My 200 words on India’s Naxal guerrilla rebels that a “leading business magazine” invited but then found too hot to handle

April 26, 2010 — drsubrotoroy

“Public finances in India, state and Union, show appalling accounting and lack of transparency. Vast amounts of waste, fraud and malfeasance get hidden as a result. The Congress, BJP, official communists, socialists et al are all culpable for this situation having developed – over decades. So if you ask me, “Is the Indian state and polity in a healthy condition?” I would say no, it is pretty rotten. Well-informed, moneyed, mostly city-based special interest groups (especially including organised capital and organised labour) dominate government agendas at the cost of ill-informed, diffused masses of anonymous individual citizens ~ peasants, forest-dwellers, small businessmen, non-unionized workers, the destitute, etc. Demarcations of private, community and public property rights frequently remain fuzzy. Inflation causes non-paper assets to rise in value, encouraging land-grabs. And the fetish over purported growth-rates continues despite measurements being faulty, not reaching UN SNA standards, probably hiding increasing inequalities. India’s polity and economy are in poor shape for many millions of ordinary people. Armed rebellion, however, does not follow from this. Killing poor policemen and starting class-wars were failed Naxal tactics in the 1970s and remain so today. Naxals should put down their weapons and use Excel sheets and government accounting data instead.

Dr Subroto Roy, economist and adviser to Rajiv Gandhi 1990-1991.”

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Posted in Accounting and audit, Agriculture, Communists, Economics of Public Finance, Government of India, India's agriculture, India's communists, India's Land, India's mob violence, India's Naxal guerrilla rebels, India's nomenclatura, India's peasants, India's political lobbyists, India's pork-barrel politics, India's Public Finance, India's State Finances, India's Union-State relations. Leave a Comment »

A Small Challenge to the RBI’s Governor Subbarao

April 21, 2010 — drsubrotoroy

The Hon’ble Gov of the Reserve Bank of India Shri D Subbarao

Dear Governor Subbarao,

You said yesterday, April 20 2010, that the Reserve Bank of India has a macroeconomic model which it uses but which you had personally not seen.

I have given two lectures at your august offices, one by invitation of Governor Jalan and Deputy Governor Reddy on April 29 2000 to address the Conference of State Finance Secretaries, the other on May 5 2005 to  address the Chief Economist’s Monetary Economics Seminar.  On both occasions, I had inquired of the RBI’s own models by which I could contrast my own but came to understand there were none.

If since then the RBI has now constructed a macroeconomic model of India’s economy, it is splendid news.

May I request the model be released publicly on the Internet at once, so its specifications of endogenous and exogenous variables, assumed coefficients, and sources of time-series data all may be seen by everyone in the country and abroad?  Scientific scrutiny and replication of results would thus come to be permitted.

I would be especially interested to know the demand for money function that you have used.   I well remember my meeting with the late great Sukhamoy Chakravarty on July 14 1987 at his Planning Commission offices, when he signed and gifted me his last personal copy of the famous Reserve Bank report by the committee he had chaired  and  of which he told me personally Dr Rangarajan had been the key author – that report may have contained the first official discussion of the demand for money function in India.

With cordial regards

Subroto Roy

Posted in Academic economics, Academic research, Government of India, India's Government economists, India's Banking, India's bureaucracy, India's Economic History, India's Economy, India's Government Budget Constraint, India's Government Expenditure, India's inflation, India's Macroeconomics, India's Monetary & Fiscal Policy, India's Reserve Bank, Sukhamoy Chakravarty. 1 Comment »