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I had a strange dream the other night.
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I had been called to the PMO for dinner with the Prime Minister.
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Modiji was there, Jaitley ji was there, Hasmukh Bhai was there.
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Modiji was at his hospitable best, starting me off with some cheese and white wine.
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He told me, we don't serve red wine.
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Anyway, once I was suitably lubricated, Modiji leaned forward and said,
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Amit, you are the economic commentator I respect most in this country.
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From day one of demonetization, you got it right.
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You wrote about what a disaster it was.
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For many years, you have been the wisest one.
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So now tell me, oh great soul, oh fountain of knowledge,
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what is the state of the economy like in India?
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I replied, Namo, bro, I got to be honest with you, things are a mess.
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Demon screwed the informal sector and small businesses.
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GST with all these slabs and exemptions, even worse.
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Red tape has gone up, compliance is hard.
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A new Inspector Raj is being unleashed.
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Exporters are suffering, small businesses are suffering.
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Then he said, this bloody economy.
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I have such great speech writers and social media trolls.
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And still the economy is not doing well.
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It baffles me, I need food.
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Jaitleyji rang a bell and an eminent economist wearing a waiter's uniform walked in.
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Kya lao sir, whatever you want, I will bring it for you.
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Modiji whispered something in his ear.
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I couldn't quite make out what he said.
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And then he elaborated,
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And make sure it's medium rare.
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Hare Modiji, I said, what is it that you are eating?
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Modiji said, Amit, my boy, why so serious?
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We all worship in our own way.
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host Amit Varma.
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Welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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In today's episode, I want to do a round up of the state of the Indian economy.
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Now, the economy is not doing very well.
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And many of the things wrong with it are the unseen effects of demonetization and GST.
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Before I bring in my guest for today,
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I want to spend a little while talking about each of these.
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As Modiji mentioned in my dream,
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I have been writing against demon from day one in publications like the Times of India and the Hindu Business Line.
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The second episode of the scene and the unseen was on demonetization.
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My guest in that was Suyash Rai.
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You can check out the archives at sceneunseen.in.
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Some people say that demon was a good idea that was implemented badly.
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This is nonsense. It was a terrible idea from the start.
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This is mainly because it was not an attack on high denomination notes to begin with.
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In 1978, when the last demonetization happened,
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the notes that were demonetized were only 0.6% of the notes in circulation.
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They were basically used to store money and not to actually spend it.
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By contrast, this time 1000 rupee and 500 rupee notes constituted 86% of the money supply
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and are used by the common man for daily transactions.
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Modiji may not have bought something from a store for a couple of decades
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and probably didn't know this sitting in his ivory tower.
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And from the insider accounts I have heard,
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he also didn't consult any of the eminent economists who worked with him.
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Anyway, so overnight there was a shortage of cash
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and hundreds of millions of people had to queue up for hours
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to get a hand on their own money.
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This was easily the largest assault on property rights in human history.
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The informal sector depends on cash and was crippled by this.
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Small businesses everywhere were hurt.
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And as expected, our GDP growth rate suffered as well.
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Demon was supposed to attack black money,
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but it was estimated at the time that only 6% of the black money was stored in the form of cash.
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And even that got neatly laundered.
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Basically, demonetization crippled our economy and achieved absolutely nothing.
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For more details on this, do listen to my February episode on this with Suresh Rai at www.seenunseen.in.
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I have done two episodes in GST, first with Devangshu Datta and then with Vivek Kaul.
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My episode with Devangshu happened before GST was implemented.
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And Devangshu warned that if there were too many slabs and exemptions,
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it might defeat the whole purpose.
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Vivek did an episode with me after GST was implemented,
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and the problems with it were exactly as Devangshu had feared.
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Too many slabs and exemptions that made it the opposite of a good and simple tax.
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Indeed, there were now so many regulations that compliance was hard and time consuming,
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and observers feared that a new Inspector Raj may well be on the way.
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Anyway, my guest on the show today is Vivek Kaul himself,
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a prolific author and columnist for Equity Master,
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and, much to my good fortune, a frequent guest on the Scene in the Unseen.
