#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pulliya Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kottaswane, two really
#
good friends of mine, Kickass podcast in Hindi.
#
We live in a world of disruption.
#
Across the world over the last 20 years, every marketplace has been disrupted by technology.
#
Retail has been disrupted by Amazon and eBay.
#
Entertainment has been disrupted by Uber.
#
The way people interact with each other has been disrupted by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
#
Entertainment has been disrupted by Netflix and Amazon Prime.
#
And everywhere, consumers and producers have both benefited enormously from this.
#
This disruption has happened in most marketplaces, but not yet in the political marketplace.
#
So here's a question worth asking.
#
Can politics be disrupted as well?
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
My guest for today is Rajesh Jain, who will be talking about his new project, Dhan Vapsi.
#
I've known Rajesh since early 2015, and he's most famously known for being one of the brains
#
behind Narendra Modi's rise to power.
#
But I saw a completely different side of Rajesh when I met him.
#
He had gotten buyer's remorse in 2014 itself, and when I met him in 2015, was an articulate
#
and vociferous critic of Modi, a man he had once supported for understandable reasons.
#
But Rajesh had the intellectual honesty to change his mind about Modi, and the commitment
#
to continue working on projects that were actually designed to get Modi out of power
#
at considerable personal risk to himself.
#
He hasn't spoken about this publicly much in the past, but we'll speak about some of
#
that on this episode, and we won't speak about certain parts of it.
#
And while this episode is supposed to be about Dhan Vapsi, which is an insanely ambitious
#
and extremely interesting project he's on, I decided to dedicate only the second half
#
of the episode to that project, and spend the first half discussing why he supported
#
Modi to begin with, and what made him change his mind.
#
This is a really long episode, but it's fascinating, so do listen to the full thing after a quick
#
Like me, are you someone who loves fine art, but can't really afford to have paintings
#
by the artists you like hanging on your walls?
#
Well worry no more, head on over to IndianColours.com.
#
Indian Colours is a company that licenses images of the finest modern art from some
#
of the best artists in India, and adapts them into objects of everyday use.
#
These include wearable art, like stoles and shrugs, home decor like cushion covers and
#
table runners, and accessories like tote bags.
#
This allows art lovers to actually get fine art into their homes at an accessible price,
#
and artists get royalties on sale, just like authors do.
#
What's more, Indian Colours now has an exciting range of new products, including fridge magnets
#
with some stunning motifs, and salad bowls and platters made of mango wood.
#
Their artists include luminaries like Babu Xavier, Vazvo X Vazvo, Brinda Miller, Dilip
#
Sharma, Shruti Nelson, and Pradeep Mishra.
#
They accept bulk orders for corporate and festival gifting, but even if you want to
#
buy just for yourself or a friend, head on over to IndianColours.com.
#
That's Colours with an OU.
#
And if you want a 20% discount, apply the code IVM20.
#
That's IVM for IVM Podcasts, IVM20 for a 20% discount at IndianColours.com.
#
Rajesh, welcome to the scene in The Unseen.
#
Rajesh, I've known you for like the last three or four years, I've of course known
#
of you from way before that, you are one of India's first tech millionaires.
#
And I've kind of been seeing what you've been doing in the blogging space for, you
#
know, from a decade before that, but I actually met you two or three years ago.
#
And I find the story of your political consciousness, so to say, that how you, from just being
#
someone who'd made a lot of money in tech, to how you got interested in politics in a
#
deeply passionate way, extremely interesting, because most middle class or rich Indians
#
tend to be apathetic about politics.
#
So my journey into the political space began with a question.
#
A friend of mine, Nathanu Dey, asked me, it was in late 2008, he said, Rajesh, you've
#
been working in the tech space for a long time, when your son Abhishek, who was three
#
years old at that time, when he grows up and tells you or asks you, Papa, you saw all that
#
was going wrong in the country.
#
You had the time, you had the money, why didn't you do something about it?
#
What will you answer him?
#
And that was the question which really set me thinking.
#
And as happens many times, when you start thinking about it, sort of doors open up.
#
And this was late 2008.
#
And then early 2009, I'd met with Piyush Goyal, because he had come to assess my company Net
#
Core for BJP's SMS campaign.
#
And then I said, look, there are a lot of people like me who'd like to help in the
#
There have been sort of long time BJP supporters.
#
And elections are coming up in four or five months.
#
And we'd like to do something about it.
#
And from there started Friends of BJP.
#
So it was not sort of structured, just one event led to another.
#
But the question really made me think about what we need to do to help transform India.
#
So you're describing yourself here as a BJP supporter at the time.
#
And I'm presuming the support for the BJP came out of this new political consciousness,
#
out of this question that you asked yourself, that what can I do to make my country better
#
As a family, we have been BJP supporters.
#
My father always would tell us, go vote BJP.
#
And also in the 2000s, when I started sort of thinking for myself on the political space,
#
I think one thing which came and was that the policies of the Congress, once you start
#
reading, you start thinking about it, is really why has India been poor?
#
And the party which had been in power for a very long time, of course, has been the
#
And again, if you look back at that period after 2004 onwards also, there wasn't anything
#
substantially different being done from what they had done previously.
#
So the support for Congress really wasn't there.
#
I had written a blog post, in fact, in early 2009 when I started Friends of BJP said, where
#
I described BJP as the lighter shade of gray.
#
I said, you can't really, it's not a black and white thing.
#
And that time, the memory, of course, of the BJP was the Vajpayee government and the sort
#
of some of the reforms that they had brought into play.
#
So A, there was a family history of having supported the BJP.
#
B, there was some sort of an antithesis towards the Congress based on my own sort of reading
#
and conversations with different people.
#
And third, there was the opportunity which came up through the BJP SMS campaign, which
#
was, of course, a professional activity that we had done.
#
Right, and you'd also done a similar professional activity for India Against Corruption.
#
Yeah, and I was purely professional.
#
So just to sort of, again, go back, I mean, obviously we are, I know on the same page
#
as regards to the harm that the Congress has done the country, I mean, we've been poor
#
for decades longer than we should have because of bad policies in the case of Nehru that
#
you can say they were misguided because those were the fashion of the time.
#
And he was a great statesman who built institutions and did a lot else, which was great.
#
And but just got the economics all wrong.
#
And in the case of Indira Gandhi, I mean, I think we'd both agreed that many of her
#
economic policies were crimes on humanity.
#
Even if you leave emergency aside, she was an absolute monster for the damage that she
#
caused to the poor of this country, despite her slogans like Garibi Hattau and all that.
#
So I completely get that, that at some point in time you begin to feel that damn it, we
#
need an alternative and we can't have any more of this.
#
Our people need freedom in every way, economic freedom and every other freedom.
#
But I think where our intellectual paths differ is that I never went from there to support
#
BJP seemed to me to be equally bad in other ways.
#
So I agree with you that Vajpayee's prime ministership did give a lot of hope and he
#
had some good people like Arun Shuri in his cabinet.
#
But you know, at the time that you decided to kind of support the BJP and go all in and
#
you describe them as a lighter shade of gray, inevitably that would mean propping up Modi,
#
And you know, and Modi had the history of 2002 behind that.
#
How did you reconcile that?
#
So in 2009, actually before the elections, the support was for Yadvani-led BJP at that
#
particular point of time.
#
So we have started Friends of BJP where we tried to organize events in multiple, we did
#
actually organize events in multiple cities for BJP leaders.
#
The idea was how do you get middle-class more engaged in conversations in the political
#
I remember writing about what I called at that time, the secession of the successful,
#
that people, like you said, right in the beginning, people become apathetic in the political space
#
and they don't tend to vote or even want to have conversations about those things.
#
So the idea was how do you get a more structured form of conversation going?
#
Of course, BJP lost the elections and then Friends of BJP also sort of petered out.
#
They didn't want anything to do with it afterwards.
#
In political parties, there's no sort of introspection on why you lost.
#
You can't really point fingers at a single person and you can't.
#
So it's collective responsibility, which means no one's really responsible.
#
So you just rationalize what happened and you move on.
#
So we sort of moved on from there.
#
And it was in early 2010 when I had met Modi for the first time and I met him multiple
#
And my belief was, at least from what I had read, and I had not, of course, gone into
#
the depth of things, but at least when you see, when you read up at that time, he did
#
come across as the tallest leader and you compare it with what was happening in the
#
So there's a context also what's happening in the country, 2010, 2011, some of the scams
#
had started coming out also.
#
The leadership really of the country was not very strong.
#
And Gujarat's track record, at least the visible track record at that time, was quite good.
#
I mean, one thing which we would see, which you could see the difference is the roads
#
You travel from, say, Bombay to Rajasthan, which we used to do often by road.
#
I mean, and you know, when you're leaving Gujarat and you're coming into Rajasthan,
#
the roads were significantly different.
#
So the idea was that in the BJP, if you're supporting the BJP and you have a choice between
#
So if you want to do something in the political space at that time, it was this or the other.
#
There was no alternative to any of these two.
#
And my belief at that time was that Modi was the best person to support if the BJP had
#
to come to power in the next election.
#
But the question of 2002 still comes up, like, what do you feel about that?
#
See, at that time, I had not thought much about it.
#
I think the thing was that Indian courts really have the jurisdiction on decision.
#
There were many investigations which were happening.
#
And I sort of left that decision to the courts.
#
I did not think that it is for me to make a judgment.
#
I did not have any specific information one way or the other.
#
And at that time, the economic, so the courts were, of course, making the call and they
#
did make decisions through the investigative agencies, which cleared Modi, of course.
#
And on the economic side, the idea was that at least when you heard Modi in 2013 and 2014
#
run up, he said all the right things.
#
He did say all the right things, I agree with you.
#
And you see the track record, at least of the visible track record, like I said of Gujarat
#
in terms of infrastructure development, in terms of power, et cetera.
#
And more importantly, I think, in the conversations that I had with him, Modi came across as a
#
very good listener, very open to new ideas, very open to meeting with different people.
#
In fact, I traveled with him to China in 2011 and I wrote a fairly detailed blog post about
#
And the one memory which stood out for me was on the flight back.
#
There were about 20 people on the flight, mainly business people from Gujarat.
#
He called everyone to the front of the aircraft and asked everyone, tell me what went right
#
What could we have done better as a team?
#
And any other candidate suggestions.
#
And for the next four hours, he was listening to as every person spoke.
#
Now, I interacted with politicians in 2009, some of the BJP politicians, and I found this
#
ability to listen as just not there in most of the other politicians.
#
So you combined multiple things together.
#
And even in my one-to-one conversations with him, here's a person who is very open, very
#
listening, which typically doesn't happen, like I said, with the political class.
#
And that's what my feeling was that we should support him for being the next prime minister.
#
But beyond the openness, did you find that he has sort of strong beliefs of his own on
#
Or is he open in terms of tell me what works, I'll do it, or is he also constantly reflecting
#
and changing his ideas?
#
Does he have a belief system in place?
#
The context in which we were interacting at that time was primarily the elections part
#
So it was the first the Gujarat elections of 2012, December, which took place, and then
#
the national elections.
#
And the one thing which I had told him is that I will work from the outside for you.
#
So I do not want any funds from the BJP.
#
I think you are the best person to lead the country.
#
I will invest my own money and I will set up my own team because I want to see you as
#
So those conversations were more on questions of instrumentality, like how do I win?
#
What strategy should we have?
#
How do I portray myself?
#
But you didn't really get a deeper sense of what are his actual core beliefs?
#
No, I did not spend time discussing that.
#
It's primarily around, I would give tech ideas for the campaign because that is what I knew
#
I was not very conversant really with the political and the economic part of it.
#
Any political advice, you can read and try and summarize and give it.
#
But what fascinated me was the fact that for the first time, you could actually start using
#
technology to shape a campaign.
#
Obama had done that in the 2012 campaign in the US.
#
And using technology, he had helped create a community organizing sort of network of
#
people, volunteers across the country.
#
There was a book which had come out in late 2012, Victory Lab, which actually said how
#
political science was used through the years in the US.
#
And I was very interested in taking some of those ideas and applying it in the Indian
#
So mobile penetration was going up, internet was becoming much, much better and so on.
#
So what are the sort of learnings you then took from these new campaigns like Obama's
#
campaign and apply to Modi's campaign for 2014?
#
So one of the first things which I had done, which in June of 2011, actually, again using
#
data, I had looked at the BJP's electoral performance through the years.
#
And I realized that they had won 299 seats at least once.
#
And this was a number which really no one knew about it.
#
When I would ask people, no one could give an answer.
#
And from there, I wrote a blog post which said Project 275 for 2014.
#
So I was the first person to actually articulate that the BJP could get a majority of its
#
own in the next election.
#
And before that, the paradigm was that, hey, we'll get 160, 170, have a coalition, have
#
In fact, exactly right.
