2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

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ramana
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2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by ramana »

Opened new thread as the 2019 Election Results have come to a close and the discussion is going beyond the topic. In order to provide continuity am opening this thread as this coming five year period promises to be a game changer for India and the world.
All the usual rules apply. No name calling and stick to topic and lets have a good exchange of ideas....

Last page of the previous thread....


Please post away and join the journey.

ramana
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by KLNMurthy »

viewtopic.php?p=2359732#p2359732

Responding to Suraj's post above:

Considering Muslims as "one entity" was not my intention, I used only for the sake of brevity. I agree completely that any constructive dialogue, either through words or deeds of the government (such as the action against TTT) should take into consideration the full range of viewpoints and backgrounds among Muslims. What I worry about mostly is the instability built into the transition period while a more normal Hindu-Muslim relationship shakes out. There are plenty of Hindus who want to see some sort of reckoning for past injustices, and there are lots of Muslims who have their aspirations pinned on the MB / ISIS route. Either of these sides stepping out of a narrow operating range could throw the whole process into a tailspin. We can remain optimistic, but when, not if, that happens, we need some plan, beyond the hand-wringing and bleating about tehzeeb and resiliency that we had in the past.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by A_Gupta »

I think the no-nonsense approach of Singapore may be useful to examine again.
Can it scale to 1.3 billion people? Unknown.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by KLNMurthy »

A_Gupta wrote:I think the no-nonsense approach of Singapore may be useful to examine again.
Can it scale to 1.3 billion people? Unknown.
Making the law effective, equal and timely will go a long way. One former IAS officer-turned social activist-turned politician once said that the biggest culprits in the Indian system are not the politicians but the lethargic and corrupt justice system.

I can't help focusing on the risks of the next 5 years and the number of ways in which it could all come to naught.
ramana
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by ramana »

Folks, I would like to track corporate director ship of top 200 companies by value in India.

Any volunteers?
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Suraj »

The lot of Hindus (generally speaking, all poor, but Hindus are the most numerically visible and most associated with the image) as poor, wretched, 'dirty' and backward - scrawny people with beseeching looks on their faces - is something Modi strove hard to fix from 2014. A lot of people were underwhelmed when in his 2014 I-Day speech, he spoke not about foreign investment and growth, but about village toilet building. I remember tracking that in the econ thread, and being a little surprised myself. The press responses were rather elitist then, asking why the first PM with an absolute majority in a generation is talking about toilets in front of phoren dignitaries at I Day (shades of Indian censors trying to cut parts of people eating with hand in Mother India in the 1950s, lest phoren people be put off by the sight).

However, having tracked Swachh Bharat and Saubhagya missions over the years, the data is nothing if not stunning. Feel free to go to SBM site and play with any states cumulative coverage graphs since 2014. There's only one state left to cover. Same for Saubhagya site. It would be easy to dismiss these figures as optimistic babu-generated fantasy numbers, except the people of India gave their opinion on the same on May 23 too. Swachh Bharat Mission itself cost $10 billion so far.

Modi seldom talks of his grand plans as such. Unlike Rajiv, he doesn't state grand "humko yeh banana hai, woh banana hai" banana republic plans. He didn't go to Cambridge under a fake name, and doesn't know anything about the escape velocity of Jupiter. He just announces a series of action items and keeps talking numbers, like some UPSC mid ranker IAS person. Stepping back and looking at his actions, one can visualize his plan - he focused on trying to quickly get rid of the picture of India as the land of an overwhelming number of poor and wretched people - the blame and cause of which conveniently was placed upon the lap of Hindus, since that is the most visible image. And why not ? India was led by a succession of western educated and cultivated elite, who obviously couldn't be wrong as they're western educated. And yet the place was a hellhole. Must be something about the religion and backward thinking native culture, the argument went.

In 2014, despite ~25 years of liberalization, India's villages were sh*t - 60% of the rural people had no road, no power, no water, no toilet, people scrounged for food and scrounged more for firewood and then went and pooped in the fields where it leeched into the water and food and made them grow into small stunted unhealthy people. Even our greatest cultural cities were poor crowded messy and filthy (i.e. Varanasi). We all felt that unease, seeing how some of our greatest religious and cultural places are badly managed, dirty and nothing like the grandeur in imagery of Vatican or Mecca. Admittedly I didn't expect progress on these to be so incredibly rapid. But as it did happen, it was tracked here. Simultaneously he sought to clean the Ganges and basically demolish and rebuild large sections of the Kashi waterfront. Likewise, there was a conscious effort to ensure that the Kumbh was an efficient, clean and modern experience, not a crowded heaving mass of people known for its lethal stampedes.

