Tags:
Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, Dec 9: While India and her political class can continue to be full of themselves, the two-day World Economic Forum (WEF) meet which concluded in the Capital today gave ample evidence of how the country continues to goof up.
At a time when the 400-odd business leaders gathered here from all over the globe were trying to tell India that its pace of reforms simply wasn’t good enough, India’s top politicians – the prime minister and to some extent, even the finance minister – kept harping on the distance the country had travelled in the last six years, all the while down-playing the distance still left to be covered.
Sure, you’ve travelled a long distance, the WEF leaders kept saying, but the fact is that other parts of the world have travelled a lot more. “China has increased the level of foreign investment from $2 billion to $42 billion in ten years, but India gets just $2.5 billion six years after its reforms. Poland expects $18 billion by the year 2000,” for example, are a few of the statistics quoted by Percy Barnevik, who heads Investor AB of Sweden which controls companies such as ABB, Saab, Astra, Ericsson, SKF and Electrolux.Several other delegates reeled similar statistics and equally embarrassing stories – most newspapers, including The Indian Express, have been reporting these over the past two days.
But since the Indian leaders refused to listen, and in some cases even understand, the WEF meet was full of embarrassing moments when the Indian side and the business leaders spoke at complete cross-purposes. Hardly the effect the government was looking for, especially since the meeting was a forum where investor-fears were to be addressed. And while that wouldn’t have mattered ordinarily, the problem was that the WEF delegates made a lot more sense.
So while most people know that the South East Asian currency crisis was not a result of too much and too fast a pace of liberalisation – incidentally, also a point made by Finance Minister P Chidambaram today – the prime minister told the audience that the South East Asian experience meant that India would have to be a lot more cautious while opening up its economy.“All these tigers are suffering from flu as they did not march forward with caution” might have sounded very good, especially from the erudite-looking Gujral, but it convinced few. Gujral scored similar talking points when he spoke of how reforms would continue since “there was a broad political consensus on this issue.”
Had any of the delegates been rude enough to question him closely, however, Gujral would have been hard-pressed to explain why the Insurance Bill fell through in the last session of Parliament, or the fact that something as innocuous as the Companies Bill hasn’t been passed for the past four years. The list of such legislation which continues to remain unattended is endless.And while Chidambaram was a lot more circumspect than the prime minister, he too chose to down-play the political situation. He termed it `dynamic instability’ which would lead to political parties taking much more well-defined stands on economic issues since the people would `no longer accept slogans, ambivalent and meaningless election manifestoes.’
Power Minister Yogendra Alagh’s presentation on how the government had cleared 31 power projects totalling to a capacity of 17,000 MW – apart from an additional 7,500 MW of projects which have already achieved financial close – was also greeted with similar scepticism by delegates who’d seen their projects hang fire for well over five years.
And not surprisingly, for while making his claims, Alagh chose to add a small rider – "You have to appreciate that after we clear a project, the issue is no longer in the hands of the government.
There’ll always be the issues of negotiation, on the tariff, on the fuel-linkage, and those take time." Tell that to the Cogentrixes and the Hindujas of the world!
