Wish list for Modi 3.0 administration

[tandav]

India Government Budget is 0.57 Lakh Cr. Population is 145Cr. Therefore percapita spend is 0.35L/year. dependency ratio is 47%. Therefore average tax of a working age person should be 0.51L per year.

Less than 5% of India's population crosses 0.51L/Yr tax hurdle (my estimate). Most of the tax is paid by a miniscule 2% of the population (which pays 4.6L per year) and rest of the nation is a net tax beneficiary from the Government services, Freebies, Infrastructure etc. The taxpayers is not represented in governance and is suffering from all type of legal and illegal taxes (by way of poor infrastruture, pollution, poor law enforcement etc) in India.

Property tax (generally 1% of property value) which runs most local government like in china / usa (paying for schools, local roads, sewerage, prisons, police stations, public parks etc) in India is an astonishingly low 0.02% of property value has never been collected properly since 1947. The low property tax value and high transaction tax (Stamp duty 7% without input credit) has kept land non liquid and extremely expensive. With land values at least 4X greater than comparable land in other nations. There is no cost to hoarding land and keeping it idle.

India rental yields are low since the property costs are artificially high.

[Ambar]

The tax paying population is already taxed to death in India! Increasing taxes even more without fixing corruption and suicidal freebies is counterproductive. The absurd land and housing valuations in India is the result of decades of endemic corruption, overpopulation, and hidden money chasing assets, rising property taxes won't fix this except make your corporator even more wealthy!

Someone in another thread mentioned digitization of property records and the bureacratic pushback, infact, the opposite is true, bureacrats are all for digitization because they get to take Rs 80,000 in bribes for a task with a govt fee of Rs 800! We call it e-aasthi or e-katha in KAR, the bribe is anywhere from 0.5% to 1% of the property value depending on the location.

[chetak]

The tax paying population is already taxed to death in India! Increasing taxes even more without fixing corruption and suicidal freebies is counterproductive. The absurd land and housing valuations in India is the result of decades of endemic corruption, overpopulation, and hidden money chasing assets, rising property taxes won't fix this except make your corporator even more wealthy!

Someone in another thread mentioned digitization of property records and the bureacratic pushback, infact, the opposite is true, bureacrats are all for digitization because they get to take Rs 80,000 in bribes for a task with a govt fee of Rs 800! We call it e-aasthi or e-katha in KAR, the bribe is anywhere from 0.5% to 1% of the property value depending on the location.

Ambar ji,


that's what happens when some mafiaso brat promises freebies without knowing his gluteus maximus from his cubitus

he was so greedy to claim credit that he surprised the govt of KAR at a public function which had been arranged to celebrate the congi victory and made this freebie announcement shocking everyone on the stage.

the cm was shell shocked

It has been downhill all the way since then, and no blame ever attaches ever to the dynaaastie, a national policy, one that has been carved in stone, since before 1947.

The city and the state has gone to the dogs, the jihadis have grabbed vast tracts of land and the abrahamics have a free run to conduct their nefarious conversions.

The fallout is, as usual, borne by the majority middle class, who curse their fate but will idiotically vote for the congis again and again

the beedis and rohingiyas, including the folks from the NE have taken over all the low paying jobs, even as the foolish majority low skilled workers have ill-advisedly vacated this space and they will never regain it ever again

[Ambar]

Chetakji, I am no fan of the current Karnataka Govt, but lets be honest, the state of affairs and corruption is the same whether it is INC run BJP run. A BJP MLA or corporator is no more or no less corrupt than a Congress or Janata Dal one, and hence they find it so easy to switch loyalties based on changing winds.

Your salaried tax paying janata gets nothing except more harrasment from politicians,police and bureacrats, while all parties are in competition to do one over the other when it comes to announcing freebies or minting the next dollar billionaire MLA. We have Swiss level of taxation for Swaziland quality of life, and hiking even more tax is not the solution.