Fast forward to 2019 and we have a second administration brought to power with an unheard of mandate, where nearly 20 states/UTs gave Modi absurd voteshares north of 50%, some coming close to 70%. Even Nehru at his peak didn't command such numbers. On a multi-dimensional index, a lot of factors that made rural India no better than sub-Saharan Africa, have been addressed. There's essentially universal road/electricity/sanitation coverage, access to banking. India no longer hosts the largest population of the desperately poor - a 'throne' we picked up around 1996-97 from China. Nigeria - with 1/6th of our population, holds it now.

The larger picture becomes clear now. Modi wants to fix the reputation of India and Hinduism as one of overwhelming wretchedness and poverty. People who aren't subjected to indignities from the moment they wake and need to take a sh*t, grow prouder and more assertive of their own culture and faith. Who loses out in this ? The entities engaged in conversion, for whom this huge mass of wretched people was a target rich environment, and Muslims, who are still socio-economically stronger than the weakest sections of Hindu society. Both entities find themselves marginalized when these changes happen.

I think most of BRF itself doesn't grasp the extent of the change that's happened at the bottom of the pyramid. This is not about 'GDP growth'. Our GDP growth has been great for close to 30 years of liberalization, but the improvement in quality of life of the very poor in the past 5 years outstrips the cumulative improvements until 2014. That's right - in 2014, only 45% of rural India had access to roads/electricity/cooking gas/sanitation/banking . The figure across the board now is between 93-99% depending on which measure you look at. That is why 2019 mandate is what it is, even though no one spoke of RJB, temples or anything else.

A people who have their basic quality of life issues met, become much more assertive of having their spiritual void fulfilled, and then a bottom up sentiment can drive the 'Hindu causes' that many here chafe about 'having been placed on the backburner'. Arguably they were never placed there, as much as a completely different plan of action undertaken.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by SandeepA »

If South India were a separate nation BJP would still be the single largest party and form govt in alliance with KCR and with YSRCP giving outside support. :rotfl:
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by sudarshan »

A_Gupta wrote:I think the no-nonsense approach of Singapore may be useful to examine again.
Can it scale to 1.3 billion people? Unknown.
It doesn't have to scale up to 1.3 billion people. It just has to scale up one state at a time. That is exactly what is happening in UP. It was happening to some extent in MP also, but that's been interrupted - hopefully it will resume when the MP government falls.

Which brings me to the next point. The states where the no-nonsense approach hasn't begun are in for a rough time. TN especially. People living in the metros are oblivious to what is happening. They are under the impression that their neighbors, having lived peacefully in the same street since childhood, will continue being the friendly, peace-loving people they've been so far. Only, those neighbors are now starting to have loudspeakers blaring out sermons at the end of the fasting month. The rest of the street is puzzled, and wondering how to approach these neighbors. Surely they'll be accommodating, given the peaceful childhood and youth spent together, and given that there are only one or two such households in the entire street?

The radicalization that's suddenly flared up is going to take streets and localities by surprise and by storm. It would have been way worse had Modi not come back - now there's at least some hope of change. But it's going to be bad enough as it is, especially down south. Even in BJP states, the police and bureaucracy aren't exactly "even-handed" if you know what I mean.

People are going to have to wake up in order to survive. The solution is long-term - vote for your best interests, get the bureaucracy to be impartial, take a stand, drive some neighbors off those streets if need be. And we need more CMs like that UP CM all over India.

Things can get better, there is hope now, but as the cliche goes, things will first get much worse before they start getting better. It's going to be a rough ride.

Their era in India started with wiping out the men and employing "gentle persuasion" to convert women, and, by extension, the children of those women. The way back will again be through the women. The TT bill is a good beginning.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by chanakyaa »

ramana wrote:Folks, I would like to track corporate director ship of top 200 companies by value in India.

Any volunteers?
By tracking, you mean names of directors by company? At 7-9 directors per board, you are looking at over 1600 people. And, directors can be re-elected/changed frequently.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by williams »

Image

GDP is really a macroeconomic picture. Even with some slow down in macro-economic numbers Modi/BJP has captured the imagination of the youth in India. Apart from any other reason, the prime reason for the 2019 mandate is a huge success in micro-economic development.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by JE Menon »

Suraj, boss that was an absolute masterpiece

I see others have tweeted it. I will too
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Suraj »

JEM: thanks!! Please feel free.
williams wrote:Image
GDP is really a macroeconomic picture. Even with some slow down in macro-economic numbers Modi/BJP has captured the imagination of the youth in India. Apart from any other reason, the prime reason for the 2019 mandate is a huge success in micro-economic development.
The graph is not a weighted average. As a result, the 'Overall' figure is very misleading. The first three age groups outnumber the last three due to the youth bulge.