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Vivek, welcome back to the show.
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Thanks, Amit, for having me over.
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So, Vivek, you've been writing about the economy four or five times a week, more than that.
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You write so many columns and are prolific across so many websites,
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besides the work you do for Equity Master.
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And, you know, for the last few months you've been coming up with the most detailed, updated reports on what's been going on.
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What is the state of the Indian economy right now?
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I mean, we're probably in the worst state that we have been in almost one and a half years.
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I mean, the last, the GDP data that came out for the period April to June 2017,
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the growth was at 5.7%.
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Now, what this figure does not tell you is that this growth was pumped up
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because of, you know, a dramatic increase in government expenditure.
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So, if you strip out the government part of the economy,
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which typically tends to be around 9 to 10%, but now is around 13%,
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the non-government part of the economy grew by around 4.3%,
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which is very, very worrying.
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And it's fallen from around, it's come down from around 9% as of March 2016 to around 4.3%.
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From 9% to 4.3%. So, just put this in context for me.
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Typically, what is the kind of growth rate for any given quarter that we've been experiencing over the last few years?
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Okay. So, this, you know, we grew by around 9% as of March 2016.
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And after that, you know, the growth has started to fall.
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And to take you a little further back, what was it like during the UPA's time, for example?
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So, you really cannot compare because, okay, the UPA for the last three years,
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you know, we have data from around, I'll tell you, we have data from January, no, from March 2012.
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So, the growth was around 5% to 6%.
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Before that, we do not have data because, you know, we moved on to a new GDP series in January 2015.
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And for that, you know, the data is available only from 2012 onwards.
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Right. So, I'm trying to get a sense of how the economy reacted after the Modi government took power in 2014.
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So, basically, you know, the initial response was good.
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And then, you know, somewhere in early 2016, the growth started to come down.
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Right. And also, one way in which the Modi government has been very lucky is with oil prices.
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I mean, you've written, you wrote a piece for this on the website.
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I added praghati at thinkpraghati.com on how a lot of the good economic figures under this government
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have come fortuitously because the oil prices happened to be really low.
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Actually, you know, as Amit Shah said, because of technical reasons.
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So, I mean, so the way it is, you know, imports are a negative entry into the GDP formula.
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Right. So, if oil prices fall, your oil imports in dollar terms or in rupee terms also fall.
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Right. So, the moment that happens, your GDP goes up automatically.
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So, as Mr. Shah said, due to technical reasons.
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So, this is exactly where these technical reasons come in.
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So, now, going back into the last 18 months or so since, you know, the last year and a half,
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what has been happening in the economy?
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See, you know, one factor which is people have gradually started to realize
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and which they were not realizing earlier is the fact that we are not creating enough jobs.
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Okay, there are estimates suggest that around a million Indians are entering the workforce every month.
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And we've done a podcast on this previously where we discussed it.
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So, and you know, the problem is that this is now, I mean, it's coming to the fore wherein,
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you know, the media is writing about it and people are talking about it.
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But nothing seems to be happening, you know, around it on the government front.
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I mean, the entire, you know, the explanations that are coming from the government
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seem to be telling us that all is well and, you know, we don't need to worry,
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which isn't really true because the numbers don't show that.
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Right. And how would you sum up the impact of demonetization to begin with and then GST and the economy?
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For example, typically, it takes a long, long time for all the relevant data to actually get in.
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And what complicates this further, obviously, is that demon affected the informal sector really hard
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and their data itself is a problem to begin with.
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So, how do you begin to estimate what the impact is? What do we have so far?
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So, you know, a lot of data has started to come in.
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So, the first thing I would like to say is, you know, if you look at the crash in food prices,
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the major reason for that is demonetization because most of the agriculture trade in India worked on cash.
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And the moment that cash was taken out of the system, the buying and selling simply stopped.
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And farmers had to sort of sell their produce at very, very low prices.
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So, one of the stories that minted was about this farmer who had to sell his, you know,
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he had grown potatoes this year and this was sometime in March.
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And he had to sell his potatoes for as low as nine paisa a kg.
