Sketching India’s Rupees 35 (?70?) trillion (lakh crore) public debt?

October 21, 2009 — drsubrotoroy

Exactly nineteen years ago, in late October 1990, I advised the then-Congress Party President Rajiv Gandhi as follows:

“The prime indicator of economic mismanagement today is not the annual deficit, but rather the vast public debt today of more than Rs. 273,000 crores (Rs.2.73 trillion). Our Government has borrowed something like Rs. 3500/- on behalf of each man, woman and child in the country — and spent it. A pile of rupee coins adding up to the public debt of India would stretch 4.55 million km into the sky, or be as long as six trips to the moon and back. That is the size of the problem….”

In recent years I have estimated the stock of India’s public debt has grown to perhaps Rs 30 trillion; after the lobbyist-induced corporate pork aka the “fiscal stimulus” since 2008, it has  perhaps risen to Rs 35 trillion, along with States’ debts, Rs  70 trillion!

[From Facebook July 31 2010

Subroto Roy reads in today’s pink business newspaper the GoI’s debt level at Rs 38 trillion &  that of each of three large states (WB, MH, UP) is at Rs 6 trillion, add another 18 for all other large states together, another 5 for all small states & 3 for errors and omissions, making my One Minute Estimate of India’s Public Debt Stock Rs 70 trillion (70 lakh crores). Interest payments at, say, 9%, keep the banking system afloat, extracting oxygen from the public finances like a cyanide capsule.]

(1 trillion = 1 lakh crore  ie. 1,000,000,000,000 = 100000,0000000)

Now when I advised Rajiv it was still early days in the IT-revolution and in fact I wrote the words quoted above on the first laptop I had ever used which was Rajiv’s own (enormous) Toshiba laptop in an office of his staff.

It was eight years before Google was launched — and now there is even something called Google Sketch which I am downloading as I write.

Today on Facebook, I have reposted this wonderful link sent by a friend of a Google Sketch of what one trillion dollars (or one lakh crore dollars) looks like:

Ten thousand dollars:

packet

1million dollars (i.e. ten lakh dollars):

pile

100 million dollars (i.e. ten crore dollars):

pallet

One billion dollars (i.e. one hundred crore dollars):

pallet_x_10

One trillion dollars (i.e. one lakh crore dollars):

pallet_x_10000

So much for dollars.

May I ask someone to use this link and this one to re-sketch India’s public debt, of perhaps Rs 35 70 trillion, and annual interest-payments, at perhaps 9% per annum on average? (Before the next “Budget” please…)

Subroto Roy

Postscript: Of course, most of this exists intangibly as deposits or accounting-entries, not as tangible cash, but it is fun anyway — and an illustrative way to explain things to politicians and citizens.

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Posted in Government accounting, Government Budget Constraint, India's Big Business, India's Government economists, India's 1991 Economic Reform, India's Budget, India's Government Budget Constraint, India's Government Expenditure, India's Macroeconomics, India's Monetary & Fiscal Policy, India's political lobbyists, India's pork-barrel politics, India's Public Finance, Public Choice/Public Finance, Rajiv Gandhi. Leave a Comment »