The efforts to build all this rural assets and services to improve basic quality of life, doesn't really move the GDP needle all that much. As mentioned earlier, the SBM spending so far is ~$10 billion over 5 years . That is 0.3% of one years GDP (which for 2019 is $3 trillion). The Saubhagya rural electrification program costs about as much. Let's throw in all 4 fixed asset efforts (SBM for sanitation, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya / Saubhagya missions for rural electrification, PMGSY for rural roads and Ujjwala for cooking gas) into one basket and say $50 billion spent on them combined. That's still just 1.6% of single year GDP as the total outlay for them all combined, and this spending was done over 5 years.

That's the thing about all this - it doesn't take incredible sums of money. It just takes a lot of persistence and effort to efficiently implement all of this on time, on budget, and without graft, most of it in territory that was a benighted hellhole. All of these are things successive governments failed at for decades - so much so that one single government intent on getting it sorted out, could do more in 5 years than everyone else together did before them over 6 decades - even the good ones. There’s an effort online to dismiss the work as ‘someone else got to 85%, this government is just taking credit for the rest’ . That’s not true - none of these items were at even 50% in 2014 . They’re all well north of 90% now . A huge amount of work was done, far in excess of prior rate of progress.

The main gains of these efforts will be in the improvement in HDI figures which IMHO will show up in a few years as these changes get accounted for in human development index metrics. It will also serve to 'prime the pump' for rapid GDP growth because far fewer people are living a hand to mouth existence, and are now mobile, their basic needs significantly met, and they're able to contribute to productive economic growth instead of basically living a hand to mouth existence and barely moving the growth needle.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Atmavik »

JE Menon wrote:Suraj, boss that was an absolute masterpiece

I see others have tweeted it. I will too
yes this is a classic. do we still have the good posts thread?

in 2014 it was said that Modi was exceptional at delivering governance at state level but many doubted if this could be scaled at center. This is what freedom feels like.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by sanjaykumar »

Toilets in many villages are being used as store rooms. There are often no sewage connections.

Hopefully these efforts are changing the cultural expectations of rural Indians. That is a significant barrier.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by nandakumar »

sanjaykumar wrote:Toilets in many villages are being used as store rooms. There are often no sewage connections.

Hopefully these efforts are changing the cultural expectations of rural Indians. That is a significant barrier.
Don't you think a slightly modified statement, "some toilets in villages are being used as store rooms", a better depiction of the reality? Also it is not necessary to have sewerage treatment for a dispersed community such as a village. Each house has a twin chamber soak pits with lining of the side walls with bricks. Over time it becomes deodorised and decomposed organic manure.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Pratyush »

sanjaykumar wrote:Toilets in many villages are being used as store rooms. There are often no sewage connections.

Hopefully these efforts are changing the cultural expectations of rural Indians. That is a significant barrier.
And this is a failure of Modi.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by hanumadu »

sanjaykumar wrote:Toilets in many villages are being used as store rooms. There are often no sewage connections.

Hopefully these efforts are changing the cultural expectations of rural Indians. That is a significant barrier.
I thought these toilets did not need a sewage outlet.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by nandakumar »

hanumadu wrote:
sanjaykumar wrote:Toilets in many villages are being used as store rooms. There are often no sewage connections.

Hopefully these efforts are changing the cultural expectations of rural Indians. That is a significant barrier.
I thought these toilets did not need a sewage outlet.
No, they do not. The Ministry of Sanitation and Water Supply has a detailed write up on the subject with illustrations.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by hanumadu »

Even the toilets being used as store rooms sounds extreme and made up.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by ArjunPandit »

^^may be they are, but we'll get to them being used properly. The narrative has shifted to shitting in fields as no toilets to no water in toilets. Next it will be inconvenient indian v/s western ones then to chains of toilet mugs in Indian railway toilets.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Sachin »

nandakumar wrote:Each house has a twin chamber soak pits with lining of the side walls with bricks. Over time it becomes deodorised and decomposed organic manure.
Exactly. In fact this was the norm in KL households way back from the 1980s. Even in a plot of around 10 cents (4356 sq ft), we had a "septic tank" to where all toilet waste landed up. And this could run smoothly to years together. It was only after coming to Bangalore city that I noticed this concept of sewerage pipes going underground main roads, with individual pipes joining in from each household.
sanjaykumar wrote:Toilets in many villages are being used as store rooms. There are often no sewage connections.
Modi or any one cannot go on a patrol around villages and make every one use a proper toilet. That change has to come from within :). If some idiot villagers are using toilets as strong rooms, there are also other village girls who compel their parents to build a proper toilet at home. So all is not that bad.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by ramana »

Thread hijack. Not the focus.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by sanjaykumar »

That is why Modi is important at this time. I don’t care about Pakistan being taught a lesson. Apni maut marega indeed.