#
I mean, people would laugh when I would tell them that, look, instead of thinking 180,
#
you need to think 100 seats more.
#
And the strategy for trying to win 180 versus the strategy for 280 is very different.
#
180 really, it's a summation of state elections.
#
If you want to get a majority on your own, you need to make it a wave election.
#
So there has to be one dominant theme pretty much across the country.
#
And I said, that is really what I want to work on, but I didn't want to take any orders
#
As an entrepreneur, I'm doing it from the outside.
#
So that then led me to the formation of NITI.
#
And we worked in four areas.
#
So those were the sort of learnings I picked up from my experience in 2009.
#
And generally, keeping on looking at the political space, where are the gaps?
#
So I said, we need four things.
#
We need a media platform, because there was nothing which was really pro-BJP or able to
#
articulate the BJP viewpoint or even be pro-Modi.
#
So that was NITI Central, which we set up.
#
The second one was India Votes, which had all the electoral data.
#
Again, it was very hard to get elections data.
#
The election commission had it, but it was in Excel files and PDFs.
#
So we took all of that and made it into a very nice, browsable, public, open site.
#
Then there was the analytics.
#
So where do you focus on?
#
So there are 10,00,000 booths in the country, 543 constituencies.
#
Which are the constituencies where you have a greater chance of winning?
#
In the constituencies, which booth should you focus on?
#
There's a lot of historical data available through Form 20 data, which is the booth level
#
data, which is made public again on the election commission site, but no one would look at
#
And the fourth one was the volunteering platform.
#
It's what we called India272.com at that time.
#
That people could, wherever they are in the country, help in spreading information about
#
Modi or about the BJP and what it wants to do to people in their neighborhood.
#
So without becoming part of the formal party structure, you could just work on it.
#
So I took learnings from what I'd seen in 2009, what I thought were missing, plus some
#
And then like an entrepreneur, you identify which are the gaps and then you see how you
#
can plug those or fill those.
#
One of the podcasts that I'd done over here was with Prashant Jha, who wrote the book
#
How the BJP Wins, which is a description of say Amit Shah's, and I recommend listeners
#
listen to that episode because it's got a lot of insight.
#
And his book is really about Amit Shah's work on the ground where he would travel incessantly
#
and go across all the different cities and booths and revamp the organization completely.
#
So what's the synergy between, for example, the data that you were coming out with the
#
analytics and the party organization and how they were using it?
#
So we had made a lot of this information available to the BJP and RSS ground campaigners.
#
And it was available through a website where they could pick up this information, pick
#
up the electoral rules.
#
We had on a campaign where if you supported Modi, you could SMS your voter ID.
#
And then we had digitized the electoral rules so we could then map voter IDs to the person
#
So the idea is, see in the election, it's actually a very simple idea.
#
It's basically being able to identify who supports you and who does not and who are
#
the ones in the middle.
#
So it's a support score that you need combined with a turnout score.
#
So if you are likely to support and you're likely to turn out, you don't need, nothing
#
needs to be done to that person.
#
They're going to go out and vote on their own.
#
If they don't support, not likely to turn out, again, you can't do much about them.
#
But if you're likely to support low propensity to turn out, then you need some persuasion,
#
you need some push to make sure you vote on election day.
#
And if you are high turnout but low on support, then you need persuasion.
#
So you can actually slot people in this matrix.
#
And then, but again, there's not enough data still available, or at least at that time
#
But those were the ideas.
#
So those were the experiments or those were the things which I tried to do.
#
And a lot of it depended on the ground operation, that people had different candidates, including
#
in the two constituencies that Modi fought.
#
They would have, where there was a better ground organization, they would then be able
#
to go out and do the door-to-door outreach.
#
See, in India, one of the big problems is that candidates are typically not declared
#
until three weeks before the elections, there are no primaries.
#
So it's very hard to run a proper campaign, actually.
#
So you need, I think there are a lot of systemic changes which need to happen for data and
#
tech to have a much greater play in elections.
#
So you know, kind of moving away from the mechanics of this, which is a fascinating
#
subject in itself, and maybe we'll do another episode on it sometime.
#
But you know, at this point, essentially, what the BJP was doing is it was campaigning
#
It was presenting different faces of itself.
#
And one of those, of course, is Vikas.
#
And that's pretty much, I guess, why you became involved in the first place, because you correctly
#
felt that what India really needs is economic freedom.
#
And this is not just an economic question, it's a humanitarian question, because millions
#
have been in poverty for decades longer than should have been the case.
#
And we badly need reforms and economic freedom.
#
And here is a guy who is saying the right things, as we subsequently know, none of that
#
But along with his Vikas talk, there is also polarizing talk, there is also a lot of bigotry,
#
a lot of which was, in fact, reflected in the site that you own, Neeti Central, which
#
to me had two problems, and one issue, of course, was editorial content, because it
#
would publish just about anything and there wasn't enough discernment.
#
But the other issue was that a huge chunk of Neeti Central content, for example, was
#
bigoted anti-Muslim Hindutva content, I say Hindutva as opposed to Hinduism, the two being
#
very different, and not enough of sort of the Vikas economic content.
#
Did this disturb you at some point?
#
Was it something you thought about?
#
See, the site, essentially, and I don't agree with you on your assessment of the site.
#
The site, our goal really was that there are BJP supporters across the country, whether
#
it's spokespeople or supporters, and they needed material to be able to defend themselves
#
against what is being spoken, because you also need to understand that the media pretty
#
much in its entirety at that time, the 2010 to 2014 timeframe, was very much anti-BJP
#
So there needed to be an alternate platform, which really puts across an alternative viewpoint,
#
which different people could use it to counter really what was happening.
#
So we did try and have a wide mix of trying to articulate what is wrong with the current
#
narrative and putting out an alternate narrative.
#
Some people may have different views on the content, but our idea was very clear that
#
we needed to get this out, because there was no space in the traditional print and TV media
#
sites, and there were very few internet sites at that time, political media sites, of course,
#
there's a proliferation of that now, at that time, to bring this viewpoint across.
#
So I don't agree with you on your characterization of this sector.
#
Fair enough, fair enough.
#
I mean, you would know the site much better than me, and you did shut it down after you
#
Yeah, so I was very clear that the purpose was still the election.
#
And then after that, we, of course, disbanded most of the team, pretty much the entire teams
#
over the course of the year after the election results.
#
So I want to ask one more question, which I think we've discussed before, and you know
#
that it's something I kind of bring up and feel strongly about, which is that my support
#
for economic freedom is really part of my support for freedom in a larger sense, that
#
of all individual freedoms, it arises out of that.
#
So I will also, for example, I'm a free speech absolutist, I'll also support all kinds of
#
I was delighted when 377 was abolished recently.
#
And to me, these are off a piece, these can't be separate things that if you really care
#
about freedom, economic freedom, and personal freedoms kind of go together.
#
And this is also why I was against the BJP even then, because the thing is that while
#
they were talking about economic freedom, they really did not give a damn about the
#
other freedoms, it seemed to me at the time.
#
Today, of course, we both of us know in hindsight that they don't care about any kind of freedom.
#
And on economics, they're actually as left-wing as their predecessors.
#
I mean, they're all basically the same.
#
But personally, how much of, for example, your concern for economic freedom comes from,
#
I mean, do you support freedoms in all of these other contexts, or is your support of
#
economic freedom something that comes out of saying that India is a poor country, we
#
should be rich, and economic freedom will get us there.
#
And for these consequentialist reasons, therefore, I support it.
#
So there are two ways to look at that question.
#
One is what I feel, and second is, what is it that we can persuade people about?
#
So I am still learning on the freedom part.
#
I mean, I educated myself in economics post-2014.
#
So my background has been in technology.
#
So I heard the terms like classical liberalism or libertarian or public choice after 2014.
#
It was not before that.
#
Even the term economic freedom, really, where I understood the full meaning of it later
#
on and not before that.
#
I think, of course, like you said, a lot of these freedoms, they all go hand in hand.
#
You can't have one without the other, though you can argue that countries like Singapore,
#
countries like China have clamped down on political freedom, allowed at least some parts
#
in China, have allowed much greater economic freedom.
#
I think in India, what we really need, because when you take this message out to people,
#
When you go out and tell people that, look, you need freedom, the answer you get back
#
is, oh, but we are free.
#
We got free on August 15, 1947.
#
So the word freedom itself, there is a big challenge in persuading people about the need
#
And most people don't have the same sort of intellectual capability to read and analyze
#
why freedom is so important and the cornerstone for prosperity.
#
So when I thought about the problem, I said, rather than talk about freedom, which then
#
gets you into independence and on a different track, let's start with prosperity.
#
It's something which is tangible.
#
India is a poor country.
#
It has been deliberately kept poor over the past 70 years.
#
And that is something which people can feel and understand, that you should have been
#
10 times wealthier by now, but you are not.
#
That is something which is easier to sell, to persuade people about, than to say that,
#
look, you need more freedom of speech or more individual freedom.
#
That becomes a little harder problem.
#
So I said, let's start with the economic outcome that we want to talk about.
#
And from there, then we can actually talk about all the other elements.
#
They will all become natural elements which will flow into making the end happen.
#
So let's, you know, and this is really a part of your thinking, your support for Modi and
#
all of that, that you actually left behind and you left it behind in 2014.
#
And you described to me how very early on in Modi's prime ministership, you kind of
#
knew that you had made a mistake and that he was going in the wrong direction.
#
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
#
So I think it started, the process, of course, was gradual.
#
There were step functions, I think, in that process.
#
But I think the first step was really the initial team that was put together as part
#
I think till what was very interesting was that the campaign was essentially managed
#
by a lot of people from the outside.
#
But when it came to the team, the cabinet which was formed, and there was speculation
#
between 16th May 2014 and 26th May when the cabinet was announced, there would be outsiders,
#
there would be laterals.
#
And I think it was a moment in time when there were a lot of people from India and abroad
#
who I think if they had been tapped into and told that, look, the next three years we'd
#
like you to work for making Indians rich or making India prosperous.
#
Very few would have had hesitation in actually agreeing to something like this.
#
So the first problem which I saw was the talent that had been assembled.
#
The second was the language.
#
I think the language changed quite dramatically from pre-election, which was about aspirations.
#
It was more of the new middle class term that Modi sort of used to talk about.
#
And it became very quickly about the poor.
#
And I think, as we know, that the more you talk about the poor and the more you try to
#
do things specifically for the poor, you are basically ensuring that they will stay poor
#
for the rest of their life.
#
So that was the second thing.
#
Third was that I think we lost or Modi lost really the first 100 to 200 days, which was
#
the time for dramatic change.
#
And the agenda for what needed to get done, actually, if you want to make Indians rich,
#
I mean, you've got to undo the anti-prosperity machine which has been running for the past
#
70 years, whether it's in education, health care, labor, land, admin reforms, pretty much
#
every sector of the economy.
#
And none of that happened.
#
So I'm seeing the first five, six months where it's basically a continuation.
#
And the budget, I think the first budget which got presented in July was effectively a rehash
#
of the previous or the pointers in the budget or the economic survey were just rehash of
#
So then where is the change?
#
The second sort of event, which I think was concerning to me, was the response to the
#
phrase Sudputki Sarkar, and that happened probably in early 2015.
#
And I think Modi turned decisively more socialist, more towards the left after that.
#
So the poor focus became a lot more heightened.
#
What he really should have done, and I think the Modi who was the campaigner would probably
#
have done this thing, but maybe the Modi, the Prime Minister did not look at it the
#
So he should have come out and said that, look, of course we want the Sudputki Sarkar.
#
We want every Indian to be in a Sudput.
#
We want every Indian to be rich so they have the choice of what they decide what to wear.
#
But that did not happen.
#
So that was, I think, a huge missed opportunity because after that, the economic slide sort
#
And I think the next big breaking point really in my mind came with demonetization.
#
Demonetization I think was, I mean, no right thinking leader would inflict this on any
#
It was the largest probably abuse of individual rights this country has ever seen and perhaps
#
And I remember having a phone call, phone chat on the day, the night the demonetization
#
was announced and telling people, telling a few of my friends that this is India's road
#
to serfdom, road to serfdom as we all know is the Hayek book, and I said this is just
#
And even the reasons which were outlined, it is very clear, I mean, corruption does
#
not happen when two individuals are transacting.
#
Corruption happens when people have to interact with those in government or in the political
#
Whoever has power over you, whoever has power over you is corrupt.
#
So all of the reasons which were set out seemed to me completely wrong.
#
And it just didn't seem right.
#
So I said that is, but of course, and in parallel what was happening also was my own economic
#
education was happening.
#
So from 2014, the first time I remember attending a CCS seminar in Delhi in late 2014 and hearing
#
about public choice, and it was an aha moment where I said, okay, so this really explains
#
how politicians behave when they are in power, they are just like us, as self-interested.
