostly stalling the reforms that started a decade ago), there would no reform to improve manufacturing.

These reforms are not happening because of the socialist mindset of Indian political parties (egged on by NGOs). They wrongly presume that SSI and its workers need shelter. So they rather spend 100 crores on job program hand outs (how is that for a cruel experiment on middle-class tax paying school teacher) instead of enabling unskilled and semi-skilled job creation through manufacturing reforms. There is nothing new about it. It is part of easy solutions package that Indian political parties put forth – just like job and education reservation everywhere to every little group as the cure to solve the age old issues of discrimination and social immobility.

The reforms will happen – probably too slow to help another generation of poor people. If I had my way, I would turn back the clock on all economic laws and constitutional amendments enacted since dear Indira started the great GOI grand thief of Indian private property since 1968. How’s that for a wholesome reform package?

Please don’t bring Gandhi into this – he is long forgotten soul for most Indians and irrelevant for this topic.

If business journos are reading this blog, maybe someone will go and ask the Karat couple and their ilk to start creating jobs before they can comment on how the jobs created should be sustained.No one has the right to demand employement as far i know !

They crib about FDI in retail but go to a big bazaar and its primarily manned by young men and women from non upper / middle class backgrounds. A casual conversation while waiting in long qs reveals that most of these kids are from families of laid off mill workers, have just about completed their 12th in local language schools , know some english or are currently going to english speaking classes to improve their english and pitching in to help run their homes. some are children of mom and pop store ownders whose shops have closed and while they may have been compelled to get a job, the inherent business savvy has propelled them rather quickly in a retail setup besides of course bringing better money than they could ever have earnt.
if in the bargain , they are able to go up the managerial chain then we have created and sustained jobs.

Regrettably, some of our politicians will only look at the glitzy facade of the malls without peeking at the economy they propel.

Ila

Are you talking about India: The Growth Imperative? I have only glanced at the report, but the report follows classic McKinsey style of benchmarking, interviewing and extrapolating rather than fundamental macroeconomic modelling. The report has several good suggestions, but I would take their numbers of a healthy dose of skepticism. The McKinsey report is clearly biased against the so called “Transition sector” of the economy where most of the Indian population is currently employed. These are mostly mom and pop operations widely recognised as the best generators of employment albeit at a lower wage than the “modern sector”. Finally, the reserved portion of the small scale industries accounts only for 30% of the total SSI sector.

About the Placebo for poor comment: There is no doubt that the economic reforms since 1991 have benefitted the well educated middle and upper class. That does not mean that the poor were placed on a pacebo. In some cases people benefitted from the reforms, and in many cases have lost big time. Ditributional impacts of the reform process are felt by the poor people. They may not understand the economic jargon, but they sure do vote.

Error in an otherwise sound argument. The NDA government’s lasting contribution in the area of economic reform is the privatization of state-owned enterprises, carried out in the teeth of opposition from not only the usual suspects such as the Left and the unions but from within the government and even the courts. Shourie — with backing from Vajpayee — fobbed off the goon-like tactics of Ajit Jogi in the sale of Balco. More than a dozen companies were successfully sold and many more were lined up to be sold before the government was voted out of power. It was the supreme court — not the unions — that stopped him from pulling off what could have been the biggest privatization success story: the sale of HPCL.

Privatization has been a very contentious issue in most every country bitten by the socialist bug in the last century. In Europe, a political party’s willingness to privatize state enterprises has been used as the barometer of its commitment to free markets. No wonder the first thing that the corrupt bunch that is ruling us has done after coming to power was to put an end to strategic sale of public sector companies.