Values of cleanliness and hygiene are in deficit, that is more critical to correct than Pakistani obduracy.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Suraj »

The whole argument around toilets as store rooms misses the point.

The poor demonstrably do not punish the government for their own inability to put infrastructure to use. Whether it is toilets as store rooms, or used gas cylinders as seats, the memes abound. These are all part of the narrative that seeks to discredit an achievement on the basis of end user behavior, rather than lack of delivery.

The SBM toilet design has been openly provided for review years ago. It was discussed in the health or public policy thread here on BRF - my memory fails me since it was about 4-5 years ago. I don't know much about toilets, other than pull latch and hope something happens, while humming pakistan zindabad.

All kinds of FUD narratives have been propagated. "Toilets may have been built, but I know most poor still prefer to sh*t outside so they have fresh air". "People prefer to sit on the gas cylinder instead of use it", "Walking on asphalt is hard on feet and people still walk on grass"... these are all rather insulting of people. It depicts them as impulsive, thoughtless little children. They aren't. Their choices are collectively carefully considered, but focused on their immediate plights. It is why we have been able to sustain peaceful democratic transfer of power for decades, despite widespread poverty levels until recently .

Going into the elections, there were two primary questions:
1. Was the implementation on the ground sufficiently effective as to impact the lives of most of the 55-60% of the rural poor that still didn't have access to these basics in 2014 ?
2. How well does direct delivery of these to the poor translate to votes ?

We already have answers for both. It is pointless to restate old memes arguing about the lack of efficacy of delivery post May 23, because there's already a popular mandate on the table that contradicts any claim of widespread breakdown in delivery of these .
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by sanjaykumar »

In mass behaviour modification, there is a concept of the nudge.
When the prime minister picks up a broom, that is a potent cue to change behaviour. Similarly meeting the effort and expense of building toilets is the opening to changing behaviours.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by khatvaanga »

the biggest thing to me from BJP manifesto is their promise of potable water to all thru pipes. While i am a (lot) skeptical about it due to the distances from water sources in, lets say, states like RJ or lack of any perennial water sources in districts such as Anantapur etc. I hope these things are taken into consideration when the policy paper on it comes around. Water tables have absolutely been devastated across india past 100-200 years.

Earlier in our history, from ancient times thru british times, we used to have koneru or watering holes in almost every single village across India. Maybe there will be a Jal Yukt Shivir kinda mass movement across india to resurrect them.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Suraj »

Probably worth more detailed analysis in the roads thread, but Yogi is on a tear pushing for completion of several long expressways in UP before 2022. Implementing these will change UP drastically, from basically the largest laggard, to the most impressively connected one, with UP alone accounting for half the access controlled expressways built in India, by distance:
Yogi plans expressway to every region of UP by 2022
The Uttar Pradesh government is focusing on completing several expressways before the next assembly elections in 2022. In 2017, the election pitch of the then chief minister Akhilesh Yadav centred around Agra-Lucknow Taj expressway.

Similarly, in 2007 the then chief minister Mayawati’s achievement was Yamuna Expressway. The Yogi Aditya Nath government is working on four large projects which could be the highlight of his government before elections in 2022. First project on the priority list is the Purvanchal Expressway, a 341 km long expressway from Lucknow to Ghazipur, passing through Amethi, Ambedkar Nagar, Sultanpur, Faizabad, Azamgarh and Mau.

“We are targeting to open the main carriageway for public by August 2020,” says Awanish Awasthi. There would be 89-km link way on the expressway to connect it to Gorakhpur for which E-bids would be announced soon. Another project on the line is Bundelkhand expressway which would connect the backward districts of Bundelkhand such as Banda, Hamirpur, Jalaun to Agra Lucknow expressway in Etawah.

Around 79 per cent land acquisition has been completed for this 296 Km expressway and e-bids are going to take place in the current month. Currently the target is to complete the project by 2021. On January 29 this year, Nath announced Ganga Expressway from Meerut in West UP to Prayagraj.