#
And the goal is not out there to do good for the people, it's to do good for themselves.
#
And doing good for themselves means doing those things, which is going to keep them
#
So this backdrop of my own education, plus what I saw on the trajectory, which I saw
#
with the Modi government, helped create my disillusionment and then made me really decide
#
And in fact, like public choice theory, I often say is something that every Indian should
#
really learn about because it totally explains the system so well, and in fact, Shruti Raj
#
Gopal and a mutual friend and I are planning to do a series of episodes where we talk about
#
public choice theory and I'm really looking forward to that.
#
Going back to demonetization, obviously, I agree with you entirely.
#
At that time, I called it the largest assault on property rights in human history.
#
And it was very Maoist more than anything else.
#
I saw the parallels between Mao's great leap forward and demonetization, very striking
#
in the kind of social engineering that Modi was attempting, and I have a number of episodes
#
on that which will be linked from this.
#
Regarding what you said about Sudboot ki Sarkar, I think the criticism of Sudboot ki Sarkar
#
and criticism that I agree with was that Sudboot to me was reflective not of prosperity, but
#
And that was the main criticism.
#
But what Modi should have done is turned it around.
#
So in an attempt to be anti cronyism, and as we are seeing now, it's probably been getting
#
proven the other way around, what should have been done is said that we want every person.
#
So it was more of dealing with the rich, but he should have turned it around and made it
#
into a symbol of prosperity for every Indian.
#
But that's a rhetorical solution.
#
I mean, you know, Modi is brilliant at optics and it's surprising that he missed this out.
#
But my issue with him always has been that he nails the optics, but he completely gets
#
He doesn't actually do anything.
#
So that's a separate, I think, that's a separate point basically where I think the fundamental
#
problem is that of lack of a and understanding.
#
I don't think any Indian politician really understands why India is poor.
#
And therefore what we need to do for prosperity.
#
And that's the most fundamental issue, which really is there.
#
And therefore, when they all come to power, it's more a continuation of what's happening
#
because without having self beliefs on what creates prosperity, it's going to be continuity
#
I think that remains the first challenge.
#
The second is, of course, India's bureaucracy, really saddled with the same old ideas.
#
The secretaries in Delhi are today probably 58 to 60.
#
And with ideas which are 20, 30 years old, I mean, India never really has, where do you
#
in India, do we hear about Adam Smith, about Friedman, about Buchanan, about Hayek?
#
These ideas aren't even taught in our schools and colleges in economics.
#
So without that understanding, I think it's impossible for things to change.
#
And more importantly, I think people have really no understanding without, like you
#
said about public choice.
#
And I think that kind of education needs to be done.
#
And it's actually a very simple idea.
#
Once you explain it to people that look, the politician is not some saint who's different
#
The politician is basically just like you and me.
#
And you look at your self interest and the politician does the same.
#
The politician's self interest just happens to be staying in power, getting reelected.
#
And once you use that lens, it actually becomes clear.
#
But no one's taking this message out to people.
#
Once we start doing this, I think we'll start creating a demand for change in the country.
#
And so where does change come from?
#
It either comes from a leader who understands, which we did not have in this case, or from
#
people who demand it, which also has not been there.
#
You know, what I should point out to my listeners is that while you were talking about all the
#
different reasons to be disillusioned with the Congress coming down all the way to demonetization,
#
you were disillusioned with Modi and you saw it for what it was from well before that.
#
I remember meeting you in early 2015 and you were already very clear that the country was
#
going down a very harmful road and you needed to do something about it.
#
Yes, because if you look back, it's the first 100 to 200 days really when transformative
#
change can actually happen.
#
And I had studied the Reagan, Reagan period, Reagan basically, there was a complete document
#
prepared by Heritage Foundation on the changes that were required in the government at that
#
And most of those changes were done, started at least the narrative and the change process
#
In India also what happens is because of the continuity of or a continuous flow of assembly
#
elections, you know, you are sent back in one election, then you go back to sort of
#
quaint old ideas, flawed old ideas of the past.
#
And here was a person who could basically, I think, persuade the country on any idea.
#
And to have missed out the first six months, I think is unpardonable really.
#
Because that is where the country was primed for change.
#
And in every sector, I mean, we had to loosen up, we had to give really economic freedom
#
to people and Modi was the person who could have sold it.
#
Again, like you said, the mandate was a majority.
#
So he could get anything done in the Lok Sabha.
#
Oil at that time was at like $40.
#
You have a leader who can sell, I mean, this is a moment in time, which was really after
#
I mean, this had not happened since the 1984.
#
And he completely blew the opportunity.
#
And that really upset me quite a bit because to make that change, I think you needed two
#
You needed to have a deeper understanding of what creates prosperity.
#
And second is you needed talent.
#
You needed people different from the political class and the existing bureaucrats because
#
they all think pretty much the same way.
#
And without laterals, without having lost the first three to six months, I think it
#
was then very clear that it's a very uphill struggle and therefore it's not going to change.
#
I mean, that's another thing that, you know, public choice teaches us, right?
#
If you look at the traditional politicians and the traditional bureaucrats, they have
#
their self-interest in mind first, their incentives are towards increasing their power, getting
#
elected again, blah, blah, blah.
#
So if you actually want radical reform, then you've got to bring in people from outside.
#
Which brings me then to the question is that two questions really and sort of a small question
#
The small question being that who would you like to have seen in the cabinet?
#
What would have given you hope?
#
And the big question being what are the key changes, maybe three or four, that you would
#
have liked to see in those first six months?
#
I think what we needed at that point of time is first, Modi should have basically got his
#
team together, got a bunch of economists and probably people from other countries, even
#
spoken to others, possibly at that time, Lee Kuan Yew was of course still alive in early
#
He did get Arvind Panagariya for the Niti Aiyog and he completely disgraced himself
#
by going against his life's work, basically.
#
But that came in much later.
#
So ideas, I think, were there, but they needed to be internalized.
#
On what does India really need to change from the trajectory of the past?
#
Okay, so that was, I think, the first thing.
#
And you needed experts really, you needed people, at least expert inputs.
#
You definitely did not need politicians manning the entire cabinet.
#
And even between 16 and 26, there was talk of, oh, we'll have a much more reduced cabinet,
#
There should have been no HRD minister, there should have been no telecom minister, there
#
should have been no civil aviation minister.
#
You basically didn't need 80% of the positions.
#
That would have sent a very strong message.
#
That the command and control mindset of the past is gone.
#
There were, again, another simple thing which would have been on as many of the, what they
#
call the concurrent list, should have been just handed over to the state, decentralization.
#
So when you talk of, so it's very hard to pinpoint specific people, but essentially
#
what I'm saying is, needed a smaller number of people who basically understood or understand
#
what creates prosperity.
#
I think that was the single most important agenda for this country.
#
I mean, and we'll talk about it more when we, in the second half, but the big changes,
#
I think, which needed to happen, I think number one is education.
#
I mean, we have, I think, yet again blown another five-year term where we keep messing
#
And this has happened now for 70 plus years.
#
It started with Nehru, who did not get one generation of Indians educated.
#
If one generation of Indians had been educated well, they will ensure that the next generation
#
is educated better than they are.
#
So he invested in higher education at the cost of primary education.
#
So where was education?
#
I mean, you look at the core ideas in economic freedom, in terms of administrative reforms,
#
the way the bureaucracy actually works.
#
You look at getting rid of government presence in all of various sectors of the economy.
#
I think we needed to just get the government out from all of those things.
#
I mean, Vajpayee had done a little bit of that, but the government had no business being
#
in any of these sectors.
#
Essentially, again, all of it would have, these things would have happened had there
#
been an understanding of what creates prosperity.
#
And there is only one path which creates prosperity.
#
If you study the countries which have become rich, it's the path of limited government,
#
its free markets, its free trade, its individual freedom, its rule of law, and property rights.
#
So every policy should have been taken, keeping this framework in mind.
#
Policies which are non-discriminatory, policies which basically decentralize power closest
#
to where the people are.
#
But none of that actually happened because the core understanding was not there.
#
So without that core understanding, then you stick to, oh, so it's essentially like, it's
#
not like Warren Buffett type investing strategy, it is more like day trading.
#
So it's almost like all of Modi's openness, which you spoke about earlier, was openness
#
in terms of how do I win this thing, and not openness in terms of evaluating his ideas
#
on what is right, what is wrong, what should I actually do, how should I actually govern,
#
but more in terms of how do I win, how do I win, and that obsession, and that, therefore,
#
while campaigning, he could be all things to all people.
#
He could say words which are music to all ears, like minimum government, maximum governance,
#
but actually which he didn't give a damn about and didn't deliver on at all.
#
In hindsight, this is an absolutely correct understanding.
#
And I want to take you back to a point you made earlier where, again, I entirely agree
#
with you that one of the problems here is that these ideas are sort of not part of our
#
culture, that people don't value economic freedom, people don't value freedom per se.
#
I mean, the way I come to economic freedom is just saying that, look, two consenting
#
adults should be able to do whatever they want with each other, whether it is in a bedroom
#
No one else has a moral right to get in the way.
#
This is a moral issue as much as a consequentialist one.
#
But a lot of Indians wouldn't even agree with that basic premise that two consenting adults
#
should do whatever they want with each other.
#
There are all kinds of social and cultural norms which we would consider problematic.
#
And therefore, I would imagine that one of the things that you would then say is that,
#
okay, if you look at the political marketplace, there's supply, there's demand, I need to
#
change the demand side, I need to change the culture.
#
And only then will politicians with those kinds of ideas actually come to power and
#
do something about it, which therefore becomes then a sort of a long-term project.
#
And instead, what you sort of did after you realized that Modi wasn't the way to go were
#
a series of projects which were still sort of predicated on the supply side itself.
#
And I want to spend a few minutes talking about each of them before we come to Dhanvapsi.
#
For example, your constitution project where you decided that you want to change the constitution.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
Why did that come to mind?
#
So, when I started thinking and talking to various people on why is India really poor?
#
So, of course, the simple answer is Indians lack freedom, but why do Indians lack freedom?
#
And the answer goes back to the rules that are there.
#
There's nothing wrong with Indians.
#
You take the same person from here, you put that person in America or Singapore, and in
#
five years, they'll be doing incredibly well.
#
So there's nothing genetically or there's no DNA problem with Indians.
#
So there's obviously a problem with the external circumstances or in the external environment
#
in which they are operating in.
#
And the core set of rules are actually defined in the Indian constitution.
#
And when we started studying the constitution, I think what was the shocking realization
#
was that 242 out of 395 articles in the original constitution were pretty much lifted verbatim
#
from the 1935 Government of India Act.
#
The 1935 Government of India Act was written by a colonial power, the British, to subjugate
#
And we kept two-thirds of that, or we used that to become two-thirds of our constitution.
#
And once you go through the constitution of India, it's A, the longest one, and length
#
does not mean greatness or goodness at all.
#
It's written by lawyers, readable only by lawyers, if then else's butts are all over
#
It's a pretty much unreadable document, can be interpreted in any different way.
#
Most important, it basically puts the people as subservient to the government.
#
That is, I think, the most fundamental problem.
#
And then you compare it with the American constitution, which is effectively carried
#
in a pocket, 20 amendments only, 25 odd amendments in 200-plus years, but written in a language
#
a 10-year-old can read and understand.
#
Simple example, you take Article I Amendment, basically, it says, Congress shall make no
#
law, among other things, abridging freedom of speech.
#
What it really means is that every person has the freedom of speech naturally.
#
It's there with them, and Congress cannot make any law, suppressing it or abridging
#
In India, if you read the 1700-word First Amendment on the same theme, effectively,
#
it says you can say what you want, as long as you don't disagree with what the government
#
And that's the root of, that sets the context.
#
All the caveats mentioned in Article 19, like public order, decency, and so on, which make
#
freedom of speech irrelevant, basically.
#
We pay lip service to it.
#
When we started thinking, it's the rules, so we can keep changing rulers, but if you
#
don't change the rules, your outcomes are not going to change.
#
And the core set of rules were defined in the Indian Constitution.
#
So that is when I started thinking that India needs a new Constitution, because if you change
#
the rules, then you'll start to at least get different outcomes.
#
But of course, the process of changing the Constitution is a long drawn out one.
#
Second is when I started talking to people, people would get spooked with this idea, because
#
we have been all taught to revere our Constitution.
#
Of course, not a single person I met, and I must have spoken to hundreds of people at
#
that time, has actually even read the Constitution.
#
I would carry the Indian Constitution, the thick Indian Constitution, and a copy of the
#
You know, it's basically one sort of long page where you have everything written out
#
So this is, I mean, other than the preamble, I don't think anyone gets past the preamble
#
also, of course, has problems, as we all know, socialist and secular and all that stuff.
#
What's wrong with secular?