[tandav]

Is it time to shift from center-state type governance to. Center-District type governance. Currently the taxation norm implies that taxes collected from mostly urban areas of India get spent in rural areas by the State Governments. However in most other efficient government nations bulk of government spend happens at the local government level.

China /USA / EU etc the split of government spend between center, state, local government is as below
30% 10% 60%
In India it is
30% 66% 4%

Essentially all Municipal functions have been subsumed by the state government as local bodies get nothing to spend. Cities like Mumbai get CAPEX funding via Parastatal bodies such as MMRDA controlled by State government. However the OPEX funding / taxation base for maintaining the infrastructure created is absent.

[SRajesh]

^^
Would be intersting to check the break of expenditure in
Canada, Germany and Spain
The reason I ask is they have regional premiers like our Chief Ministers and how they spend and collect taxes including state and Fedral shares in both.
should be we have a more formal system like Länderfinanzausgleich, to share money between rich and poorer states?
We are not fully decentralized like Canada or fully Centralized like Germany (Attempting to with income tax and GST).
We are like Spain but less sharing between Rich and Poor states.
I am not an economisrt but a question to all : Will GST act as a Länderfinanzausgleich for sharing between rich and poor states??
Is this one of the reasons that Congis and opposition fought against GST. becasue even though they are so called Secular but against true Egalite!!

[A_Gupta]

^^^
OECD Fiscal Decentralisation Database
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/o ... abase.html

For the countries where the expenditures were broken out as Central, State, Local instead of Central, State+Local, we have for 2023

Code: Select all

Austria	Central	67.35
Austria	State	16.83
Austria	Local	15.82
Belgium	Central	54.05
Belgium	State	32.84
Belgium	Local	13.11
Canada	Central	33.80
Canada	State	46.84
Canada	Local	19.37
Germany	Central	60.77
Germany	State	21.28
Germany	Local	17.95
Mexico	Central	57.62
Mexico	State	29.74
Mexico	Local	12.64
Spain	Central	55.31
Spain	State	33.03
Spain	Local	11.91
Switzerland	Central	42.06
Switzerland	State	38.17
Switzerland	Local	19.77

[A_Gupta]

Some kind of way for political parties to finance their campaigns, to raise money without raising corruption, would be welcome.

[Cyrano]

A few things I wish Modiji and his govt did better in no particular order:
1. Pan India implementation of UCC
2. Intense focus on indigenous fighter jet engine - over a decade lost there on his watch
3. ED cases on a dozen corrupt political families brought to convictions
4. Allowing foreign companies into health insurance sector
5. Great focus on higher education like IITs and IIMs. But allowing them to run humanities courses has allowed leftys in through the back door led to wokeism in them too
5. I suspect there is massive price gouging of govt health care money by private hospitals
6. Free temples from govt control
7. Unable to curb corruption at state level
8. Giving tickets to defectors from other parties - for 1 Hemanta there are a hundred thugs
9. IAS and IPS reforms
10. Justice and rehabilitation of Kashmiri pandits
11. 24 hours more of Op Sindoor to crush the snake head so that it can't rise for decades
12. Communication both internal and to a lesser extent external (luckily we have Dr SJ there)
13. Our China policy is confusing but may be it's deliberate seeing how geopolitics changed in the past year. Modiji is very good at keeping everyone guessing.
14. Primary education is terrible if you can't afford private school. And even there we need to improve quality greatly. It's also a state subject, but there is no real difference in double engine states either.
15. NEP is not effective in reclaiming our civilizational heritage, despite a few changes here and there, but even that doesn't apply to state syllabus.
16. Language appeasement for Tamil, what about so many others?
17. Caste appeasement becoming more and more prominent - doesn't go with sresht bharat
18. What happened to national census including caste and economic parameters?!
19. Minority appeasement - Modi ka saugaat etc. These things make no difference
20. Bengal poll violence paid for in blood and women's dignity by so many karyakartas. Didi and her goons are scot free.
21. BD violence on Hindus and tepid response by the govt, a partial of failure in anticipating and countering US and China moves. Change of potus period was a window of opportunity missed
22. Our EAM budget needs to be at least doubled given the state of the world

This is not to take away from a much longer list of successes and achievements.