The 600 KM expressway will connect districts such as Meerut, Jyotiba Phule Nagar, Sambhal, Badaun, Farrukhabad, Hardoi, Unnao, Rae Bareli, Pratapgarh to Prayagraj. The survey for the project is slated to being in coming months.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by ShyamSP »

A good video by Shri Malhotra on Rastra and Rajya. While Rajya deals with Governance and Governing models and systems and is most influential and changing factor of Rastra. Rastra in Indian sense is civilizational not like just one Nation-state for many countries but is conglomeration of Nation-states and continue to exist while Rajyas went/go through birth-life-death cycles. Malhotra correctly identifies RSS for Rastra and BJP for Rajya. Rastra is something missing in INC and political-ideology-based parties which are purely for Rajya unlike in the past for Congress which fought for Rastra and so INC can't be transformative and can't be good for the country going forward. Oddly and thinking aloud, DMK has both components in it so BJP has to battle it differently.

===
Rajya is Strong, Where is the Rashtra?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnkbmERdyBg


On the historic occasion of Modi 2.0, Rajiv evaluates the opportunities & existential risks that Bharat faces. He provides a framework for solving the challenges ahead - bureaucratic mediocrity; digital & social media colonization; internal & external threats, and development of human capital.
===
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by KJo »

khatvaanga wrote:the biggest thing to me from BJP manifesto is their promise of potable water to all thru pipes. While i am a (lot) skeptical about it due to the distances from water sources in, lets say, states like RJ or lack of any perennial water sources in districts such as Anantapur etc. I hope these things are taken into consideration when the policy paper on it comes around. Water tables have absolutely been devastated across india past 100-200 years.

Earlier in our history, from ancient times thru british times, we used to have koneru or watering holes in almost every single village across India. Maybe there will be a Jal Yukt Shivir kinda mass movement across india to resurrect them.
Mysore used to have a lot of large ponds centuries ago, now they are all dry even going back to my childhood and are now playgrounds or exhibition grounds. Bangalore is also the same way, they seem to be actively killing off the lakes in order to steal land for apartments (which end up going vacant).
We need to take more care of the environment for future generations. But we seem to think only of today. Maybe artificial lakes could be built and an ecology may come up around it after a manual start?
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Rudradev »

An article The Atlantic that is surprisingly balanced (by Western globalist media standards) regarding Modi. Ironically it is by a Bangladeshi-American Muslim, Reihan Salam.

The reason I'm posting here (in full) is that he seems to be championing certain policy proposals by a think-tank called IDFC, pushing what they call an agenda of "urbanization".

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ia/590506/

Modi's New Challenge Is Embracing Urbanization

His expansion of welfare benefits has won him votes from rural citizens—but if he wants to build a “new India,” he must focus on cities.
May 30, 2019


When Narendra Modi led his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to an outright parliamentary majority in 2014—a feat no party had been able to achieve in the previous 25 years of Indian politics—the hopes and expectations for his first term were straightforward, if lofty. Modi promised to build a “new India” that would curb corruption, spur economic growth, and advance the interests of the growing “neo–middle class” of erstwhile villagers striving to reinvent themselves as consumers.

Five years later, the BJP has secured a new electoral mandate even more impressive than the last, a testament to Modi’s unmatched political prowess. Yet it has done so despite an economic record that can be described only as underwhelming. If Modi hopes to do more than simply stay in power, if he still aspires to bring his new India to life, he’d do well to heed the advice of a small clique of economists who’ve been calling on his government to more fully embrace urbanization.

Why is it that Modi’s premiership failed to deliver robust growth? During his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat, one of India’s more prosperous and industrialized states, Modi envisioned India as a manufacturing powerhouse in the making. But that was not to be. To his credit, on his ascension to national office, Modi was clear-eyed enough to recognize that his preferred development strategy—cultivating a labor-intensive manufacturing sector that could sell its wares overseas, as China had done with such great success—was ill-suited to emerging global economic trends.

Modi and his advisers quickly came to understand that a combination of depressed demand in the mature market democracies and robust competition from other low-wage countries had essentially foreclosed the export-driven model of development, as Amy Kazmin and Lionel Barber report in the Financial Times. Instead, Modi reached for a grab bag of reforms and public investment, an approach one of his advisers described as “light many fires at once—to see if any of them would catch.” Modi’s policy mix has indeed succeeded in lighting many fires, though not all of them are burning quite as he might have wished.

It must be said that Modi has achieved some modest successes. His move to overhaul the tax code is a step in the right direction. The previous tax system vested too much power in the state and local levels, such that India’s domestic market was littered with internal trade barriers. The newly instituted VAT promises to facilitate more interstate trade and, hopefully, raise some badly needed revenue for India’s chronically under-resourced central government. In just two years, India’s tax base has increased by 50 percent.