#
Yes, you don't have to put it in there.
#
It's an individual choice that is there.
#
And the way we have used secular, by putting it in there, is completely the opposite of
#
what really was the intent of secular.
#
It has been twisted through the years.
#
And of course, socialist where you just insert...
#
Now, my thinking at that time was that the Constitution really are the core set of rules,
#
and that needs to get changed if India has to be put on a path to prosperity.
#
But then I realized very quickly that it's not an idea you can try persuading people
#
about, and it's also an impossibility to try and change it because the way the proper process
#
is you need Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, majority states, and all of that stuff.
#
And we're not even clear about how that can be done because of the basic structure doctrine
#
So it became a very complicated part.
#
But I said, at least I still show people who come and meet me in the office, the American
#
and the Indian Constitution.
#
I said, look at these two and try reading it.
#
So there's something here that you're an engineer, right?
#
So I know that appeals to you that you just change a few rules somewhere and everything
#
But what I'm trying to reconcile here is, and where I probably disagree, is that one
#
of the criticisms against the Constitution in the first place is that it's a Constitution
#
imposed by liberals on a country which is not really liberal.
#
Of course, we know the Constitution is deeply illiberal, doesn't support free speech, doesn't
#
support all kinds of personal freedoms, but it's still relatively more liberal than the
#
Or at least the original 1951 was, till they started with all the amendments, as Shruti
#
As Shruti has explained.
#
And we linked that a brilliant talk she gave about how Nehru and Indira and so on, all
#
the way to the present day, just kept making amendments to the Constitution every time
#
they didn't agree with what a court would have to say and it became more of a periodical
#
But the question here is that, let's say that by some miracle you could change the Constitution
#
and make it what you wanted.
#
It would still be a question of elite people imposing ideas on a country that broadly does
#
not agree with these ideas.
#
So the larger task, if the Constitution ever changes, the way I would rather see it change
#
is if these ideas emerge from the culture itself and people demand freedom and people
#
demand all of these things and then you have sort of change coming forth.
#
I don't agree with you, Amit.
#
See the real problem in India is we've never really experienced freedom.
#
So people, the problem is that people think they are free.
#
So now to actually prove to them that they are unfree and what is the world that they
#
are living in is actually not the right world is a very difficult exercise.
#
And unlike when you look at the time of the American Constitution, the people who drafted
#
it were living away from the British guys and their freedoms were then being imposed,
#
the British started imposing taxes, etc. on them and curtailing their freedoms.
#
Unfortunately in India, in 1947 the skin color of the rulers changed, but the real lives
#
of people, the rules governing them, look at our penal code and how many of them are
#
still brought from the British era, we are still in place.
#
And meant to subjugate us as you say and I keep pointing out, you know, when people talk
#
about Gandhi's fight for independence, that the salt taxes of the British that he protested
#
are actually far higher today and we've normalized all of these, we've normalized these many
#
oppressions which, you know…
#
The Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act is a derivative of a 1988 document, so these things
#
1888, sorry, 1888, 1888.
#
So the problem really in this is, okay, how do you bring about change?
#
So there are two approaches, you can try and change minds of people or you can channelize
#
votes and push through changes through that second process.
#
To demand end and supply end in a sense.
#
So I said, trying to change minds of people on some of the ideas around, whether it's
#
the constitution, around the rules, is actually going to be a very, very long drawn out effort.
#
And I tried, like I said, like you said, the constitution was the first one, we tried to
#
even persuade people in Mumbai city that, you know, we need a directly elected empowered
#
mayor, that the city should not be under the thumb of the municipal commissioner appointed
#
the chief minister who doesn't really care about cities because the votes are coming
#
So cities become a milking ground for collecting all the money and then redistributing it in
#
rural areas where all the votes are.
#
And therefore you see the pathetic state of not just Mumbai, but most, pretty much every
#
And I had a great episode on urban governance which Shruti, which sort of, which I'll again
#
link it on the page of this episode, which kind of explains that dynamic beautifully.
#
Yeah, so this was the problem that what we realized is that trying to persuade people
#
on these ideas is actually a very hard exercise.
#
And for me, the biggest learning came when we went out and talked in the Mumbai campaign
#
that we were running ahead of the Mumbai civic, the corporation elections and people told
#
us that, look, your ideas are good, but don't tell us to vote nota.
#
Don't tell us how we want to vote.
#
If you have good ideas, come and contest, put your own candidates and then we will support
#
So don't just, so the message really was that don't tell us what to do.
#
You give us an alternative to what the other parties are basically doing.
#
And this is in the context of like after the constitution thing where you moved on to.
#
Yeah, so 2015, if I were to look back, 2015 and early 2016 was when I was talking about
#
the constitution ideas.
#
After the second half of 2016, early 2017 was the cities campaign, what we call free
#
cities, Swatantra city.
#
But before we go on to that, you know, the constitution thing, the thing is at around
#
the same time, you know, and through this period, the RSS has also been talking of changing
#
the constitution and they would of course make it much more culturally Hindutva as opposed
#
And it would just, the constitution would reflect the bigotry of our nation perhaps.
#
And with the exception of the RSS would have a realistic shot at this.
#
You had absolutely no realistic shot because, you know, yeah, it was a sort of long term
#
I thought that if I could put this idea out to people around the constitution, around
#
the freedom, give them an alternate document, which is really built on the American version.
#
I mean, I keep saying that India made two fundamental mistakes in 1947.
#
We chose the wrong economic model and we chose the wrong political model.
#
We should have copied the American constitution, we should have copied the American economic
#
We chose the British parliamentary system and we chose the Soviet Union's economic model.
#
And that really has sealed the fate of our country over the last 70 years.
#
So what my thinking at that time really was that if we can at least try and persuade people
#
on an alternative set of ideas, then some of these things may be possible.
#
I was naive and like any entrepreneur, I think you make initial mistakes and then you learn
#
So I'm a political entrepreneur.
#
I try out different things and if they don't work, then you make changes and you adapt.
#
I failed enough times in my life, so I don't worry about failure.
#
And moving on from the constitution, then you decided to focus on local governance.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
So cities are the engines of growth basically.
#
Cities are where jobs get created, cities are where wealth gets created.
#
And in India, cities are in a miserable situation because we have no decentralization of power
#
So the decentralization, the rules which were there in the constitution don't mandate in
#
They leave it to the state to really decide if they want to give funds to the cities automatically
#
And of course, no chief minister will want to do that.
#
So the cities basically become completely under the thumb of the chief minister who
#
then appoints a commissioner.
#
So the elected people, the mayor and the corporators have very limited powers to really make any
#
And therefore, there is no accountability, either financial accountability or governance
#
So you have, Bombay has, Mumbai has basically some 20, 30 agencies.
#
We've got 60,000 crores sitting in a fixed deposit account, which could transform the
#
city's infrastructure, but no one's doing anything about these things.
#
So it becomes basically dens of corruption because everyone is looking at their own thing.
#
We've compounded the problem with reservation of seats or for the 50% women thing where
#
no corporator knows if in the next election, their seat is going to become a reserved constituency
#
So they want to make as much money as they can now.
#
So as much money as now.
#
What's the incentive for performing well?
#
So there's no incentive, absolutely.
#
So the rules, again, you look at the rules which are there out here.
#
The perverse set of incentives out there.
#
So the cities really should have been the magnets.
#
I mean, we have 15 million people moving from rural areas to urban areas every year, 400
#
million people in the next 25 years.
#
What kind of lives are we going to give them in cities?
#
We've already seen that in Mumbai.
#
We are seeing that in many other cities.
#
And it doesn't have to be that way.
#
So the cities really needed to be independent of the central government and the state government.
#
And that's why we called it swatantra cities, free cities.
#
But these are hard ideas to actually persuade people with.
#
And we had limited budgets.
#
We were not fighting the election.
#
Our thing was, and of course, the other problem in the election was that this is a decision
#
which has to be made at the state government level.
#
And the corporators, ones whom people were voting for, had no power to decide their own
#
This is, in fact, what Shruti had discussed in her episode on urban governance where she,
#
I mean, the fundamental problem here is there's a mismatch between power and accountability.
#
The people you vote for and who have incentives to do things for you actually has no power
#
And the people who have the power, they don't care for your votes because they're getting
#
it from somewhere else.
#
And the fundamental principle, of course, here is that, which we can all agree with
#
at an intellectual level, is that the more local government is, the better it is where
#
power and accountability are together.
#
The principle of subsidiarity, which says that decisions should be made as close to
#
the people as possible.
#
And only then is where you start making better decisions.
#
But the only people who can change the system are the people who actually benefit from it,
#
who have power without accountability right now.
#
So we had drafted our alternate replacement for the Municipal Corporation Act.
#
We did all of that work.
#
We tried to take it to people, but of course, it was not easy to do that.
#
And then I realized that that project is not going to go too far because you can't really
#
persuade people, the ones in power, to actually give out.
#
No chief minister wants to release the power that he has or he or she has over cities.
#
And you actually put together a little political machine for the Bombay elections.
#
But what you did there was instead of actually putting up candidates, you set this political
#
machine to get people to vote for nota.
#
The hope was that if there were enough nota, someone would take notice.
#
But then again, the problem in India is that nota by itself is a meaningless vote.
#
Because even if you got everyone but one person voting for nota, that one vote winner still
#
If nota wins the election, it doesn't mean there'll be another election.
#
So people basically, of course, rightly told us that just calling vote for nota is irrelevant.
#
In a sense, a not voting sends the same sort of signal as a nota does, right?
#
Nota actually, at least you're going out and making a conscious choice of pressing a button
#
So you're at least going out there.
#
Not voting is basically just ignoring the election process.
#
So, I mean, this episode is about Dhanvapsi and I don't want to, you know, take any more
#
This, the subject though, the journey that you've made is fairly fascinating to me.
#
But so before we go into a commercial break and we'll come back for Dhanvapsi, I want
#
to ask you one more question.
#
And I've been asking you this since 2015.
#
And it's something I didn't understand back then is that my thing was that, look, you
#
know, you are against Modi now.
#
You supported him in the public eye.
#
People think, oh, that this is one of the masterminds behind the whole Modi thing.
#
He runs all of Modi's tech, blah, blah, blah.
#
Why don't you speak out against Modi?
#
It would make a difference.
#
Why don't you speak out publicly about your disillusionment, all the things that you basically
#
said in this episode or the problems you have with him.
#
And at that time you weren't, I mean, now of course you are and you've come on this
#
show and you've spoken about it.
#
But at that time you weren't, like, what was the thinking there?
#
See, I've not really spoken at all either about my role in the campaign.
#
I've not given interviews for pretty much most of my last 10 years.
#
Some of it is urban mythology, which is building up.
#
So, see, the point is that what is it, I mean, I tend to look forward rather than back.
#
So, my decision to support the BJP and Modi, whether it's in 2009 or after that, I think
#
was the absolutely right decision at that point of time.
#
Given the information available.
#
I think given what the country needed at that point of time, given the information available
#
and of course what I knew and it was a decision which I made and a lot of the country made
#
at that particular point of time.
#
I think I perhaps was a little more wedded to the decision or I thought a lot more about
#
the decision because I was quite involved in the campaign.
#
But one decision which I did make was that, okay, what's past is past.
#
We need to look forward and by being critical of Modi or by saying that he should have done
#
this, he should have done that, I don't think it solves the problem.
#
I think what we really need to look at and that's what I've spent the last year, year
#
and a half thinking through.
#
I think it's very easy to criticize, okay, but then what is your alternative?
#
That's what everyone comes down to even today saying that, okay, so you don't want to vote
#
What is your alternative?
#
Whom are you going to vote for?
#
That is the question which really drove me saying that, can we come up with an credible
#
alternative to not just Modi, but the current set of political parties because like you
#
said earlier, it doesn't make a difference who's in power.
#
On the economic side, they are all the same.
#
On the political and other freedom side, some are on one side, some are on the other side,
#
but effectively they are all running what I call PPP, you know, planned perpetual poverty.
#
And as your good friend Arun Shourie said, the BJP is really UPA plus cow.
#
So I think if you start thinking about it from like an entrepreneur, okay, what's happened
#
Where are the opportunities which are there in the election?
#
And I think what's fascinating at this point of time is the options that people have today
#
are not particularly thrilling, you know, like you don't see an emotive wave which started
#
building up late 2013 and towards early 2014.
#
And this creates a market opportunity.
#
I look at it that the political marketplace has options which the consumers are not excited
#
So is there an opportunity to provide them with something that they want, something different?
#
And that's what we'll talk about after this commercial break.
#
Hey everybody, it's another awesome week on IVM Podcast.
#
If you're not following us on social media, please make sure you do your IVM Podcast on
#
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
This week on Cyrus Says, Cyrus talks to journalist Rachel Lopez about her taxi ceiling art series
#
and her own podcast, Wordy Wordpecker, available only on the IVM network.
