Our reforms clamour: pining of the naive?

For many months now, I have been reading with much amusement the statements of India's top business leaders and best brains voicing their concern about the near-stalling of the economic reforms process. Some of them talk about the present PM being the fther of economic reforms and find the current situtation an irony. A person can't take such a line of thought seriously beyond a certain point. If you consider the popularly acknowledged reforms flag-off point of late-June 1991, you also need to know that it was a flag-off out of compulsion rather than love for reforms. India's precarious forex reserve situation is well-documented as well as its other woes. India had little choice but to do the things it had to do to get IMF assistance. That is also how Manmohan Singh who was the secretary general of South Commission headed by former Tanzanian president Julius Nyrere suddenly found himself as India's finance minister and in the hot seat, talking and doing things that completely went against his intellectual and other leanings. In fact, many leftist economists accused Manmohan Singh of being "intellectually dishonest", a charge he took pains to defend himself against. What is also forgotten is that the V.P.Singh, Janta Dal and Chandrashekhar governments kept sitting on the decision to go for the IMF loan letting the economy go for a tailspin--in the backdrop of the first Gulf War of 1990 as Iraq invaded Kuwait and later was attacked by US and NATO-- even as they went overdrive working out their political fortunes in the backdrop of Mandal disturbances and BJP's Rath Yatra. If you need evidence you could go through the archives of Business India magazine during that period. It may sound terrible but unless pushed to the wall, we can't really expect a reforms burst from ths government. Neither do we have across the spectrum political consensus that gives these issues primacy nor do we have a leadership that can muscle the agenda  through.

Worldwide, in democracies, in the first two years of a government's term, one finds the boldest moves since the governments are high on confidence since they have just got the people's mandate. They go slow subsequently since they want to get re-elected and thus prepare the ground for it by populist measures and or paying lip service to some reform measures. What I find odd in case of UPA-II is that they have screeched to a halt very early on. Can they break this typical trend of democatic governments? Time will tell.      

An Export Scam?

It is difficult to be in Delhi and not to get to know whispers or chats about some scam or the other. More so if you are a journalist. Coming on the back of so many outbreaks of scams, I think now definitely it is a case of a scam overload. A recent short chat with a few journalist aquaintances and I come to know about something new. Apparently, there is a huge amount of unaccounted foreign money of India's big daddies and fat cats is coming into the country and then being laundered through export over-invoicing. Knowledgeable people, it seems, are all in the know. Of course, this only proves how dumb and ill-informed I am! The argument is that this is the reason for our recent rocking export growth figures, even in times of global slowdown. What about hard evidence? None. But anybody who knows how our export-import machinery and people function will not find it difficult to believe this allegation. But then other countries also do these things. Export and import figures of countries don't match with those of other countries--some people told me and they cite IMF on this. With stocks and realty markets down, this could be the new trick for money laundering. In this season of scam-exposing, I wouldn't be too surprised if some evidence got suddnely uncovered.