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Whereas, it takes around three rupees to produce one kg of potato. That's one part.
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The second part is if you look at the crash in, you know, the price of pulses.
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So, you know, what has been, so, you know, we need to understand as to how does a farmer
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actually decide what to produce in a given year.
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You know, he basically looks at the prices, you know, last year and then he decides.
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So, you know, the price of pulses have been going up for a while.
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So, this season there was a huge increase in production of pulses, but there were no buyers.
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And no buyers because basically no cash essentially.
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So, now, then if you remember, you know, the price of tomatoes crossed 100 rupees a kg.
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Now, how did that happen? That happened because, you know, there was a bumper crop of tomatoes
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in November, December and because there was no cash in the system, the prices crashed.
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So, once the prices crashed for the next cycle, the farmers simply decided not to, you know,
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grow any tomatoes. So, because of that the prices went up.
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So, if, you know, so, you know, if you were to sort of extend the tomato example into pulses,
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my guess is next year, you know, but the price of pulses will go up again
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because farmers this year will not plot as much as, you know, they did last year.
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And are minimum support prices relevant to pulses?
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Not really. Minimum support prices are basically relevant to only rice and wheat.
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Then there is a third, another kind of price which is set.
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I think it's called fair and remunerative price, which is set in case of sugar cane.
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So, that's a different story altogether.
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So, just to kind of demystify this, would it then be that because there was a massive reduction
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in the money supply, so to say, that had a deflationary effect?
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So, now, you know, just to sort of, for the listeners who may not be following monetary economics,
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a friend once asked me recently that, hey, you know, if the government needs to spend more money,
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why don't they just print more money? But what typically happens if they print more money is that
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a number of goods and services are what they are, but you have more money chasing it.
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So, it's demand and supply, the price of everything just goes up and the result is inflation.
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And when the government prints money, it's basically creating inflation, which is a tax on the poor.
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And here, this has the opposite effect where you take a lot of money out of the system
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and you have much less money chasing certain goods and services.
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And therefore, they become much cheaper and in this case, hurting the farmers more fully.
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I can give you a better example here. You know, sometime in the Second World War,
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you know, there used to be prisoners of wars.
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So, within the prison, there was no cash going around.
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So, cigarettes became a form of money.
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So, the prisoners used to get cigarettes through the rations that arrived through the Red Cross
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or you know, if some stuff got sent by relatives.
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So, typically what used to happen was that when the Red Cross rations came,
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suddenly everybody had cigarettes and they used to start using those cigarettes to exchange,
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you know, for a cup of coffee or tea and so on and so forth.
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Now, because there was a sudden increase in the inflow of cigarettes,
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the prices of, you know, coffee and tea used to go up in the sense that, you know,
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earlier maybe two cigarettes for a coffee and you know, after the inflow of cigarettes,
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it used to become three cigarettes for a coffee. That's one part.
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The other part is there used to be some days they used to be bombings
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or it was simply so cold that people just smoked away their cigarettes.
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So, then suddenly there was a contraction in the number of cigarettes available in the prison economy
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and the prices used to come down because the odors of, you know, tea, coffee
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or whatever they were trying to sell essentially, you know,
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wanted to ensure that their products did not spoil and so they had to cut prices
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in order to attract people who were still left with cigarettes to spend those cigarettes.
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That's a brilliant illustration of the money supply and that is actually a good reason,
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another good reason to say cigarette smoking is injurious to health
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because here you're burning money literally in that case.
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So, this is one thing that happened that because of money supply,
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because of amount of cash in the economy drastically went down,
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prices of course crashed and farmers got screwed
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and then this changed the incentives for the next cycle of crops.
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So, when they couldn't get any money for the tomatoes, for example,
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their incentives changed and they didn't grow tomatoes the next time around,
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which then led to a scarcity of tomatoes and you know, by the time…
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So, see the point here is, you know, when it comes to Indian agriculture,
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the markets anyway don't work and whatever little the markets were working,
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demonetization essentially ensured that those markets also don't work.
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So, if you don't allow the market to work, I mean there will be a cost to pay at the end of the day.