I'm hoping many of these will be addressed in the remaining term of Modi 3.0

[Hriday]

^^
More about the 7th point (Unable to curb State level corruption) by Cyrano in the above post.

A law to monetarily compensate the citizens by the state govt for the deficiency in the services. That can solve a ton of problems faced by people. AFAIK presently only court cases is the last option and it is costly and time consuming.

[Cyrano]

Such a law itself can become a source of corruption and misuse saar!
In a gutsy move, Yogi has recently stopped salaries of bureaucrats who failed to declare assets on a govt portal. Let's see what results it produces.

[Manish_Sharma]

https://x.com/juliachaigneau/status/205 ... 20519?s=20

India ranks 6th globally in deep tech ecosystem maturity, 3rd in research publications, and 6th in IP filings worldwide.

And then 64th in business sophistication.

That ranking measures three things:

- the quality of knowledge workers inside companies
- how well universities and industries collaborate
- how effectively firms absorb and apply new technology

All three come down directly to a communication design problem.

The knowledge, talent and research all exist but are working completely disconnected from each others.

A well-designed communication system between a university research team and an industry partner accelerates collaboration.

A clear technical brief gets a manufacturing partner to say yes faster.

A data room built for the right audience closes a funding round that a messy one wouldn't.

Design is one of the most direct levers available to move a company up that ranking. And it's the one most Indian deep tech teams haven't fully deployed yet and the one we actively work on at the studio.

Ranks from the Global Innovation Index 2025.

[Cyrano]

This needs thinking and questioning minds. But we teach rote memorization to our kids from childhood and kill critical thinking. Our primary education system needs a total overhaul.

Niti Ayog has published data on schooling across India which is really alarming.

[Manish_Sharma]

https://x.com/Normal_2610/status/205409 ... 88127?s=20

Interesting Article *

Sanyal gets the access part right but ignores where the money goes. Technology makes it cheaper to do a task, and the person doing the task gets commodity wages.

The surplus moves one layer up - to whoever owns the tool, the platform, or the distribution. Access spreads. Profits don't.

India already has the live version of this running. Zomato and Swiggy gave millions of low-skill workers a way to earn - that part is real.

But the delivery rider makes ₹15k-18k a month while the platform founders sit on billion-dollar valuations.

AI will do the same thing to lawyers, designers, and junior engineers. A small-town kid will draft contracts using AI - great.

But the AI company selling that tool will eat the fee the lawyer used to charge. The kid gets a gig. The model owner gets a margin business.

The dangerous part of Sanyal framing is what it tells policymakers.

If you believe technology = democratization = problem solved, you stop asking the hard question - who captures the surplus when AI makes a ₹50 lakh/year skill available for ₹500/month?

Research already shows AI-intensive regions have falling labor income shares. India gig workforce - 7-8 million today, maybe 23 million by 2030 - is absorbing people but not building wealth.

Policy has to focus on who owns the model layer, not just who gets to use it.

This is historically illiterate. Past technologies didn't actually democratize wealth - they democratized PARTICIPATION while concentrating WEALTH at the capital and platform layers.

AI will do the same, but worse, because AI platform layer is just 5-10 companies globally.

⬇ *

https://swarajyamag.com/commentary/on-t ... technology

[Manish_Sharma]

https://x.com/TrueIndology/status/20263 ... 15434?s=20

Bihar census shows that 73% of Muslims currently enjoy reservations.

Reservations are officially meant for those within Hindu community. Most of them have been Muslims since at least 500 years and have nothing to do with Hindu society.

Why are Muslims given reservation?

https://x.com/OnlineBrahmin/status/2026 ... 16841?s=20

Your tweet captures a valid concern. if reservations were meant for Hindu caste oppression, why extend them so extensively to a community that constitutionally separated from that system centuries ago? This underscores the need for evidence based, non religious criteria to maintain equity without communal distortion.