Rational Expectations

I8217;m willing to bet that once the current hijacking saga gets over, and anot-her crisis hits us acirc;euro;ldquo; it surely will acirc;euro;ldquo; we8217;ll forget all about this one. At most, if for some reason public opinon is cussed en-ough to demand that some heads roll, civil aviation secretaryRavindra Gupta will probably be transferred for not informing the Prime Minister and the Un-ion minister for Civil Aviation of the hijacking as soon as it happened. Gupta, of course, could also get promoted in the bargain, just the same way that N.K. Si-ngh managed to get a plum posting in the Prime Minister8217;s Office when he was removed from the finance ministry for his obvious bungling of the petrol price hike two years ago. It8217;s possible that a few heads may also roll at the Amritsar airport, for their failure to act fast decisively, though this seems unlikely.

This is probably a lousy way to begin a millennium piece, but the crux of the matter is that, as a country, we just do-n8217;t have a coherent organisational resp-onse to just about anything. Forget the escalator trage-dy, how did we respond to the Upha-ar fire deaths in the capital, the pandal fire in Dabwali in Haryana, or the on-ion or the sugar cr-ises?

Simple: we got very agitated while they were top-of-mind recall, and then just forgot allabout them. Buildings in most major cities and wedding pandals continue to court death, as before. And, no we haven8217;t still realised that the crux of the onion and sugar crises, are lopsided government policies. Similarly, apart from an element of corruption, the crux of various scams we8217;ve seen in the last decade 8212; Harshad Mehta, the Vanishing Companies, among others 8212; has been that the organisations in charge of these sectors have not been able to come up with an adequate response to the crises at hand. Surely there8217;s a serious problem if, for instance, SEBI takes over a year, to be able to piece toge-ther the trail of those who blatantly rigged the prices of companies such as BPL, St-erlite and Videocon? Or the fact that the average delay at the BIFR is a whopping two years and 20 days.

And why blame the government alo-ne for this tepid response to any crisis 8212; including the hijacking one. How many of us, either as individuals or as the corporates we work for, has gone through even rudimentary firedrills, or knows the basics of basic cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, the ve-ry first thing you need to deal with tra-uma cases in fires or road accidents?

Ironically, at the same time, corpor-ate India is booming as never before. Eight of the country8217;s 10 richest busine-ssmen are those whose firms are kn-owledge8217; ones, or engaged in infotech, pharmaceuticals or the media business. Many are names we8217;d never even heard of a little over a year ago. And while it would be foolish to expect that just ab-out anyone can emulate Rajesh Jain and sell his 5-year old net8217; startup to Sa-tyam for Rs 500 crore, the fact is that the net8217; opportunity has imparted a totally new impetus to Indian enterprise. With venture capitalists desperately looking for winning ideas to back, money8217;s not a constraint either, and the business field is truly level today. The sharp spurt in mergers and acquisitions over the past two months is yet another sign of the buoyancy in corporate India.And, as the latest report of the WorldEconomic Forum of Davos fame points out, India8217;s economic reforms have begun to yield definite results. Sure, India lags in terms of competitiveness it is the 52nd of 59 countries and its poor infrastructure, but these are historical problems that take a decade to fix in even developed countries. What8217;s important, is the sharp improvement in India8217;s ranking on bureaucratic delays. India was ranked 45th in terms of the time spent by senior corporate executives in dealing with government in 1997, it8217;s today ranked 29th on the same scale. So, Indian enterprise is today relatively free to just concentrate on its job.

If so much good is happening, then what8217;s the problem? The problem is that unless the country8217;s institutions begin functioning efficiently, just a few Rajesh Jains will flower, but that8217;s all. With the country set back by a few years with each crises, clearly its full potential will never get realised.

You kn-ow what they said about Henry Kis-singer 8212; he wanted to become this greatarchitect of US foreign policy, but ended up a plumber, just plugging perpetual crises and leaks.