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So, moving from agriculture to the informal sector in terms of small manufacturers
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and businesses and all that, how did demonetization affect those?
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So, this is a very, you know, I mean we all know that demonetization essentially
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ended up hurting the informal sector particularly in a very bad way
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because informal sector works largely on cash
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and the moment you take that cash out of the market, they essentially collapsed.
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Now, so that's that, I mean that's very well known.
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Now, what has happened is, you know, I just noticed this particular data point
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that I will talk about around a month back.
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So, obviously, you know, the country imports a lot of stuff, India does
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and our biggest imports are oil and gold.
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Now, oil we import because, you know, we sort of produce only 20 percent of the oil that we consume
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and gold we import because we produce almost, you know, nothing.
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I mean, so we have to import all the gold that we consume.
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Now, if you strip out gold, oil and silver from the total import numbers,
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what remains with you is, you know, the technical term for it is non-oil, non-gold, non-silver imports.
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Now, these imports are a very good indicator of consumer demand in the country.
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Now, if you look at the growth in non-gold, non-oil, non-silver imports since November,
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there has been a huge jump.
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Before November, these imports were actually in the negative territory,
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but after November, they have like really poked up.
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Now, what is happening here?
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You know, it's a very interesting question as to why, you know, how does the scenario change so quickly?
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So, what is happening here is because of demonetization, the informal sector has sort of been destroyed,
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the supply chains have been destroyed and those, you know, the products that these informal firms were selling
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are now coming into the import route.
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So, basically, you know, we have ended up importing stuff that we were essentially buying from within the country.
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So, it's essentially for all that Modi says about make an India,
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what demonetization essentially promoted was don't make an India.
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Rather, you know, make outside India and create jobs outside India.
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That's the bigger irony.
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So, yeah, now, if this were to sort of stop at this, it would be fine.
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But then again, the jump in non-gold, non-silver, non-oil imports was one unseen effect of demonetization.
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Now, there is an unseen effect of this unseen effect.
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So, we have basically in cascading unseen effects.
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I mean, you know, this is the double derivative.
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So, d dx of dy by dx or something like that.
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So, anyway, so what has happened is that now because the economy is not doing well,
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you know, when the economy doesn't do well, economists and politicians go back to that, you know, one economist,
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John Maynard Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, you know, in 1936 in his magnum opus,
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the general theory of money, interest and employment,
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essentially suggested that when the economy is not doing well,
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when the private sector is not spending enough money, the government should cut tax rates.
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He also suggested that the governments should spend more money during that period than they, you know,
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than they spend in other periods.
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So, this is something that politicians and economists have latched on to since 1936
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and every time an economy is in trouble anywhere in the world, this is the first suggestion that is given.
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Now, it needs to be explained here that, you know, when Keynes was making these suggestions,
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the governments did not run fiscal deficits.
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That is what used to happen back then was that their income was equal to their expenditure.
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So, Keynes' argument was that you essentially accumulate money when the going is good
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and then you spend it when the going is not so good.
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But what happened was people just ran with one part of the argument and, you know,
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the government should spend money when the going is not good.
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Anyway, so to get back to the point, now with the economy not doing well,
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so obviously all these economists and, you know, some politicians also have been suggesting
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that the government should spend more money than it is actually spending.
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Even though the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister which was recently set up has advised against it.
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So, as far as government spending is concerned, if you look at data for the first five months of the year,
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the government is already spending much more than it usually spends.
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So, you get, you know, fiscal deficit data every month.
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So, if you look at the period between April to August, we have already, you know,
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we are already at 96% of the fiscal deficit which was targeted for the entire year.
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So, which basically means that the government is spending much more than it actually spends.
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And when it spends much more than it actually, than it gets in,
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what it is essentially doing is borrowing from future generations, right?
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Kicking the can down the road.
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So, some sort of stimulus is already, some sort of fiscal expansion, fiscal stimulus is already on.
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Now, what remains to be seen is whether the government continues to spend money at this rate.
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So, if it continues to spend money at this rate, then, you know,
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the targeted fiscal deficit for the year is around 3.2% of the GDP and it will end up at around 4% of the GDP.