#
On Simplify, Chuck, Naren and Sriketh deconstruct the latest UN report on climate change and
#
why the next two decades might be the most important for the earth.
#
On the latest special episode of Pesa Vesa, Anupam talks to Hansi Marhotra, an investment
#
professional and owner of the financial block, TheMoneyHans.com.
#
On Shunyoo One, Sheila Ditya and I speak to Arpit Ratan, co-founder of Sainsi, a fintech
#
company that makes regulatory processes for bank and other financial institutions simple,
#
On the Kinetic Living Podcast, Coach Urmi talks to childhood buddy and actor, Shikhar
#
She elaborates on her fitness journey and how she balances work, diet and the need to
#
And just a reminder guys, please tell a friend, you need to tell a friend that you're listening
#
to a podcast that you like and get them to listen to the podcast that you think they
#
And with that, let's take you on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene In The Unseen.
#
I'm sitting with my friend Rajesh Jain and we are now going to talk about Dhanwapsi.
#
Rajesh, what is Dhanwapsi?
#
So Dhanwapsi is a movement to make every Indian rich and free.
#
So what we want to do is to ensure the return of public wealth, surplus public wealth back
#
Our estimate of the public wealth of Indians is 50 lakh rupees per family.
#
And what we want to see is one lakh rupees go back to every family every year.
#
It helps tackle what I call the Hamesha problems of poverty, unemployment, corruption and it's
#
got a lot of other very positive benefits.
#
Let's define public wealth first.
#
Public wealth is basically wealth which is owned by the government and not by private
#
individuals and therefore it's wealth which is owned by all of us.
#
Yeah, so it's the word I would use is controlled by the government.
#
It's owned by the people.
#
And this largely falls in three categories.
#
There are the public lands, so which would be in Mumbai, let's say Navinagar, the Eastern
#
waterfront or in Delhi, Lattin's Delhi, Delhi cantonment.
#
The public sector undertakings is the second category and then all the assets that they
#
have and the third is the mineral wealth that is there.
#
So all put together, I mean we've got a detailed wiki on our website dhanwapsi.com which actually
#
we've measured all of this and this comes to 1500 lakh crores.
#
Yeah, about 20 trillion dollars.
#
So 15 followed by 14 zeros if you're counting.
#
And how much of this should legitimately be owned by the state in your view and how
#
much of this should just, you know, can you ask the question to why is it owned by the
#
Yeah, so all of this is actually what we define as surplus wealth.
#
So we are not counting the real, the few things that the state should be doing.
#
I mean if you actually look, police stations, parliament, the judiciary, the army, I mean
#
Let's take a simple example, Navinagar in Mumbai, it was fine in 1790s when it was set
#
It was fine till 1946 or early 1947 when it should have been there.
#
What is the logic for having it right now?
#
It's basically become a lifestyle center, the best golf course, the best wedding venue
#
But this is place where we need, we should be having economic activity.
#
People should be not having to commute three hours every day, they should be getting whether
#
it's affordable homes, whether it's educational colleges, whether it's offices, all of that
#
should be happening because that is what creates wealth.
#
So our point is that if you want to eliminate poverty in India, you need to start getting
#
all of these surplus assets into production, into use and that then creates wealth.
#
So you monetize all of these assets and then you return the wealth back to people.
#
So that then has the other benefit.
#
So other than being under the government, because the government basically we all know
#
there's a lot of wastage which is there, I mean now government just raided the National
#
Small Savings Fund to put money into Air India.
#
So all of this started to keep happening because this is the actual wealth of the people.
#
So it is pathetic that we keep people poor and then of course they don't even know that
#
they have access to a large sum of money, which is their own, it's their own wealth.
#
All that we are saying is start returning it back to them so they can craft their own
#
So what you would suggest is for something like a Navinagar then for example, or any
#
large sprawling land which the government has and is really doing nothing with.
#
What you would say is that privatize it, which will have two effects.
#
One effect is that the money that you get is the money of the people and you want to
#
distribute it to the households of this country directly without any other use for it.
#
So it goes back to the people it belongs to and the second order effect is that once it
#
is privatized it will be put to optimal economic use and that itself will generate wealth and
#
Yes and more importantly, to add to that actually, is that today when it stays with the government
#
there is corruption also because some of it starts getting edged away, I mean railway
#
No one even has an account of how much land has been sort of encroached or privately monetized.
#
So public assets which are basically whether it's private wealth creation, all of that
#
An industrialist will come and say, okay, let me use this much land and I'll set up
#
a factory here or I'll do whatever and it's actually public property.
#
So this happens in most wherever there is land available.
#
Okay, people have been doing that in cities, this has been happening and there are no clear
#
titles also available in many of these places.
#
So your concept of Dhanvapsi really is that everyone in this country, no matter how poor
#
he is, even the beggar at the traffic signal actually has a lot of dhan in the form of
#
this public wealth which he has no access to whatsoever.
#
And this is not dhan being used for the legitimate purposes of the state or whatever one agrees
#
they might be, but it's just lying around, it's wasted.
#
So there are two arguments really for Dhanvapsi.
#
There is the economic argument and the moral argument.
#
The economic argument is efficiency, that these are assets which are not being used.
#
If you get them into use, you'll have greater efficiency, which will lead to wealth creation
#
But there is also the moral argument that what is happening right now is actually theft.
#
What the government is doing right now is taking the property which belongs to the people
#
They've basically stolen all of this wealth.
#
This is wealth which should be returned back to people and that is morally the right thing
#
So the government cannot be sitting and claiming or a thief cannot be coming and claiming that,
#
look, I'm going to use your money more efficiently, so let me steal it from you.
#
Morally, this is wealth of the people, this should go back to them.
#
And people decide how they want to use that money.
#
What Dhanvapsi basically means is here is all this Dhan which is held by the state and
#
you want a Dhanvapsi, you want this Dhan to go back to the people.
#
Go back to the people because let's, what is the broader idea behind it?
#
Indians, the average per capita income today in India is $1,700, $1,800.
#
More importantly, the family income, the median family income in the country is 10,000 rupees
#
A family of five earning 10,000 rupees, probably saving a small fraction of that.
#
Many of these families actually would also be in debt, especially in rural.
#
So the wealth is negative basically.
#
And it makes no sense, you know, because of the policies that we've had, what we talked
#
about earlier, the anti-prosperity machine that has, that every government in India has
#
run and continues to run, has actually been the biggest wealth destruction, I think, in
#
the history of the world.
#
I mean, you have a 1.3 billion people who are denied the chance to be rich.
#
In fact, the late leader Sharad Joshi used to use a term which resonates with me a lot,
#
a negative subsidy, which he used in the context of farmers.
#
We had a great episode on agriculture where Gunvand Patil elaborated on that, checked
#
So what is the mechanism of this Dhanvapsi?
#
So there are two key questions to address.
#
I think first is how do the resources get raised and then how do they get given back
#
How do they, how do we deliver it?
#
So let's talk about raising.
#
Where does this money come from?
#
To begin with, you've kind of identified a lot of this land which is just lying around.
#
So what we've done is, and it's all there on our public wealth wiki, we've tried to
#
identify from listed sources, and I don't think that's complete, but it's what we have.
#
Pretty much every government-controlled land that is there, defense, railways, public sector
#
undertakings, etc., we've then done a valuation of that.
#
We've taken an FSI of one in all cases, which is actually low.
#
In Mumbai and Delhi, the FSI should be really 10.
#
I mean, there's no reason, like Alex Rabiroch, who did an episode with me on FSI, said there's
#
no reason why it can't be 30, 40, 50.
#
But we've taken, we've been very conservative in our calculations and that's how we've...
#
We've arrived at these numbers which are there.
#
So for land, for public sector undertakings, some of the corporations are not even held
#
publicly like LIC and the India Post are still not listed.
#
So we have no way of estimating wealth.
#
You take entities like Coal India, they should actually be worth probably 10 times what they
#
are worth today because Coal India is looted three ways.
#
First, the government loots them from all the profits that they make.
#
They make them dividend it out to the government.
#
Second is it's the most overstaffed, one of the most overstaffed organizations.
#
So the employees are, in theory, looting it.
#
And then you have the contractors and the politicians when the coal starts flowing out.
#
So there's no reason really for anyone to buy Coal India stock theoretically.
#
On the other hand, you have in Saudi Arabia, you have Aramco, which is worth a trillion
#
and a half or $2 trillion.
#
And here we have Coal India, which is worth $25 billion, having one of the largest coal
#
So in the hands of government, these assets are really not worth much, put them in private
#
We've written out a Dhanwapasi bill, which we've sent to the prime minister and to every
#
Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha MP, a bill which can actually be introduced in the Lok Sabha and
#
And it gives a four stage process of how you generate the wealth.
#
First is identifying the resources.
#
Of course, we've done it at our level, but presumably government sources will have a
#
So identify, restructure them.
#
So in the way that they can be most optimized for private use, get all the permissions in
#
place, get all the land titles clear.
#
So there's no litigation afterwards, clear property, clear asset.
#
And fourth is as the monies come in, you're putting them into a fund from where it can
#
So this is how the wealth is getting created or generated from all of these public assets.
#
The second part is how do you get it across to people?
#
To sort of come back to this, I think there are like what just comes to my naturally cynical
#
mind because I'm very skeptical about how government operates is that you mentioned
#
the auction mechanism, which is a good thing.
#
But you know, the first issue there is that if you talk about selling all this public
#
land, it's a process that for politicians, the incentives are for subverting the whole
#
process and giving it to favored cronies under conditions that would fetch less in the market
#
And you think auctions would probably be one way to have a transparent process.
#
So what we are saying also in the bill is there's a separate Dhanvapasi commission gets created.
#
So you take the matter out of the politicians and the bureaucrats.
#
But the government only will create the commission.
#
Yeah, it's, yeah, the government has to create the commission.
#
I mean, at some point of time, you have to look at that.
#
But of course, we are also solving the trying to solve the problem of who forms the government.
#
We can take that up a little bit later.
#
So the first part of it is really how the assets are identified.
#
The process of auction is a transparent process.
#
And look at what's happening today.
#
Today, these assets are sitting with the government.
#
They are either picked up by some of their friends, crony people, or they are just wasted.
#
So you have effectively you have a plot of land, which is sitting idle.
#
And then you have five unemployed people sitting somewhere away.
#
Now you put these five people on work on the land, they will create wealth.
#
But today, if they are sitting idle, there's no wealth creation, which is happening.
#
So my belief is that this is at least a starting point if there are better solutions.
#
I think we are definitely open to ideas from the outside on what can be done better.
#
But our key point is, this is the wealth of the people which should be the process of
#
returning it should start.
#
Then comes how do we give the money back to people to get back to the process of returning
#
One more question, which is that if you for example, if you put too much of this land
#
on the market at the same time, the value actually depreciates because the supply has
#
So you plan to phase it out over time.
#
So if I look at it, the actual process, I think how we can do it is that in the first
#
year, the public sector undertakings, they are the low hanging fruit.
#
So by that time, you also have a year then to get the land processes and set up in place.
#
And I think it'll be a good idea if land prices come down, especially in places like Mumbai
#
I mean, we have some of the most expensive real estate, again, because of bad laws, you've
#
covered that earlier in your earlier episodes, because of bad rules that are there.
#
And again, if the core price of the land actually comes down, you'll again have more economic
#
activity, things which were unaffordable earlier, couldn't set up a college, couldn't have affordable
#
homes, couldn't have hospitals or whatever, all of the stuff that drives economic activity,
#
you'll have a lot more of that happening.
#
Prices in Mumbai and Delhi, especially, and some of the larger cities in India have been
#
artificially driven up because we have put so many constraints.
#
It's like, take a simple example, we've reclaimed the sea, we've not reclaimed the sky.
#
There are 100 stations in Mumbai and Delhi, we can have a million square feet built above
#
That's what happens in Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, all over the place.
#
That's in fact, the point Alex Rabiroc made in his great episode on FSI with me, where
#
he said that we need to reclaim the sky, not the sea and, you know, other cities in the
#
world have FSI of 30, 40, they build upwards, we have an FSI of four or five.
#
And we have done both the things, we have built a 100 story building in Mumbai, we've
#
also built on top of a railway station in Vashi, but we've done it for one station.
#
So again, this is just economic opportunities which are lying, which go a begging.
#
And therefore, we as a country stay poor.
#
Okay, let's move on to the second part of your thing now, how do we get this money to
#
So our first point is this has to be universal.
#
Okay, so, yeah, people will come in and say, why should Ambani and Birlai and everyone
#
And there are two answers to it.
#
First is that every person, every citizen of India has an equal right on the wealth
#
So it does not matter how rich or poor you are, you have a right.
#
So the beggar of the traffic signal should get the same as Mukesh Ambani.