The creation of a streamlined bankruptcy process is another long-overdue reform. An IMF report cited by the Financial Times found that under the old regime, creditors who turned to the courts to settle bankruptcy disputes could expect a process that would take four years to resolve itself and would, on average, end with them writing off three-quarters of the debts they were owed. Though far from perfect, Modi’s new bankruptcy code appears to have leveled the playing field for creditors, which should, in time, make Indian firms more attractive to investors at home and abroad.

The stimulus from these important reforms, however, has been dulled by a simultaneous liquidity contraction provoked by an ill-conceived policy of demonetization. Modi attempted to smoke out nefarious actors who were hoarding their wealth in hard-to-track cash, but instead produced a complicated and protracted financial crisis.

In November 2016, in characteristically secretive and dramatic style, Modi announced that following a 50-day grace period, the country’s high-denomination bills would be worthless. What happened next was a short-term cash crunch as people took money out from under their proverbial (and sometimes literal) mattresses and poured it into bank deposits and mutual funds. Much of this $220 billion liquidity surge found its way into the hands of shadow banks, which in turn sparked a series of financial ructions that I won’t pretend to fully understand.
Fair criticism? Someone more knowledgeable can illuminate.

On balance, though, Modi has failed to deliver on his promise of faster growth. Under his government, India’s GDP has grown at about 7 percent a year, which looks more like the growth produced by the preceding government than it does the 10 percent average growth China maintained from 1990 to 2010. Moreover, the failure to jump-start manufacturing employment has left the country with an unemployment rate of 7 percent, driven in large part by a 20 percent jobless rate for urban men under 30, a slice of the population not known for its quiescence.

Perhaps the most high-profile undertaking of the Modi government has been its war against graft and corruption. Lest voters miss the point, Modi updated his Twitter handle to include the prefix Chowkidar, or “watchman.” Here too, it is unclear that Modi’s successes outnumber his failures. During the campaign, Modi’s opponents played off his own self-branding, telling voters “chowkidar choi hai” or “the watchman is the thief.” His success at the polls notwithstanding, 42 percent of Indian voters felt as if corruption had grown worse under Modi, compared with 36 percent who thought it had improved.

Interestingly, Kazmin and Barber of the Financial Times suggest Modi’s anti-corruption fervor has deepened his country’s credit crunch. They point to the case of Jet Airways, India’s oldest private airline, which went bankrupt because no state bank was willing to extend it credit, despite the fact that these same banks had taken managing control of the company and had been shopping around for a buyer. Kazmin and Barber present the view of an anonymous businessman who thinks this curious series of decisions can be attributed to fear of prosecution: “There is a subtle difference between being anti-corruption and anti-business. If I feel I am going to be persecuted, I’m going to be very careful in how I take my investment decisions.”

Given that Modi failed to deliver rip-roaring economic growth, how do we account for Modi’s irrefutable political success? Those who attribute Modi’s success exclusively to his willingness to indulge and promote Hindu chauvinism, :roll: the Atlantic's editorial board must have stuck this in to claim their lifafa a sentiment not uncommon among English-language interpreters of Indian political life, Nice to have this acknowledged!miss an equally important, if more prosaic, explanation: the efficient delivery of generous welfare benefits, particularly to rural citizens.[

Writing in Foreign Policy, Srinivas Thiruvadanthai of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center argued that Modi deserved more credit for his effective administration of the welfare state, which is exceedingly important when you consider that more than 70 million Indian citizens live on less than $1.90 a day. One particularly impactful policy provided bank accounts to 300 million previously unbanked citizens. Though the program is still in its infancy, preliminary research has shown that areas with high exposure to the program saw upticks in health-related borrowing. Separately, in an effort to cut down on pollution and improve sanitation, the government has built 81 million household toilets and provided financing for more than 60 million cylinders of Liquid Petroleum Gas, which is a much cleaner home-cooking fuel than the cheap alternatives of firewood and kerosene.

While latrine building and small-dollar banking are not the most glamorous subjects for foreign correspondents to take up, they mean an awful lot to the citizens who no longer have to relieve themselves in fields or rely exclusively on informal networks for credit. Presumably, it was these tangible, bread-and-butter outcomes that allowed Modi to fare so well in left-leaning regions—such as West Bengal, which had long been a Marxist redoubt—and, more striking still, among Muslim women.
This is the part where he talks about the "urbanization" business...
But all the latrines in the world won’t make India an economic dynamo. To pull off that feat, Modi must persuade Indians to embrace an urban future. Reuben Abraham and Pritika Hingorani, both of India’s IDFC Institute, a small but enormously influential :?: think tank based in Mumbai, have made a convincing case that at present India’s state governments—which are each empowered to decide what qualifies as urban—systematically underestimate the urban share of their populations. According to the Indian Census, only 31 percent of the country’s population resides in urban areas. If, however, you were to adopt Ghana’s or Lebanon’s definition for what amounts to an urban area, India is almost 50 percent urbanized.

