The Technocratic Government of India

 

So what exactly is a technocrat anyway?

Destined to save our economy and our country, we Indians have been graced with the appearance of a technocratic government since last seven years, where economist Dr. Manmohan Singh (PhD) has been the prime minister. As the hero of our day – the UPA technocratic government - is largely unknown to many of our people, we summon a brief dialogue on technocratic government

Q: What's a technocratic government?

A: To answer this question we first need to be clear about how governments are formed in parliamentary systems. First - in a parliamentary system, the government must be approved by the parliament. Often this will require the agreement of more than one political party, resulting in a coalition of parties to support the government. As part of this "coalition agreement", the heads of ministries (or what are ‘Ministers’) are allocated to the different parties, who place representatives from their parties as the heads of their respective ministries. Moreover, the parties agree on a "Prime Minister" to head the government, usually but not always from the largest party in the coalition. Most of the time, the identity of this "Prime Minister" - conditional on election results - is known during the election campaign.

Q: Ok, so what's really a technocratic government?

A: Technically, a technocratic government is one in which the ministers are not career politicians; in fact, in some cases they may not even be elected members of parliament at all. They are instead supposed to be "experts" in the fields of their respective ministries. So the classic example is that the Finance Minister would be someone with an academic background in economics who had worked for years at the IMF, but has not previously run for elective office or been heavily involved in election campaigns.

Q: Is it required for the Prime Minister also to be a "technocrat"?

A: Not necessarily. You could have a prime minister from a major party who heads a technocratic government (i.e., most of the ministers meet the definition laid out above), or you could have a technocratic prime minister as well. In the current UPA government, the Prime Minister is both a technocrat and an economist. [To be clear: there is nothing in the definition of a technocratic government that requires it be led by an economist!]

Q: Why did the UPA appoint a technocratic Prime Minister, two times in a row?

A: The practical reason is often because a government has lost the support of the people who elect them to parliament, but also for various other reasons (including legal, pragmatic or political). If the parties in the parliament can't agree to form a normal government, then sometimes they can all agree to support a technocratic government. Just to make things even more complicated, it is possible to have a ‘partisan caretaker prime minister’ (which is basically what is going on in India right now), which then would not be known as a technocratic government, but instead is often called a "lame duck government".

Q: So why would elected politicians ever turn over power to unelected technocrats? Doesn't that go against the facts of everything we think we know about politicians: that they are above all else interested in holding elected office for self gain?

A: This brings us to the crux of the matter in terms of current developments. What seems to be going on is that a "received wisdom" is developing that only technocratic governments can carry out the "painful reforms necessary" to save our country. The theory here is that no major party is going to want to pay the costs of instituting painful policies alone. If this is the case, then one way around this predicament is to appoint a technocratic government that is not "of" any party but is supported by all the parties. In this way, blame can essentially be shared, and government can do the right thing, whatever that may be.

Q: Does it work?

A: Does anyone know?. First, politicians are not particularly good at "sharing blame", which will make the temptation for any of a number of major parties to undercut the technocratic government for political gains. Second, even if mainstream parties get behind a technocratic government, that doesn't mean fringe parties will as well. Indeed, a technocratic government supported by all of the mainstream parties seems a perfect recipe for the rise of non-mainstream parties.

Q: OK, but even with those caveats, technocratic government still sounds pretty good! Why doesn't everyone have one?

A: Well, there is this one small problem, which is that in a democracy; people are supposed to elect their rulers. Since, by definition, a technocratic government does not get elected for office, it is hard to call a country with a technocratic government, a democracy. Instead, we have a system where the people only get to vote for people that they send into Parliament; who then get to decide on who the real leaders of the government will be.

Q: Will technocratic governments save India?

A: The UPA made it possible for certain policies to be implemented in the short-term. But India’s longer-term problems are going to need to be solved (or not solved) by India’s elected officials. Democracy is about accountability. While UPA has made it possible to duck accountability, long-term policies are going to have been enacted - or at the very least maintained - by elected officials. The UPA technocratic government has failed miserably on most accounts and will never be an effective Government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

Mumbai's illegal hawkers and the corrupt money economy.

All the citizens of Mumbai are fed-up with the growing number of illegal hawkers taking over all the foot-paths and open spaces of Mumbai city. The Municipal Corporation and police and the various political parties seem weak and unable to stop this menace. And it is a menace of huge proportions because most of the hawkers are from Bangladesh.

So, why is the Government so weak and ineffective in front of these illegal immigrants? It’s the money, big amounts of money.