#
Same as, it's the equal share in the wealth.
#
Second is why universal?
#
Because it just makes sense, of course, everyone should get it.
#
And then you, you don't want to create another bureaucracy with corruption, trying to identify
#
should Amit get it and should Rajesh get it?
#
So what is your income?
#
What is your BPL line and all of those things?
#
So everyone gets it, you don't need bureaucracies to identify who should get it, who should
#
And the process of returning it can be through bank accounts, possibly linked, of course,
#
DBT today, so anyway, happening to roughly a few hundred million people, probably close
#
to 500 million people and all the benefits, direct benefit transfer is already happening.
#
I say is that, you know, the election commission can hold an election in 30 days and reach
#
out to every Indian who does not have to walk more than 10 minutes to actually go cast a
#
vote for the people who are left out from the bank account creation.
#
I think we can have one exercise which lets people create a bank account and you don't
#
need a physical branch.
#
You can do phone banking, all of these possibilities are there.
#
I mean, there's a significant economic incentive for a family when they're going to get one
#
lakh rupees to actually go and get a bank account.
#
All you have to do is to generate the awareness because it's a and these are the poorest families
#
in India would probably be saving not more than 10, 20,000 rupees, like we said earlier,
#
So there's a great economic incentive.
#
But you were joking about the Aadhaar linkage, right?
#
Because coercing Aadhaar on people is, you know, then you see the other aspect of freedom
#
So there are, like I said, Aadhaar is one possibility.
#
Whatever, it's a mechanic.
#
The mechanics can be debated yourself.
#
Yeah, we need to ensure that, you know, there's no fraud, there is no corruption in the process
#
So that kind of form of identity will be required one way or the other.
#
So make it universal, give it into people's bank accounts.
#
So 20,000 rupees per person, one lakh rupees for a family of five.
#
And I think in the next five to 10 years, we would have completely transformed India.
#
So every year a person is going to get 20,000 bucks.
#
Does that really make such a big difference?
#
Again, go back to what the income of a typical family is, what are the savings and so on.
#
My sense is, at least from what initial feedback we've got, I think it will make a very big
#
The most important number is 10,000 rupees is the income, monthly income.
#
Savings are probably, let's say, 10% or so for a household, for a thousand rupees.
#
What we are really doing is the 10, 12,000 rupees savings are now being multiplied 10
#
Instead of 12,000 savings for a household, you're getting one lakh to a thousand.
#
One lakh additional, which is there.
#
And that is really, really transformational.
#
That is, I think, what we'd like to accomplish through this, through Dhanvapasi.
#
I mean, every year that we are not helping or not returning this wealth, which is legitimately
#
that of the people, because we are saying that, you know what, we are keeping this for
#
So you will not become rich, but maybe two, three generations from now, you will become
#
Give the money back, let people become rich now.
#
You don't have to then support them or help them afterwards.
#
And we are actually spending probably a very large sum of money anyways today on all of
#
these subsidies and all of these schemes, a lot of which is just looted away.
#
That is going to people who don't need it.
#
Some bureaucrat in Delhi deciding who, what scheme is right for some poor family in Jharkhand.
#
This is all again about individual choice.
#
You get your one lakh rupees for your family.
#
You decide how you want to spend it.
#
Do you need to buy a buffalo?
#
Do you need to add an extra room in your house?
#
Do you need to sell the cycle and get a, get a bike?
#
Do you need to spend, invest that money for your child's education?
#
What is your prerogative?
#
So actually by, by unlocking this wealth, we are freeing the people from the bureaucrats
#
So wealth, so not only we are freeing the wealth, but this is the way you actually get
#
freedom back into people's lives.
#
And you'd rather empower these people by giving them the money rather than saying that, hey,
#
the government will do worthy things with it in your name, whether it's build statues
#
or subsidy schemes or whatever.
#
No, here, take the money directly.
#
Because everything else is coercion.
#
I mean, when government is put up already 60,000 crores into Air India, every poor family
#
has already paid 200 rupees, 2000 rupees, sorry.
#
And without being asked about it.
#
So all you listeners who are Indian taxpayers, you've paid 2000 rupees to Air India.
#
I mean, by taxpayers, I mean, a hundred percent of us pay taxes, as I keep pointing out.
#
I mean, all of these loan waiver schemes, MSP and all of these new schemes that you
#
announced, they're all taking away money from people.
#
Of course, we are just too unorganized to protest about any of these schemes at all.
#
And what we are saying is get rid of all of these things because every one of them, I
#
think the key message for people is that every one of them actually increases poverty.
#
It does not increase prosperity.
#
It hurts the poor the most because they have no choice in this matter.
#
And they should be having the freedom to decide what they want to do with the money.
#
My belief is that even the poorest family knows what is right.
#
There have been studies conducted.
#
Get this whole, when I talk to people, many times people say, oh, but they'll blow it
#
up and drinking and wasting it.
#
It's completely the opposite.
#
They know what is good for them.
#
There'll always be that small fraction of people who will probably misuse some part
#
And they do have the right to use the money.
#
Let them decide what they want.
#
Because every year that we are losing out on this, I mean, a simple example, a simple
#
point, 25 million kids get into the education system every year.
#
We are subjecting them to a government education system, which does not work.
#
You don't educate them right.
#
You are basically, it's a, it's a human rights issue, you know, literally.
#
And more than that, they go out there and because the education system is so bad, they
#
end up having no skills at all and therefore our jobs crisis becomes even worse.
#
So give them, give the money back.
#
I think you need to do this, even though technically you can do it for a longer period, five to
#
10 years, because there is no other way by which we're going to put Indians on the path
#
What else is the solution?
#
In fact, if you go back in America, they did pretty much similarly in the, in the pilgrims
#
and the early, early settlers came in, they were given land.
#
They tried community farming earlier.
#
People started dying because no one wanted to really work out there.
#
Everyone wanted the free lunch.
#
Then they started saying, okay, this is your individual plot of land.
#
You decide what you want to do with it.
#
And that started the process of prosperity in America.
#
I think in India, what we don't realize is that our people just don't realize because
#
So, but the point I try and make to people is that your network should have been 10 times
#
Had we done the right things over the last 70 years?
#
And that's the change that we need to bring out, bring in India.
#
That I completely agree with.
#
And you know, one early objection I had to Dhana Vapsi when I first heard about it and
#
I spoke to your colleague Kumar about it and I said that, listen, okay, I understand that
#
there's this public wealth and it's debt capital and you're going to sell it off.
#
But by selling it off, why don't you simply reduce the tax burden and maybe, you know,
#
cut down on all the taxes that people have to pay, which are, you know, essentially a
#
form of theft because the state does all kinds of things with it, which are not legitimate
#
functions of the, this thing and his answer, which kind of convinced me was that what you're
#
then doing is that the Ambani's and the Adani's will benefit more from this and the poor people
#
and by actually giving the money directly to each person at an equal level, you're making
#
sure that the beggar on the street gets the same amount as the Mukesh Ambani.
#
Well, if you just reduce taxes or whatever, the, it's the rich who would really benefit
#
from the lowering of the burden.
#
And there's one more point to add to that, which is that Dhana Vapsi is not universal
#
There's a very big difference between the two.
#
UBI is seen as an entitlement.
#
This is the right of people.
#
This is, this is their wealth.
#
So we are not doing anything other than giving them back what is already theirs.
#
Just that they don't know about it today.
#
Just because they don't know and doesn't allow the government to retain control on that wealth.
#
It's not a lifetime commitment that we are making.
#
This is still, the wealth is there, what is generated from there till we are giving it
#
And as of today that the wealth is 50 lakh rupees in the surplus wealth.
#
So potentially one lakh can be given for 50 years.
#
It may be more, it may be a little bit less.
#
But my feeling is that after five to 10 years, it will not make much of a difference to most
#
people because by that time they would have all started creating their own paths to prosperity
#
and their incomes would be, or their wealth would be a multiple.
#
This may not make as much of a difference, but we have to kickstart this process.
#
We have to free up this wealth and get it, get it out in the hands of people.
#
I think that's very important.
#
UBI has been used in developed countries more as a solution against the automation and the
#
jobs crisis that is there.
#
This idea is really new and innovative because it's about the public wealth.
#
It's about the wealth which, I mean, frankly, most people don't even know.
#
We all, like you said in the beginning, it's owned by the government, but what is owned
#
by government ownership means it's actually government control.
#
But we seem to separate out, no, it's owned by the government, so you can't be touched
#
as if the government was this massive monolith.
#
And your point is, look, it's actually owned by us and damn it, we need the money.
#
And, you know, just elaborate on that.
#
I mean, the point of, you know, that UBI being an entitlement and, you know, just looking
#
at it from the angle of positive rights and negative rights, you know, an entitlement
#
or what some people call rights, but are really entitlements and, you know, would fall into
#
the positive rights category and therefore what I would call fake rights is that you
#
take money from X set of people and redistribute it to Y set of people, which is what UBI basically
#
That you tax everybody and then you give everybody UBI out of that and, of course, there is much
#
leakage within the system.
#
But what you're saying is not that there is no coercion involved here.
#
This is the money of the people.
#
It in fact undoes the coercion of the past and, you know, sort of does justice by returning
#
that money in an equitable way.
#
In fact, I should have added this earlier that UBI in most countries, all the countries
#
that have been talked about is funded by taxation.
#
In fact, here, and we've written this out in our prosperity agenda on our site, where
#
gun vapasi is one of the key pillars, of course, for prosperity.
#
With this, we can actually reduce taxes for everyone to keep more money in people's hands.
#
They are the best decision makers on what to do with the money that is there.
#
The government should get a limited amount of money, which it spends on a limited number
#
Today, what's happening is that the government appetite for collecting is going up much more
#
I mean, all these excesses and all of these additional things get squeezed in.
#
You know, so it's death by a thousand taxation cuts that is there.
#
And the scope of what the government does keeps growing.
#
And we are going, we are heading down the completely wrong path.
#
So whatever the government needs, they should collect through taxes.
#
So there's a very transparent mechanism of running the government saying that, okay,
#
this is how much we collected and this is how we have spent it.
#
But they're not taking that money and trying to spend it on 25,000 other things that they
#
India needs a better judicial system.
#
India needs a better police force.
#
India needs a better equipped army or defense forces.
#
We today don't even have the money to buy arms if we have to protect our borders.
#
Those are the core functions of a government, protecting property rights, enforcing contracts,
#
law and order and so on.
#
But today, because the government does 25,000 other things, they are not even able to do
#
those core things that they should be doing, which others cannot, they're not doing that.
#
In fact, instead of being a strong and limited state, we are a weak and diffused large state.
#
So instead of being strong in the few functions that we should do, we are actually weak in
#
those and we do a hundred other things.
#
And the one thing that the state is really good at is basically predation.
#
You know, the state is like a parasite which just sucks and sucks from we the people.
#
So moving forward then, is Dhanvapasi or is this bill you've created just a public policy
#
proposal which you want others to implement or is it a political movement you're trying
#
So Dhanvapasi is a political movement because the people in power right now, the MPs and
#
their political parties are not going to pass the bill.
#
We have sent it to all the MPs.
#
We've got acknowledgments back from six out of 780 people we have sent it to.
#
Can I by the way, reproduce a bill on the site so my listeners can also download it
#
and read it for themselves?
#
So you'll find out in the episode.
#
It's there on our Dhanvapasi site.
#
In fact, the wiki, we have a booklet, there's a manifesto and the bill.
#
All these links will be in the episode page then?
#
So the current sort of MPs are not going to do it.
#
So how do we make it happen?
#
This is not just a theoretical idea which is left out there and then no one does it.
#
What we really want to do and that's the process that we've started.
#
The second part of, so there's an economic idea, there's the political part of it also,
#
which is that we don't even have political freedom actually in the country.
#
We may call ourselves a democracy, but whom are we voting for?
#
We are basically voting for those people whom the political party bosses decide.
#
We have no ability to select the candidate from a political party whom we support in
#
They put up the person.
#
So now that candidate's loyalty or that MP's loyalty is towards the political party bosses,
#
not towards the local people.
#
So our idea is that how can we create a technology platform?
#
So again, use technology to bring in change in the political process.
#
Technology has impacted a lot of other areas.
#
It's not touched the political part.
#
So how can you use technology to select and elect a government of independent candidates
#
chosen by the people through primaries in the next election?
#
And these are the people then who are elected on a Dhanvapasi plank that they will pass
#
And once you start the process of doing Dhanvapasi, government starts a lot of other side effects
#
which take place like we discussed, the process of shrinking government will begin.
#
Now, how do we make this happen?
#
So what we've done, what our thinking is that, and that's what I was saying earlier on that
#
there's a very interesting option right now that there needs to be an alternative.
#
So the way I like to sort of frame it is that the political parties are built on a premise
#
of dhoka, basically betrayal.