This definitional game has consequences—classifying an area as urban completely shifts the statutory responsibilities of local governments. Urban governments must do the important work of funding fire departments, building sewage lines, and drafting building standards. India’s current policy of closing its eyes to emerging cities is helping to ensure that its cities are filthier, more chaotic, and less economically productive than they would be otherwise.

And if India’s growth strategy is going to be defined by high-value services rather than labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing, it ought to heed the lessons of the world’s most successful postindustrial metropolises. Abraham and Shashi Verma, the chief technology officer of London’s transportation office, have argued that India should recast Mumbai, India’s financial capital, in the mold of New York or London, primarily by converting its shrinking port into a sleek new business district offering a high quality of life. Trivial though this effort might sound, the rise of Shenzhen, and the creation of Shanghai’s Pudong financial district, did a great deal to spur China’s urban development.

Ideally, Abraham and Verma’s Mumbai project would demonstrate that educated Indians needn’t move abroad to enjoy decent services or to build successful businesses. In The Other One Percent, a comprehensive analysis of the Indian-origin population of the U.S., the social scientists Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh posit that “controlling for quality, it will take decades for India’s system of higher education to simply match the stock of India-born doctorate-degree holders in the science and technology disciplines.” Only by building attractive global cities of its own can India hope to compete with the San Franciscos and Singapores in its efforts to attract and retain intellectual and entrepreneurial talent. And in doing so, Modi might finally deliver the accelerated growth that he has promised his voters.
disha
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by disha »

^Above article still misses the economic activity generated by Modi 1.0 by a mile.

None of the economists. None. Ever got the import of this statistic available in March 2019 and posted here on this forum in the Clean India thread:
https://swarajyamag.com/insta/worlds-la ... chh-bharat

The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) 2018-19, conducted by an Independent Verification Agency (IVA) under the World Bank support project to the Swachh Bharat Mission Grameen (SBM-G), has found that 96.5% of the households in rural India who have access to a toilet use it.

Key findings of NARSS 2018-19 are as follows

93.1% of households were found to have access to toilets during the survey period (the corresponding figure as per the SBMG MIS in November 2018 was 96%)

96.5% of the people who had access to toilets used them

90.7% of villages which were previously declared and verified as ODF were confirmed to be ODF. The remaining villages also had sanitation coverage of about 93%

95.4% of the villages surveyed found to have minimal litter and minimal stagnant water
I do not understand what economists who get PhD do., but take the following statistic:

1. 95.4% of the villages surveyed found to have minimal litter and minimal stagnant water

The above reduces:

1.Water and vector borne burden of diseases -> Shows up as reduced medical costs -> more savings
2.Improved productivity -> Well "health is wealth"!

Even the above writer misses the import of the above statistics on economy.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by khatvaanga »

KJo wrote: We need to take more care of the environment for future generations. But we seem to think only of today. Maybe artificial lakes could be built and an ecology may come up around it after a manual start?
this has to be done. of the thousands of lakes in Texas <10 are natural. I am curious to see what the game plan is for the Jak Shakti ministry. Hopefully it will have some tangible and trackable goals as opposed to "make water table again".
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by pankajs »

There are a couple of articles that came to my notice today that wold have fit the previous thread (Election results) but alas it is locked and this is not the right thread.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by khatvaanga »

this is still the Political Analysis thread right?
Suraj
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Suraj »

The article from The Atlantic can be moved to either the economy or urban development & public policy thread , and can be discussed further there, shorn of its politics.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by ramana »

pankajs wrote:There are a couple of articles that came to my notice today that wold have fit the previous thread (Election results) but alas it is locked and this is not the right thread.
OK post here.
Ramana
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Rudradev »

What the f***?

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/r ... 2019-06-03

Robert Vadra allowed to travel abroad for treatment, but cannot go to London
In a relief to Robert Vadra, a CBI Special Court on Monday allowed Vadra to travel to the United States and the Netherlands for treatment.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Rudradev »

I just had a tubelight moment regarding exactly WHY it is vitally important to challenge the notion of "HinduISM" as a "RELIGION"... the category in which Indian Secularists have constrained and cast it since at least 1950.

1. The traditional values and ethical precepts of Dharma are both the life-blood and building blocks of Indian civilization.

2. If these things can be cast as "religion", then by definition, they are subjective, unprovable, and incapable of being rationally defended.

3. That which cannot be rationally defended is, again by definition, a form of prejudice. Hence, bad for society, and worthy of culling.