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You know, that's a call that the government needs to make whether they want to increase the fiscal deficit
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or they want to meet the fiscal deficit target.
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Now, so typically, you know, the way this works is that when the government spends money,
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you know, somebody's income goes up and then that income translates into consumer demand.
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And when, you know, consumer demand goes up, the private sector starts to do well.
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And so, the economic growth sort of comes back.
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And I mean, as the sort of private sector does well, the government also gets, you know,
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a greater share of taxes and so on and so forth.
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The problem here is that, you know, what has happened, you know, as we all know,
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in the Indian cases because of demonetization, the large part of the small, you know,
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and medium enterprises and the informal sector has been destroyed.
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Now, let's say if the government were to continue to spend more money, okay,
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what would happen is that obviously it would translate into some sort of consumer demand.
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Now, the thing is whether that consumer demand would be met through stuff
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which is produced within the country or stuff which is not produced within the country, okay.
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Now, given the trend of non-gold, non-silver and non-oil imports going up,
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what that tells us is that up until now, the consumer demand,
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a lot of it is not being met through what is being produced in the country, right.
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So, if we sort of extend that logic, you know, the government spending more will end up,
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you know, leading to consumer demand which is fulfilled through imports, okay.
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Now, imports as we know are a negative entry into the GDP formula.
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Again, technical reasons.
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That's a technical reason.
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Technical reasons as Mr. Amit Shah said.
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So, because imports are a negative entry, what would happen is that, you know,
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the government spending more money instead of leading to an increase in economic growth would actually pull it down.
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So, this is, you know, one unseen effect on top of the other unseen effect of…
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And the thing is, you know, I would not be against imports at all.
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It's perfectly fine, you know, it's…
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But what is perverse in this case is that you are destroying livelihoods and businesses
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which were already running within the country and then imports go up as a result of that.
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And the important thing here to note is that a lot of the small businesses
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or the small enterprises affected by demonetization,
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for them it wasn't just a matter of, oh, we've had two or three bad months
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and then we'll eventually come back and it's short-term pain.
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What happens is that on the margins when businesses get wiped out, you can't come back again.
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I think the term economists use for it is a welfare shock.
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And that's a damage which really in some ways is immeasurable.
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Yes, because, you know, I mean, what the government data essentially measures at the end of the day is
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our, you know, businesses and firms which are a part of the formal setup.
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But the informal setup is really very badly measured.
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So, at the end of the day, you know, we will really never be able to sort of figure out as to what was the actual cost.
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And as my friend Nitin Paya of the Takshashila Institution once pointed out that a 1% rise in GDP typically brings 2 million people out of poverty in India.
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And therefore the opportunity cost of that rise not happening or the GDP growth being less than expected is that it has a real impact on real human beings.
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I mean, see, it's like, you know, it's very simple if India can, you know, grows at 6% for a year over the next let's say 20-25 years in comparison to if it grows at 8%.
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Obviously, you know, many more people will be pulled out of poverty if India grows at 8% and then if India goes at 6%.
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So, what is obviously important here is that, you know, if the government cannot create right situations for economic growth,
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they should at least not create situations which hurt economic growth.
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And it's interesting because there is almost a canard spread by some people that, oh, look, that, you know,
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Modi, he's doing so much damage on the social front, all the lynchings and the cow business and all that, all in the name of development and economy.
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But if you actually evaluate his economic performance, you know, especially over the last year and a half, things have just gone drastically wrong.
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He's taking the country backwards.
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But leaving demonetization apart, let's move on to something that we discussed a few episodes ago,
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which is sort of the impact of GST on the economy, which is kind of becoming clearer.
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And what is your overall take now?
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Okay. So, you know, whatever I said at that point of time continues to be true.
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I mean, but, you know, the one new thing that I've realized is, which is sort of causing a lot of problems,
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is the fact that the GST essentially has led to a situation where one too many returns need to be filed.
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You know, your people, there are people who are perpetually filing returns all through the month.
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I mean, like I need to file three returns and even that at some times, you know, becomes a pain.
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Like, you know, one of the returns is an expense statement that needs to be filed.