#
You make promises and they have no intention of keeping.
#
That's all for the purpose of getting into power.
#
And all you have a choice is between one type A of dhoka or type B of dhoka.
#
That's what you're going to get.
#
We have seen it election after election through the years, but that's the choice that people
#
What we are saying is that let's create another option, which is different from the political
#
So it's not about creating a new political party.
#
It's creating a tech platform which lets individuals who like this idea, who want Dhanvapasi to
#
happen come together with candidates, with leaders who actually want to make Dhanvapasi
#
happen, who want to get elected to the Lok Sabha.
#
So it also brings down the cost of entering politics, cost of winning elections.
#
Because now you no longer have to rely on your political party godfathers and give them
#
a lot of money to come into power, which sort of vitiates the entire system.
#
As members come, just like Ola and Uber, it's a two-sided platform.
#
You have drivers and you have passengers who connect through a tech platform.
#
Today, we have enough phones and smartphones across the country to actually think about
#
So if I want to contest elections, I can do that, of course, as an independent, but I'm
#
not going to get more than a handful of votes because who knows me?
#
And it's a waste of your security deposit.
#
But now if I want to contest elections, I can come on the Dhanvapasi platform and say,
#
yes, I want to be a leader.
#
And then we have a mechanism by which you can earn points.
#
The top five people become the candidates for a primary in that constituency, where
#
people can vote for them.
#
They can rate them, review them.
#
Someone can come in and say, hey, Rajesh, I know Rajesh, he was a BJP supporter.
#
So I can comment on that back.
#
But it's a transparent process.
#
You're not hiding, nothing gets hidden because you're also tapping into the wisdom of crowds
#
So just like Zomato reviews or Amazon product reviews, they're all out there.
#
I have to then be accountable to the people.
#
So you have primaries where the candidate then gets elected.
#
And then hopefully, because there's a large membership base, the likelihood of that person
#
And I want to add one more thing out here.
#
What's very interesting, if you actually look at the numbers, there should be 100 crore
#
eligible voters in the next election in six to eight months time, 30 crore, only 30 crore
#
are hardcore supporters of BJP, Congress, and the regional parties.
#
So those are people who will go out, vote on the symbol that is there.
#
They're not going to sit at home.
#
They don't care about the candidate.
#
The other 70 crore are unattached to any political party.
#
They are either not voting, they're not either registered to vote, they are wasting their
#
vote or they're sitting at the last minute, whom to vote for.
#
Our goal is that if this 70 crore people can be persuaded that there is an economic incentive
#
where you get your wealth back, and there's a political part of it where you get your
#
And for the first time, you really will have a say in the future of this country.
#
You have a voice as part, of course, of a large group, you have your voice, which comes
#
You are not now hostage to the political party bosses, where two people sitting in Delhi
#
are making all decisions, does not matter what you think.
#
So it's sort of a revolution on both the political side and on the economic side, because you
#
can't do one without the other.
#
I can put the economic idea out, it's not going to happen.
#
And that was the big learning from the Mumbai Corporation elections.
#
And the solution is not creating another political party, because then we will go down the same
#
path where there'll be two people at the top trying to decide.
#
You've seen that happen with, for example, Aam Aadmi Party, where it went down the same
#
So how do you think and bottom up, where how do you return in a way the voice and wealth
#
How do you make people politically free and give them economic freedom?
#
So let me try to kind of summarize what you've said and tell me if I've made a mistake in
#
sort of understanding it and I have follow up questions.
#
What you're saying is that then the Dhanwapsi platform is like a tech platform, which is
#
like an Uber for politics, where you're connecting, like Uber connects drivers and passengers,
#
you are connecting potential voters with potential politicians.
#
And eventually from this interaction between voters and politicians, you will winnow out
#
a person in each constituency who will then represent the platform, but not a political
#
And the only thing about this platform, which is a given, is that this platform stands for
#
So all these voters are people who want Dhanwapsi to happen.
#
And all these politicians on the other end are people who are basically saying that,
#
hey, we will make it happen.
#
And that is a single point purpose of this.
#
And it really doesn't matter what else anyone stands for.
#
Yeah, that's largely correct.
#
And what we are hoping also is that as people come together, there's a broader prosperity
#
agenda, where I think the Dhanwapsi by itself is the big idea.
#
And actually, if we just get that right, there'll be a lot of other things which will have to
#
be done, all of which will push India in the direction of prosperity.
#
But the core agenda is towards this.
#
So our thinking is that, can we, in the next election, create a Lok Sabha of 272 plus,
#
so the majority, are independent candidates who support Dhanwapsi, and therefore we can
#
get the Dhanwapsi bill passed as we go forward.
#
You're talking about the 2019 elections, which are a few months away.
#
2019 elections, yes, in the next six months.
#
Do you think that's realistic, 270 independent candidates?
#
I think the good thing today is that what technology lets you do is if an idea catches
#
the imagination of people, it can spread very rapidly.
#
This was not possible even probably four or five years ago.
#
Each of us has the ability to, in seconds, distribute an incoming message to a hundred
#
or two hundred other people through all the groups that we are on.
#
And we tend to do that quite regularly.
#
So I don't have to rely on sort of the existing media channels or any of those to get an idea
#
across and it really has to be created as a people's movement.
#
So the key parameter for success or the key, the one path for us to succeed is this idea
#
And there's an economic incentive actually for both members and for candidates to spread
#
What we are saying is for members, when you register, you get a Dhanwapsi date exactly
#
one year from the day you sign up.
#
So the earlier you sign up, the earlier will be your date when your family will get back
#
But it should be equal for everyone, right?
#
So everyone will get it over a year.
#
But of course you can't distribute all of it on the same day.
#
But we're just getting an economic incentive for people to sign up earlier.
#
Otherwise, we have the free rider problem.
#
No one is going to sign up and we don't get any support base.
#
So in the first year, everyone will get it.
#
So it's a universal, but just it's staggered in terms of how there's an interest incentive
#
for you to sign up earlier.
#
And what we've done is what we are saying, of course, this is all subject to us being
#
able to pass the Dhanwapsi bill through the Lok Sabha and all that.
#
The second part of it is that if you now help sign up other people, your date advances by
#
a day for every person you sign up.
#
So we've gamified this a little bit.
#
Again, incentives work.
#
So if you are a person who is connected with other people, the one lakh rupees means a
#
You will want to then sign up on this platform.
#
There is no downside to it.
#
Even a lottery ticket that you buy actually costs you money.
#
Here there is no downside to it.
#
And we want to make people champions of this idea that by just by you signing up, we're
#
not going to make Dhanwapsi happen.
#
Go and talk about it to 10, 20 other people because that's how the idea can spread.
#
So these are the incentives that the voters and what are the incentives that the candidates
#
Now, what's very interesting is that if you have wanted to come into public life, if you
#
want to do public service, you want to become a politician.
#
What are your paths today?
#
You can try going into any of the political parties.
#
If you do not have a lot of money or if you do not have the right surname, it is pretty
#
much impossible for you to make any kind of progress.
#
And that's why we see some of the MPs that we see.
#
You don't even see them after the election campaign over the next few years.
#
What we are saying now is that if there are a lot of people who want to get into politics
#
for the right reasons, where making money, being corrupt and just exercising hardcore
#
power is not the primary objective or is not the objective.
#
For these people today, there is an alternate way, which does not require a lot of funds.
#
It democratizes or opens up politics.
#
Just as OLA did, if you have a car and you want to make some money driving it around,
#
Of course, we've banned that particular element in India, but worldwide, that's the place
#
For example, you have a few hours, you've got a vehicle, you just sign up on the platform.
#
So it opens up the access to the platform.
#
This is what we are doing out here.
#
And people can then essentially enter and by primaries, it makes the process very transparent
#
And even in the primaries, we have set two more conditions.
#
We've said that we will only do primaries if we have a 5% plus support base in our constituency.
#
So unless there are a lack of people in a typical 20 lakh constituency, there are no
#
primaries, there is no candidate.
#
And second is the winning candidate must have 50% or more of the support base.
#
So you cannot create selectorates.
#
So you have run-offs basically, that if you have five people in the top two players.
#
Either run-offs or you can do rank choice voting.
#
There are two options which we are examining.
#
So I have some further questions on this mechanism.
#
The first question is that to get sort of critical mass and build a bunch of voters,
#
you have to then sell the idea to them.
#
Now the thing is the idea that you're basically selling does not seem to be the idea of economic
#
freedom because those are counterintuitive, hard to understand, not already in the culture.
#
The idea that you're selling is basically, hey, we'll give one lakh a year to your family.
#
And that seems, although the logic is different from populism because it's not funded by taxes
#
In terms of the appeal to the people, it seems kind of, it has that populist, welfarist kind
#
I thought a lot about which is the one idea which can capture people's imagination.
#
And to everyone who gives me this, I said, give me a better idea.
#
And it's really like this.
#
I think the real problem in India today is that of poverty.
#
And I would say one, it's not just absolute poverty.
#
It's just that people don't have enough wealth because we suppress wealth creation.
#
We prohibit, we proactively have policies which destroy wealth.
#
Negative subsidies, like you said it earlier.
#
So I said among all of the ideas which were there, and there are many themes which we
#
had when I used to think about this.
#
It's like an entrepreneur.
#
There is a political marketplace.
#
We are introducing competition in the political marketplace.
#
And what should my product be like?
#
And I said, this theme around prosperity, this idea around that there is your wealth
#
which can be returned back to you, came across to me as a very, very powerful idea.
#
And in the last two and a half months, I released the first video on August 15th, which talked
#
We've had two types of reactions from people.
#
So the intellectual elite have come back to me and said, Rajesh, how are you going to
#
You know, all these land permissions are there.
#
This permission is there.
#
Nothing gets really ever done in India.
#
It's never going to be possible to do it.
#
But then there's a completely different other set of group, which I would categorize as
#
They are coming and saying, when will I get my one lakh rupees?
#
This theme of, you know, that this is their money, it's getting, it's spreading.
#
Now it's at least spreading as in it's touching people, that this is mine, I should get it
#
back and it will make a significant difference to my life.
#
It gives me an escape path from the bad or suboptimal situation that I am in and the
#
fact that this is my right.
#
That is, I think, very important to bring out here, that this is not another government
#
scheme where they are giving out this kind of money by redistributing it from taxes that
#
So I think if we can get more and more of that idea across to people.
#
So you really want to invoke that anger, you want people to say that, damn it, I struggled
#
so hard to get by and my money is just lying out there and I want some of it.
#
So I mean, all that will, you're absolutely right.
#
Because unless people get really angry, okay, they do not tend to act.
#
This is, we all know this really is there.
#
So this theme of dhoka versus dhanvapasi, dhoka or dhanvapasi.
#
So the way I'm looking at it is how do I frame it?
#
And I'd love inputs from people who listen to this podcast, for example, is that we have
#
to get a message out to people with limited attention spans.
#
The framing has to be such that it has to be positioned as a choice in the next elections.
#
You can either vote for BJP, Congress or your favorite regional party.
#
That is the only choice you had so far.
#
But now there is an alternative.
#
So then when people say, what is the ordinary amount people say, there is dhoka on one side,
#
there's the betrayal, which will happen again and again to us.
#
Doesn't matter who gets elected.
#
Or there is the idea of dhanvapasi and prosperity and freedom that we can make happen.
#
That is the real framing that I want to get done going forward.
#
That's with regards to appealing to the voter.
#
Now, my second question to you is that if the platform becomes popular and if there
#
is a chance that candidates, you know, you will reach the 5% threshold you set for yourself,
#
like in a 20 lakh constituency, you will get a lakh people and then you will elect candidates.
#
Isn't there then a danger that this will be hijacked?
#
Because the only thing that a candidate really needs to say is he needs to say, I believe
#
in dhanvapasi and beyond that, his framing can be absolutely anything and you don't even
#
know whether he really believes in dhanvapasi.
#
So you can have like Modi made a lot of opportunistic noises about economic freedom before 2014
#
and people were taken in by that and voted for him and it turned out to be something
#
You know, as you said, this is like a crowd sourcing, no one owns this whole process.
#
You want it to be bottoms up.
#
How can you say that the process won't be hijacked, for example, by people who might
#
say, yeah, dhanvapasi is a good idea, but hey, let's also ban cow slaughter and hey,
#
let's also, you know, push Muslims to out of the country to Pakistan, for example.
#
So my sense in this is that it's you're right that it is impossible to control the entire
#
Because in the current Indian system, there is a whip.
#
So the extreme that you have right now is two people decide the entire existing set
#
of MPs are basically just administrators of MP lad funds, which they get, they have no
#
real power, no real authority to do anything because otherwise if they violate what the
#
party tells them to vote for, they're ejected and thrown out.
