Week’s reading Round-up - 1

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading this week, which might be of interest to our readers:

a)      Kaushik  Basu’s  review of economist Arvind Virmani’s works

b)      ‘Suddenly Susan’, a nice piece on author Sigrid Nunez’s experiences when she lived in with Susan Sontag’s son, sharing an apartment in New York with the legendary literary critic.

c)       An insightful essay, that reviews four books on the last wall street crisis, by Jonathan Kirshner. The author also describes why we can soon expect the next crisis. And while on the financial crisis, Michael Hardt argues for ‘reclaiming the common in communism’.

d)      A report on the conditions in one of China’s largest electronic gadget manufacturing firm, that contains this chilling paragraph:

The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in less than a year died here. They carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

e)      Lastly, Tehelka has a nice pictorial summary of the 2G scam.

The Billion Dollar Question

Thomas Friedman asks the 110 Billion $ question:

When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask: What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?

Urging for a pullout from the Af-Pak quagmire, Friedman suggests a use for the 110 Billion USD:

The truth is we can’t do much to consolidate the democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia. They’ll have to make it work themselves. But we could do what we can, which is divert some of the $110 billion we’re lavishing on the Afghan regime and the Pakistani Army and use it for debt relief, schools and scholarships to U.S. universities for young Egyptians and Tunisians who had the courage to take down the very kind of regimes we’re still holding up in Kabul and Islamabad.

PS: While on Pakistan, also read this hard-hitting piece by an op-ed editor at Pakistan’s Daily Times. Ms. Sarfaraz, the author of the piece, hopes for sane voices to arise from Pakistan.

Lest we Indians gloat over Pakistan’s descent into anarchy and chaos, let us remember that the killers in the various riots (1984 New Delhi, 1992 Bombay riots and 2002 Gujarat pogrom) not only roam free, but hold important central and state level posts. As a version of old wisecrack goes: if you kill one person, you might be arrested (assuming you are not a politician or related to one). If you organize the killings of thousands, you get to be a minister.

Cash transfers: who is right?

Cash transfers to the poor have long divided the opinion makers in India. This year’s union budget takes baby steps towards cash transfers to the poor. In a corrupt country like India, any government scheme is bound to be sucked dry by the corrupt administrators and the various mafia, so cash transfers seem to be the least damaging endowment policy. However, it has already raised the heckles of the left-leaning intellectuals. Members of the National Advisory Council, the most powerful decision-making body in the country today, are against the mechanism, citing various reasons from encouragement of free-market profiteering to wrong targeting. Right-leaning intellectuals, of course, are heavily in favor of cash transfers, saying it’s the only way a welfare scheme can survive the tsunami of corruption.

Here are two sane views from each sides: Jayati Ghosh argues against (while maintaining that the transfers should supplement, not replace public provision of goods and services), while Samar Haralankar argues for cash transfers (while building a solid case for having the necessary infrastructure like UID in place before the roll-out). Expect more heat and debates on the topic in the coming months and years.

Dummies at play

Ramchandra Guha laments the ‘absence of vigorous, credible, state-level leaders’ at the Congress party:

"Things were once otherwise. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, the Congress had strong, capable, and focused CMs — among them S Nijalingappa in Karnataka (then known as Mysore), K Kamaraj in Tamil Nadu (then Madras), BC Roy in West Bengal, and YB Chavan in Maharashtra. They successfully won elections and ran governments.

Now, in states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, there is no one, identifiable, Congress leader. Five or six senior men jostle for position, their precedence varying from month to month depending on the winks and nods of the high command. In other states the situation is even more dire."

It is one of the ever-lasting ironies of Indian politics that the Congress party, run in an autocratic and presidential manner at the center, prevents strong leaders at the state level. This was one of Indira Gandhi’s Big Ideas: to plant mediocre dummies at the state level. The idea was a runaway success. The senior  Mrs. Gandhi started her career pitted against formidable leaders at the union and the state level. At her demise, no one in the party dared oppose her or her son.

Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s Big Idea has been to copy her mother-in-law and at the center as well: not even Dr. Singh’s greatest admirers can charge him of being strong-willed (except during the passage of the Nuclear deal) . Aso, Mrs. Gandhi seems intent packing the union government with ordinary, pedestrian journeymen like Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushil Kumar Shinde, CP Joshi and MS Gill. Mr. Guha’s comment thus applies at the center as well.

PS: Prem Shankar Jha argues that we must judge Dr. Singh ‘not by what he has been saying but by what he has done’. Unfortunately he builds his case by citing token actions, like the arrest of A Raja, and a questioning of the junior Ambani. With the Supreme Court’s action yesterday striking down the appointment of the CVC, the PM’s position has further weakened. Tokenism won’t help here.

(Ramchandra Guha article link via Churmuri).

Need versus Greed

Jeffery Sachs paints a grim scenario of the days to come:

There is something else hidden from view that is very dangerous. In many populous parts of the world, including the grain-growing regions of northern India, northern China, and the American Midwest, farmers are tapping into groundwater to irrigate their crops. The great aquifers that supply water for irrigation are being depleted. In some places in India, the water table has been falling by several meters annually in recent years. Some deep wells are approaching the point of exhaustion, with salinity set to rise as ocean water infiltrates the aquifer.

A calamity is inevitable unless we change. And here is where Gandhi comes in. If our societies are run according to the greed principle, with the rich doing everything to get richer, the growing resource crisis will lead to a widening divide between the rich and the poor – and quite possibly to an increasingly violent struggle for survival.

He also writes about the colonization of Africa by the big nations:

An analogous power grab is being attempted in Africa. The rise in food prices is leading to a land grab, as powerful politicians sell foreign investors massive tracts of farmland, brushing aside the traditional land rights of poor smallholders. Foreign investors hope to use large mechanized farms to produce output for export, leaving little or nothing for the local populations.

India’s own land grab in Africa is also described, in vivid detail, in a masterful essay by Rana Dasgupta on Delhi, and can be read here.