A rather unscientific survey in 2010 – 11, states that Mumbai has more than 8 lakh (800 thousand) illegal hawkers spread over 227 municipal wards. These hawkers pay off the Police, the municipal officers and the local political parties for the right to occupy our city’s foot-paths & open spaces. Payment is either daily (for floating hawkers who move from ward to ward) to weekly payments by those who set up stalls either during rush hours or specific days of the week. Semi – permanent and almost permanent stall owners / operators pay on monthly basis and in some cases of large turnover, on a profit sharing basis.

These amounts of payments range from as little as Rs. 2000 ($ 42) to Rs. 50,000 ($ 1064); on a monthly basis.

Assuming an average amount of Rs 5,000 per hawker per month for 800 thousand hawkers; the monthly corrupt money economy is Rupees 40 Crores ($ 85 million) which works out to Rs 480 Crores ($ One hundred million plus) per year.

This entire amount bypasses the City Treasury and makes its way straight to the pockets of those who are supposed to stop this illegal activity. This is the reason that the illegal hawkers menace is not controlled or stopped by the Government officials. It’s their “super income” and it is fully tax free.

And who are the real culprits behind this menace? We, the People. It is we, the people who buy goods from these illegal hawkers at cheaper than store prices and think that we are being smart. But in reality, we are the idiots who lose a lot, to gain a little.

Congress Party's pathetic attempt towards Censorship... Again

 

Times of India reports that Union Minister Kapil Sibal has been in talks with Internet social media companies to put in place a monitoring mechanism. On Monday (05 Dec), the telecom & IT minister met executives from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to discuss the issue.

The executives were shown content which could allegedly hurt religious sensibilities and obscene images of Indian political leaders.

But the reality seems that Kapil Sibal is more concerned about the negative image of his master(s) Sonia Gandhi & Rahul Gandhi.

The New York Times reported that about six weeks ago Sibal called legal representatives from the top internet service providers and Facebook into his office and showed them a Facebook page that maligned Congress president Sonia Gandhi. "This is unacceptable," he said, reported an executive.

How dare Sibal say that critisism of Sonia Gandhi is unacceptable? Is she above the law or does the Minister think that the law of freedom of expression in India is a slave to the whims & fancies of the Congress party?

Sibal wants the above companies to appoint people to screen content before it is uploaded, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted. THIS IS CENSORSHIP.

Assuming that Minister Sibal is acting on the instructions of his bosses to curtail our freedom of expression, let us respond by a scathing critisism against him & his party all over the internet.

The net cannot be controlled by politicians who want to censor the right to free speech just for their self-survival; and it is time this point was made clear to them in the most direct fashion.

Wal - Mart Overview

 

Wal-Mart, the biggest American retailer, has a huge impact not only on the local economy but on the global one as well. The company’s strategy of having the lowest prices (which is not always necessarily true) seems to have much more implications than people think. The fact is that a low cost for a Wal-Mart customer is actually a higher cost for many other stakeholders, mainly referring to the American economy.

Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to discover and leverage the power of information that is hidden in the barcode of every product on their shelves. The black and white stripes hold an encyclopedia of information, from tracking sales throughout the time to product and inventory information. This gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage, making it an efficiency machine: it allowed to speed up deliveries from plants to shelves (Wal - Mart has a high turnover and low inventories). In this way, Wal-Mart became a world leader in logistics, giving them the edge to change the way goods are produced: a shift from “push production” to “pull production” where the retailer is the one making the decisions– the manufacturer is being told what and when to produce.

An interesting story refers to the relationship between Rubbermaid and Wal-Mart. Changes in the market made Wal-Mart Rubbermaid’s most important customer since it significantly contributed to its growth in a very short period of time. Their relationship went well until the moment when the price of a production material went up. Wal-Mart, a strictly cost focusing company, did not accept the price increase for the Rubbermaid products, which lead to less shelf space for the supplier. This case reflects the risks a supplier takes when focusing too much on a single customer with such a big market share. Having such a high negotiation power, Wal-Mart can always go for the best deal, most of the times bargaining for an amount as low as 20 paise.

Lately, the markets have become more and more competitive among the suppliers in their quest of getting on retailers’ shelves. China, the world’s supermarket for the production market, has a lot to do with Wal-Mart’s strategy to keep costs as low as possible. 90% of Wal-Mart’s suppliers are Chinese. In order to sell in a Wal-Mart, a supplier has to be very competitive in finding ways of cutting costs. In most of the cases, the place where that is possible is actually China.
The bottom line is that Wal-Mart offers consumers a wide range of products at very low prices at the expense of putting local people out of work and lowering living standards.