By this particular form of intellectual trickery, the entirety of Dharmic norms, mores, and principles evolved over five millennia have become tainted as not only opposed to "reason", but actually a form of toxic bias.

This explains the need to recast Hinduism and Sanatan Dharma as something entirely outside the scope of the two way "religion" vs. "rationality" debate. This false dichotomy is at the heart of Breaking India discourse, every bit as much as the (now eroding) wretched poverty of Hindus is central to Abrahamic claims of being a "civilizing influence".

It also explains why the standard-bearers of Hinduphobia from the Left have very often cast themselves as "rationalists" or "anti-superstition activists"... be it Periyar, Karunanidhi, Kalburgi, or Gauri Lankesh.
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by pankajs »

Maulana's chaddi is all in a knot. His musings border on blasphemy!

https://www.dailyo.in/politics/rahul-ga ... 30920.html
Wooing The Minority: Overlooking India's Hindu majority was only one reason why Congress missed the bus to power -- Rasheed Kidwai, Journalist-author is a visiting fellow of ORF
Rahul Gandhi’s ‘khoon ki dalali’, ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ comments have reinforced party ideologue, the late VN Gadgil’s comment that on emotive issues, the grand old party falls between two stools. At another level, it had shown Rahul as unconventional and a rather reckless leader. As AICC chief, Rahul seemed taken in by a sense of entitlement — without giving due weightage to the feelings and sentiments of millions of ordinary Congress workers, sympathisers and those who voted for the party.

For instance, a large number of Congressmen are extremely proud of the Congress’ heritage of being anti-Pakistan. According to them, Indira Gandhi was singularly responsible for the division of Pakistan.
Pappu jee handed over the "Nationalistic" space to the BJP on a platter.
There was a huge contradiction in the way Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi viewed religion and politics. As I have mentioned in my book 24, Akbar Road (Hachette), Nehru was firm in his definition of secularism that meant separation of religion from the political, economic, social and cultural aspects of life. Religion, in Nehru’s scheme of things, was a personal matter that the state should disassociate from at all costs.
<snip>
But for Mahatma Gandhi, religion was an integral part of secularism. Gandhi, who agreed with his disciple Nehru on a range of issues, was a believer that the Nehruvian secular prescription would not work for India. Gandhi kept saying, “politics bereft of religion is absolute dirt.”

Rahul Gandhi’s move to engage “Muslim Intellectuals,” Shashi Tharoor’s apprehension of India turning into a “Hindu Pakistan” and the Congress manifesto offering to partially withdraw security forces from Jammu and Kashmir boomeranged.
<snip>
VN Gadgil (deceased), who served as AICC spokesman during the regimes of Narasimha Rao and Kesri, had told Congressmen at a seven day-long training camp in Maharashtra, that he disapproved of the Congress leadership’s policy of appeasing Muslims. At Kurla, which was a training camp to select ‘future Congress leaders’, Gadgil launched a scathing frontal attack on Congress policymakers. He observed, ‘Every time the Shahi Imam makes a statement, the party reacts as if God himself has spoken. Do minorities mean only Muslims? What about Buddhists, Sikhs and others? When thirty-six Sikhs were killed in Kashmir, not a single Congressman condoled over their deaths. In Jammu and Kashmir, there is not a single Buddhist working in the state secretariat. The only Buddhist who was selected through the state public service commission had to convert to Islam to secure a government job... The Congress is silent on this.’ {Imagine the kind of distress and hopelessness this maulana must be feeling to write about such a thing!}

While appeasing Muslims, we should not forget Hindus, who are a majority in this state,’ Gadgil said, pointing at an article published in The Economist, which stated that ‘Islam and democracy do not go together’. Quoting from the article, Gadgil said a province in China which had a substantial Muslim population wanted to break away and form a separate nation. When Gadgil was asked why he was saying all this, he said: ‘I have said this earlier. Muslims constitute only 18 per cent of the vote share. Even if all of them vote for the Congress, the party will not return to power. We cannot go on ignoring the sentiments of the other 82 per cent.

The Congress, under new leadership, will do well to ponder over Gadgil, Seth and the rest and find a way forward.
How can maulana endorse the "appeasement politics" narrative of Mudi/BJP?

Ya halla ... I fear next he is going to ask Pappu jee to take charge of the hindutva brigade. Mudi checkmated! :mrgreen:

#ModiHaiToMumkinHai
Suraj
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Re: 2019 Strategic and Political Analysis-1

Post by Suraj »

Suraj wrote:The article from The Atlantic can be moved to either the economy or urban development & public policy thread , and can be discussed further there, shorn of its politics.
I've copied sections of it to both threads and responded to one. Will handle the other later, unless others want to take it up.
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