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Now I need to file my expense statements 12 times a year.
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So obviously, you know, one can understand what the government is trying to do.
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I mean, they're obviously trying to sort of build a database and then figure out, you know,
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who are the people who are not paying their fair share of taxes.
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But then again, you have to be, you know, you have to realize the fact that
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it takes a lot of time and energy from what is actually not a core activity, right?
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I mean, for a businessman or a self-employed individual,
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he would rather sort of concentrate on what he does well rather than on these things.
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You're wasting an enormous amount of productive time just doing this nonsense.
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What has also happened is again, I mean, this is anecdotal and I mean,
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I don't have agglomerated data to back what I say is that I think chartered accountants
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are finding it difficult to handle the volume of work that GST has created.
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Now to give you a very simple example, you know, you need a lot of data entry operators now.
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I mean, you don't expect a chartered accountant to sit and enter data.
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So from what I understand, there is a shortage of good data entry operators.
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You know, you need someone who understands some amount of English.
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He understands, you know, this is Excel and you know, this is all basically, you know,
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you need someone who at least you understand a few basic things.
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And it has become a little difficult to find such individuals.
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And I think over time, the scene effect of this and some might say that,
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hey, there are more data operators and we've created those jobs.
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But the unseen effect is the opportunity cost. I mean, yes, there are more data operators
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and work has been created for chartered accountants,
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but then there are so many people who are not doing what they should be doing.
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And, you know, just looking at the fact that the entire return is filed properly.
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And the extra money that people are spending on their chartered accountants
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and GST consultants and so on is money that they would have spent elsewhere
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and would have been put to productive use.
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Which is a basic point of the unseen effect anyway.
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Which is a basic point of the unseen effect.
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So, you know, looking forward, what is sort of your prognosis in the, you know,
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let's say the year and a half to come, let's say till 2019 when the next elections happen.
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Is the worst behind us?
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Because the government at some point will start fixing some of the glitches of GST as well, at least.
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Which they have, they have started.
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Yeah, they've started that and you don't really expect things to really get worse.
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The thing is that the impact of demon and the…
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See, the, yeah, I mean, economic growth has been falling for six quarters now.
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So, six quarters is a reasonably long time.
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I mean, it's not a small…
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So, the point is, I mean, a lot of damage has already been done.
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Now, whether this damage will continue, I mean, for that, I mean, it's difficult to sort of say offhand.
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But, you know, if you look at other high frequency data, I mean, things, some things are improving.
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It's not like everything's going to the dogs, but a lot of things are in an extremely negative territory.
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So, one of the data points which I came across recently is, you know, we all know that bank lending is in a bad state.
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So, you know, bank lending to agriculture is down, bank lending to retail is flat,
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bank lending to industry, you know, has contracted.
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But bank lending to services this year has fallen more than bank lending to any other sector.
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I need to dig a little deeper.
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Now, the point is that services form around half of the economy.
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And if services firms are not borrowing, there is something which is really not right.
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So, I mean, I need to dig a little…
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Is it that they're not borrowing because they don't see a scope for expansion?
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I don't know, I mean, which could be one reason or I don't know, I mean, there's no demand.
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So, one has to sort of…
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See, I mean, if you, you know, go back to Mr. Modi's speech recently.
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So, he said, you know, car sales are going up and motorcycle sales are going up and tractor sales went up by 34% in a month.
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But then these are not the, you know, he pointed out a spate of positive data points,
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but he did not point out a spate of negative data points also which are there.
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I mean, you know, your cement consumption for one, I mean, I can tell you offhand has come down.
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The real estate sector which sort of is, you know, should have been the main sector to create jobs for the unskilled is continues to be down in the dumps.
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So, I mean, so the point is that there are enough, I mean, negative data points going around as well.
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So, even if there is a recovery, I don't see a fast recovery happening.
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I mean, it will be as slow as…
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And it's probably true even if the government gets everything right from now on that, you know, given where we are, it's just really difficult to climb out of this.
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Yes, I mean, because a lot of these, see what has typically always happened in India's case is that whenever we have done well and, you know, grown at 8 and 9%,
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the structural issues have held us back.
