'India woke up on January 8, to witness the largest ever strike with an estimated 25 crore (250 million) workers, employees, farmers and rural labourers stopping work and hitting the streets to protest against the Modi government’s economic policies and divisive politics. Reports coming in from various states indicate that the strike was complete in the country’s massive public sector across sectors, such as steel, coal, other mining, defence production, port & dock, oil & natural gas, telecom, power generation, etc. Ancillary industries also were mostly shut...
'The release of richest people’s lists is usually a signal for much back-slapping and triumphalism in the corporate world and its hangers on in the media. It is seen as some kind of symptom that India is doing well, people are getting wealthier, achhe din (good days) are here, although such lists are only for a 100 people (as in the case of the Forbes India list) or perhaps more (as in IIFL Hurun list), in a country of 1.3 billion people.
'...Privatisation is being introduced in diverse ways. Some public sector enterprises are earmarked for outright sale, not just loss-making ones, but even those which make handsome profits. In others, the government intends to reduce its own share of equity below 51% through disinvestment. In still others, the idea is to break up the total activity into several different individual activities and to privatise some individual activities by divesting the public sector of those; this last route is what is being followed with regard to the Railways.
'India’s sagging economic growth has finally forced the government to relax its strict fiscal deficit targets, but even that may not guarantee a recovery. On September 20, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a reduction in the country’s effective corporate tax rate from around 35% to 25%. For companies that do not avail of any other incentive or commission, the effective tax rate would be just 22%. While India’s equity markets cheered the decision, the bond markets tanked on fears that the government may now have to borrow more to meet its expenses.
'It is ironical that the Narendra Modi government, which never tires of reminding everybody about their nationalism and patriotism, is actually following an economic policy of selling off the country’s national resources to foreign companies. It recently announced measures of easing foreign direct investment (FDI) in coal mining and associated infrastructure, contract manufacturing, single brand retail and digital media.
'This week we once again heard the prime minister and finance minister speak, at a recent media house event in the capital, about how well the economy is doing. The truth is nothing can improve our economic fundamentals till public investment is sharply increased. Manipulating statistics may help manage global headlines for a while, but cannot strengthen our economic fundamentals.
'Referring to the “ethnic tensions” in the wake of controversies over beef and other issues, Moody’s Friday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi must keep BJP members in check or risk losing “losing domestic and global credibility”, reported Press Trust of India. Stating that BJP does not have a majority in Rajya Sabha to pass crucial reforms and the Opposition was being ‘obstructionist’, Moody’s Analytics said in a report that the government has also not helped itself in recent times with controversial comments from various BJP members.
"A shocking new report on the automotive sector questions whether manufacturing in India can ever deliver on its promises without offering a safe environment for workers... With the Indian auto industry – which produced 23.37 million vehicles in 2014-15 and attracted FDI of $12.2 billion between 2000 and 2015 – all set to play a central role in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to “Make in India’’, an alarming new report on shop floor injuries in the automotive sector has questioned whether “Make in India” can be successful without first ensuring that manufacturing is ‘safe in India’.
'Lawyers fighting to have Queensland’s land court stop the construction of Australia’s largest coal mine say they have made the touted economic benefits look “ridiculous” beside the risk of environmental damage. In a closing statement against the Carmichael mine proposed by Indian coal giant Adani, barrister Saul Holt told the court there had been “dramatic changes in the picture of this mine” as a result of legal proceedings brought by conservationists.
New Delhi, 2 March 2015: The Union Budget of 2015-16, the BJP government’s first full budget, has a sense of triumphalism that it ‘can fly’ because it believes that , the ‘opportunity for this exist because we (the BJP government) have created it’ over the last nine-and-a-half months. This government is taking credit for conditions and circumstances that it has nothing to do with or did not, in the remotest way, have the ability or opportunity to contribute to.