#
Look at the US system, the Republicans and Democrats, people get elected on one of these
#
two tickets, but they are free to decide on every vote on every issue on their own.
#
So there is no core, possibly maybe other than maybe finance matters, the budget or
#
There is no real whip that is holding them on this, but they are accountable to their
#
What we are saying here is that if you are going to do things, which is against the will
#
of the people and my, and you have to rely on the will of the people at the end of the
#
day, that is the choice that we've made in India.
#
If you are going to do, they are going to be up in arms against you.
#
You are accountable to them.
#
Second is, I think once people taste economic freedom and because of that, the other freedoms,
#
I think there is no going back.
#
See, we've never had, you know, it's like we've never really had Indians exposed to
#
real freedom, you know, where you are not held hostage by some government bureaucrat
#
for like 20 permissions that you need for doing something and so on.
#
I mean, the rules, regulations in India just keep going up in every sphere that is there.
#
And the government has become, like you said earlier, a predation machine.
#
It keeps extracting because its desire to gather votes and please people is going up.
#
Like what we have seen currently happen in the dispute between the government and RBI
#
on what to do with the big chunk of RBI reserves, which really technically is the wealth of
#
the people, but they are fighting over it as if it's their pool of money to distribute
#
So I think what needs to happen here is that you can bring in what people want through
#
the mechanism of technology and where it is happening actually is in Italy.
#
The five-star movement, even though that's a populist movement, so they came to power
#
on a populist principle, but forget that part for now.
#
They are essentially using the app, the five-star app, using technology to source inputs from
#
people on bills, on legislation, et cetera.
#
So there is a way by which you can make this happen through technology.
#
There is discussion which happens today.
#
There is no voice that people have at all.
#
We may make some wrong decisions, but then the candidate has to come back and face his
#
constituents and then they will decide, look, you did not do the right thing.
#
So I think this is the natural process of corrective democracy, which will be there,
#
but let's at least experience that.
#
And my belief is as long as we go through the dhanvapasi, even if just dhanvapasi gets
#
done, I think in five years you will have a very different country.
#
You will have a significant reduction in the powers and the resources that the government
#
has and it's an irreversible, after that they cannot grow it again.
#
And that will really set Indians free.
#
So even if they want to try and do things, they will not have the ability to actually
#
grow government after that.
#
Platform like this seems a mind blowing idea to me, very disruptive and all that, but it
#
also seems to me that rather than being built around a set of values is built around one
#
specific policy proposal and you could easily have people come out of the system who would
#
say, fine, we'll implement dhanvapasi, but we'd also do XYZ and here just think of whatever
#
is most objectionable to you.
#
I thought about this and I said, should we have a pledge, you know, which says, I agree
#
to this, I agree to this.
#
I said, it's a meaningless pledge.
#
I said, how is it that I look inside a person and say, what are your core beliefs and all
#
So keep the big idea as big enough that it will prevent a lot of other bad things from
#
happening and you can't really, like you said earlier, people could sign up for anything.
#
So it's very difficult for me to force that corrective mechanism has to be with the voters
#
in the constituency themselves who are selecting the candidate and therefore in a very small
#
electoral college, it's not 10 people deciding who the candidate should be.
#
It's a very large electoral college, which is deciding who the candidate should be and
#
if they make mistakes, well, they'll correct it in the next election.
#
So now that let's, so you've got this tech platform, you've got this one policy item,
#
which also, you know, has a rationale of certain principles behind it, which you hope are embraced
#
But leaving that aside, let's say that everything works.
#
You achieve critical mass in terms of getting voters, you get good candidates who fight
#
among themselves and there's a meritocracy and you actually get a lot of MPs.
#
But then the question is, these are all independents.
#
They're not part of a party.
#
They've used your tech platform, but they're not actually part of the same organization.
#
So think of this as if we are successful, it's a government of 272 plus, whatever number,
#
singleton parties, every party with a single candidate because every candidate is theoretically
#
But we have seen this picture before.
#
This is exactly how the US Senate, how the US Congress work and in many other countries
#
it's the same way that it works.
#
What happens even when the president or whoever proposes something, they have to get persuaded
#
whether to support that particular bill or policy.
#
And for that, they are taking inputs from their constituents, which is what we want
#
Technology just makes this whole process easier.
#
I agree this is not perfect and we will probably take, we'll see how it gets refined and how
#
But look at what we have today.
#
Today we have effectively, like I said in one of my earlier videos, we have a cacistocracy.
#
Cacistocracy is a government by the worst of the most unscrupulous people.
#
We had that for the last 70 years, people who have no incentive, no interest in doing
#
the things to get out of the way of Indians who want to prosper for themselves.
#
And that's the core idea that everyone, every family has.
#
But we put hurdles, whether it's farmers, whether it's entrepreneurs, whether it's
#
businessmen going about their lives genuinely, whether it's kids wanting to get educated.
#
I mean, look at, but that is what we have today because it's two people who have no
#
understanding of what creates prosperity and does not matter which party they are, if it's
#
one or two people deciding what should be the core policies or whatever it is there.
#
Maybe this is another extreme, but let's at least try something different for next five
#
years, 10 years, because we know the path we are on right now.
#
If we're going to stick on that path, we know the outcomes.
#
India is not going to become rich.
#
Today, every Indian family who has an 18 year old kid and who has two crores in the bank,
#
they want to send their kid outside of India for education.
#
In fact, under Modi, you had the largest number of multimillionaires leaving the country and
#
settling somewhere else.
#
So we are effectively sending our best brains, our brightest young kids out of the country
#
How is India going to become prosperous?
#
I think for one generation, what India needs to do is to set aside everything that divides
#
And there will always be issues that divide us from caste, community, whatever it is,
#
and focus on a single mission around prosperity.
#
It's effectively what the US did after the civil war.
#
After 1865, it was business people who built America, Morgan Rockefeller Carnegie Vanderbilt
#
And I think we will have that surge of entrepreneurship and innovation.
#
I mean, we are one unleashed the power of 1.3 billion free people.
#
The world has never seen this.
#
So as my question for you, supposing Dhanvapsi doesn't work and your party of independence
#
doesn't form the next government, what's next?
#
So there are two paths.
#
My belief is that the idea is right.
#
And we will, of course, see what feedback comes and what happens.
#
I think the same idea can actually be applied at the state level also.
#
So we may not have Lok Sabha elections for another five years, but there are a lot of
#
So I want to take the same theme around prosperity and take it to the states.
#
So states, I would add one additional idea along with Dhanvapsi, I want to add the idea
#
But states can't really do Dhanvapsi, right?
#
Because there is plenty of state-owned, state-controlled land also that is there.
#
Which if they sell, they will also be at liberty to disperse the money in this way.
#
That's at least a starting point.
#
So extend the platform for MLAs and potentially for cities.
#
Cities also can do somewhat similar.
#
There are resources which are there.
#
And second is, I will then want to also increase the education process.
#
Then we have five years or n years, whatever, three to five years, depending on what type
#
of government gets formed.
#
To persuade people that there is an alternate path to prosperity.
#
I recognize that the time is limited right now.
#
But I also know from my previous experience that the period just before an election, the
#
six to eight months before an election, is probably 10 times heightened awareness than
#
is the peacetime, the four and a half years in between.
#
So I think it's a great time to actually put an alternative out to people.
#
And I think we will get learnings.
#
So my sense is we'll have one of two outcomes.
#
Either we fail spectacularly, in which case we don't get any interaction, or if this becomes
#
a force, then I think it is unstoppable.
#
Because the network effects which will be inbuilt into what we have are going to be
#
something which no political party will be able to stop.
#
It's a genuine people's movement.
#
It seems to me to be, and tell me if you'd agree with it, it seems to me to be a low
#
probability high variance kind of thing, where this will probably 99.9% of the time it will
#
fizzle out completely and be a spectacular failure, but 0.1% of the time it will succeed
#
spectacularly and change the nation forever.
#
That's what you're banking on?
#
That's how every entrepreneurial venture is about.
#
So now my last- At the same time, every entrepreneur goes
#
into that venture knowing, I mean, with the reality that 99.99% ventures fail, but the
#
entrepreneur has the optimism that there's a 70 to 80% chance of success.
#
So what you're saying is then you have to be delusional to be an entrepreneur because
#
if it's a 0.1% but you think it's 70%, that's-
#
That's how every entrepreneur is, especially when you come up with big ideas.
#
So I want to sort of end on this note that, you know, in the time that I have met you,
#
you had the idea of changing the constitution, then you had the nota idea, now you have these,
#
and these seem incredibly outlandish.
#
And yet people don't laugh you out of the room because you have a track record of success
#
in tech where you've built multiple ventures and made them extremely successful, you know,
#
starting with your India World Ventures in which you sold for 100 million and 99 hundred
#
million dollars and you've built Netcore into a very successful company and you have that
#
track record of success.
#
So no matter how outlandish your ideas, people kind of listen to you and sort of give you
#
And you've brought many of your principles of tech entrepreneurship into political entrepreneurship.
#
One of those seems to be that don't agitate too much and get an idea perfect, just go
#
out with it and see what happens and throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
#
What are the sort of, like, how do you- Are there similarities between tech entrepreneurship
#
and political entrepreneurship?
#
Like, how do you think about it?
#
Yeah, see, at least the way I've been thinking about this is first is have a big idea.
#
The odds of success or failure don't change because you've got to get a million decisions
#
right in anything that you do to succeed.
#
So might as well go for the moon in terms of the idea that you have.
#
So when I started India World, the idea at that time was not just to create a news and
#
information portal, but how do you build an electronic marketplace which connected Indians
#
When I talked about in the political space with the BJP, I did not say that, okay, let's
#
move the needle from 182 seats to 210 seats or 220 seats.
#
I said, how does the BJP get a majority on its own?
#
Because the strategy then becomes very different.
#
So here it's not about saying that, look, let's try and get five independent candidates
#
into the Lok Sabha, which will actually make no difference at all.
#
So first is make big plans because they are the only ones which can really inspire other
#
Second is how do you use technology as a game changer?
#
Technology is the only thing I really know in my life.
#
And in every place I've tried to use, look ahead and see what are the things that technology
#
can do, which we can apply.
#
And when I looked at the political space, I said, okay, this is the Dhanwapasi idea
#
But then I had to make it into something which is actionable.
#
And that is where this idea of platform technology comes in.
#
Over the last many years, we've seen platforms emerge.
#
So like Facebook, Google, they're all platforms, they're connecting two sides together.
#
And I said the same thing can be applied here.
#
So instead of trying to create another political party with me at the top trying to recruit
#
people, I said, how do I know who in a constituency in Kerala would be the right candidate?
#
So you flip the whole thing around, which is what Uber, Ola, all of these marketplace
#
type platforms are actually doing.
#
So the technology in this case is this, but in every place, how do you use technology
#
to really make a difference, be the disruptor really?
#
And the third thing is, don't worry about failure.
#
I failed enough times in my life, every failure teaches, because if you think about, okay,
#
how impossible the mountain is, or how impossible the mission is, you are not going to climb.
#
There's a very nice title of a book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
#
And when I read it, it by Tracy Kidder, basically, it's a Haitian proverb, but it's only when
#
you climb one mountain, that you see that there is another mountain beyond it.
#
But if you knew if you sat at the bottom and saw how high the mountain is, you probably
#
not start climbing it at all.
#
So my approach in this is to get started.
#
Like you said, you try out different things, and you learn every day, can you become better
#
What an entrepreneur really does is not aim for massive success, you're going into work
#
every day, trying to reduce your chances of failure.
#
Rajesh, thanks so much for this, it's always inspiring and intellectually stimulating for
#
All the best with Dharmapasi, and I hope to have you on the show some other time talking
#
about something else as well.
#
Thank you very much, Amit.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do go over to dhanwapsi at dhanwapsi.com,
#
that's spelled D-H-A-N-V-A-P-A-S-I.com, dhanwapasi.com.
#
You can also read more of Rajesh Jain's writings at rajeshjain.com.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Have you gotten yourself a gym membership and shown up only a few times?
#
Are long working hours cutting your fitness goals short?
#
How about you change things a little?
#
Even a small effort can make a big difference.
#
And I'll tell you how and what exactly.
#
Hi guys, I'm Coach Urmi and on the Kinetic Living Podcast, you can look forward to some
#
interesting stories of people who have changed the way they look at fitness after their kinetic
#
Episodes out every Wednesday on the IBM app, website and anywhere you get your podcast
#
How aware do you think you are of your laws and rights?
#
Do you look up to laws when you're caught up in situations?
#
Do you know what your rights are when you're stuck somewhere bad?
#
Well, here's a show that can help you move an inch closer to being aware of what your
#
Tune into Know Your Kanun with me, Ambur Rana.
#
This is a podcast meant to answer all your law related queries.
#
Watch Know Your Kanun every week on the IBM website or the app or anywhere you get your