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So, these are, you know, the structural issues are now coming to the fore all over again.
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I mean, something as basic as our roads, our turnaround time of our ports,
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because if you realize, you know, globally, the economies are doing much better than they were, let's say, three years back.
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Exactly. I mean, in 2011, you could say that, hey, you know, there's a global downswing and everyone's doing badly.
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And if India is kind of, it's fine, it's understandable.
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But right now, the rest of the world is all looking up and India is kind of lagging behind.
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So, I mean, to look at something like, you know, the banking crisis, I mean, it's not like it's suddenly come up.
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It's been there from day one and nothing's been, I mean, nothing's been done other than getting the companies to sort of,
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sorry, getting the banks to recognize their bad loans as bad loans.
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And even that number keeps going up every quarter.
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So, either, you know, if you look at some of these banks,
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so there are these five associate banks of State Bank of India and the Bhartiya Mahila Bank,
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which were merged with State Bank of India.
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And State Bank of India as of March 31st was the second best, you know,
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performing bank among the public sector banks when it came to their bad loans.
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So, the bad loans were at some 7.15 percent and after the merger, they've increased to 10 percent.
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So, you know, what is the point in merging, you know, five weak banks with a strong bank and making that strong bank a weak bank?
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Now, this is a solution which is now being offered, you know,
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wherein the principal economic advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Sanjeev Sanyal,
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recently said that the number of banks will come down to 10 to 15.
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Now, but some of these banks, you know, the Indian Overseas Bank is one, IDBI Bank,
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they have bad loan rates of 23, 24 percent.
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I mean, the question is why are these banks still in the business of banking?
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I mean, if you're losing, you know, one fourth of all that you are lending,
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I mean, clearly you're not good at what you're doing.
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I mean, and if you continue, I mean, you'll continue to lose money and the government will have to continue to recapitalize you.
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So, you know, you need the government to make some of these big decisions which they have not up until now.
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And again, NPAs, bank loans, we've discussed this in previous episodes.
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I mean, or look at something as simple as, you know, all the railway accidents that are happening.
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Now, people say that, you know, accidents are happening and we're building bullet trains.
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I don't think that is the right comparison.
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The right comparison is that accidents are happening and we continue to run Air India
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because the bullet train will be built whenever it will be built, okay.
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Air India is there right now.
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The organization continues to lose money and every rupee that Air India essentially loses
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is money that gets, you know, taken away from something else.
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Taken from us, I mean, most people think of government and government money as something that has nothing to do with us,
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but actually it's our money.
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No, no, it's taken someone's paying for it.
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You're in fact filing those returns.
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I mean, or you look at the fact that, I mean, this is something that I wrote for Pragati wherein
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and you gave a great headline on the price of petrol and diesel.
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You know, why are there so many taxes on petrol and diesel?
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I mean, this is because, you know, you have the government needs to support companies like Air India
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and there's one called Hindustan Photofilms, which we keep talking about.
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Vivek, I think you and I have it the wrong way around.
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We seem to imagine that the government is there to serve the nation.
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No, the nation is there to serve the government.
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So net-net, then would it be fair to say that when the Modi government came in,
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at least on the economic front, there was a lot of optimism among a lot of people that they will do a lot of reforms.
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And what has happened is that they haven't done most of the reforms we expected from them.
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I showed the intent to do them.
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And furthermore, with a bad policy like Demon and a botched implementation of GST,
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they've actually set the nation backwards and hopefully we can now sort of start getting back on track.
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And as Modi ji would say, there are some positive indicators.
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So if you're listening to this podcast and you can't afford tomatoes, eat tractors instead.
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On that note, Vivek, thanks so much for coming on the show.
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Thank you for having me over, Amit.
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Excuse me, brother. Excuse me.
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On the menu, there's Scene Unseen, Podcasts, Encore, Cyrus Says, Married in India,
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Trinks and Destinations, My Neighbor Zuckerberg and The Fun Garage. What do you want?
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We won't repeat it. Go to impodcast.com and listen to all of this.
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