New Delhi, November 28: For journalists covering the annual CII-WEF jamboree in New Delhi and the few hundred businessmen who participate in it year after year, it's becoming a bit of a bore, a dialogue of the deaf and the dumb. The first evening of the three-day jamboree, always a Sunday, begins with either the Prime Minister or Finance Minister (this year, both) telling the forum how well India has done compared to the Hindu-rate-of-growth days; the very next session (on Monday) has World Economic Forum Managing Director Claude Smadja speaking of how India's in deep trouble, that its massive efforts pale into insignificance when compared to changes other economies are making!Other permanent fixtures, such as Investor AB (which owns ABB) Chairperson Percy Barnevik, are very polite to government officials, but as this year,,they talk of how India is competing with `moving targets' - an indirect way of saying other economies are liberalising very fast.This year's meet, to the extent that you like seeing the same script being enacted on the same stage year after year, held no disappointments. Aware of how the 15th meet was following a familiar script, Smadja prefaced his remarks yesterday by apologising for sounding like `an old record playing the same old song', and then explained why expecting the Indian economy to grow at an 8-9 per cent rate - both the PM and the FM kept bragging about this new target - was not in the domain of economics, but of theology!If, he explained, you have a combined fiscal deficit - of the centre, the states and the PSUs - which is 12 per cent of GDP, your savings and investment rates have to be low; India's investment levels have fallen from 28 per cent of GDP in 1990-91 to 23 per cent last year; and when investments aren't happening, growth has to be low.On Sunday, Yashwant Sinha told an incredulous audience that the bureaucracy was no longer a problem, that it was there to help investors(!), that industrialists no longer needed to come to any of the (Shastri) Bhawans for any kind of clearances, so where was the problem? Today, at a lunch on foreign investment, Coca Cola India's chief Alex von Behr poked extensive holes in what Sinha said. Of course, the diplomatic von Behr never once mentioned Sinha by name.The Coke chief was clearly upset that excise tariffs on carbonated drinks are the highest at 32 per cent (at the same level as tobacco, pan masala and alcohol), but here's what else he said: investors have to spend between six and nine months to get the 40-plus different licenses/approvals they need from more than 15 different central and state agencies to set up any `non-controversial' manufacturing operation. Franchising a fast food chain requires 221 approvals; it took four years for getting government approval to manufacture margarine, three years for making flavoured tea.But not all government spokespersons were as blase about India's progress - Montek Ahluwalia spoke of how India's record was half-empty-half-full, but made it sound like half-full was full enough. Prafulla Kumar, the additional secretary from the surface transport ministry, won silent admiration when he said he was also impatient with the pace of change, but that he was retiring soon; or when he said that the department had asked for some special system to be installed on the national highways, ``but the way the government works, we haven't got clearance so far.''Investors such as Barnevik and Smadja spoke extensively of how India was getting just $2 billion of foreign investment (the third year of consecutive fall from $3.7 bn in 1997) which is a fraction of that received in not just China but even smaller countries. They spoke of how the 1,00,000 MW of private power project proposals under three per cent had materialised. And of how, according to an AT Kearney survey of investors, just 14 per cent of MNCs said they were more likely to invest in India as compared to China - 56 per cent said the opposite.But who's bothered? The industrialists said what they felt, the government said what it wanted, and both agreed at the end to have joint groups to resolve problems. An innocent (or polite?) foreigner, Barnevik spoke of this as a major step forward at the closing session today. He obviously never heard Anil Ambani at an earlier session saying, ``We're tired of giving good advice - so many of our reports are on the internet as well - let's implement them now.''PS: Don't forget to register yourself for the next jamboree, at Davos first, and then in New Delhi.
