Ticket Quota Raj: It’s not cricket

The New Indian Express First Published : 28 Feb 2011 10:54:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 27 Feb 2011 11:11:59 PM IST
Thousands of tickets have been reserved for various cricket associations, club members, channel partners, sponsors, VIPs and government departments ostensibly due to ‘official commitments’. The ticketing website has crashed. People who booked online six months ago are still waiting to receive tickets. In this, the most cricket-crazy country on the planet, currently co-hosting the game’s showpiece tournament, tickets for the common man are in such scarce supply that the International Cricket Council (ICC) has delivered a warning to its own president, Sharad Pawar, who is also chairman of the World Cup Organising Committee.
The situation is disappointingly reminiscent of 2010 Commonwealth Games fiasco wherein, apart from other irregularities, heaps of unsold tickets were traced to garbage dumps even as fans were turned back by sold-out signs at counters. Now, after the police lathicharge and injuries the common man has had to bear for his honest attempt at securing tickets, should there be empty seats at stadia — and there is a distinct possibility of that happening, what with the interest of sundry pass-holders in investing time and effort to watch matches being questionable — the organisers will have much to answer for. How farcical the situation is can be gauged from this: for the final, there are only 4,000 tickets for the public, 1,000 of which will be sold via an online lottery with seats costing as much as Rs 18,750 each. Officials and those on whom they seek to bestow favours have ten times as many tickets. Free. No queues, no lathicharge, no tension.
That there is no ceiling on the number of tickets placed at the discretion of association presidents and secretaries remains a matter of convenience for cricket administrators and fans, the commercial backbone of the game. To put an end to this humiliation, officials must necessarily surrender their ticket quota and, if at all compulsions as host require that this privilege be extended to sponsors and certain patrons, the tickets so issued must be limited and priced significantly above the counter rate.
Clearly, the buck stops not only with the Board of Control for Cricket in India and its affiliated units for stretching unfair practices too far, but also with the ICC as the event is being staged under its supervision. The World Cup is the perfect time for administrators to realise that there is no such thing as a free meal. Or a free ticket.

Budget is silent where it matters

The New Indian Express First Published : 01 Mar 2011 11:21:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 28 Feb 2011 11:50:22 PM IST
In Pranab Mukherjee’s first budget speech as the Union finance minister in the 1980s, so unstoppable was he that it made Indira Gandhi, perhaps India’s wittiest prime minister, later on remark, “here is the shortest finance minister who has made the longest speech.” Three decades later, his budget speech, though not too long, has remarkably shrunk in content. Inflation, deficit, corruption — on none of these burning issues of the day is Mukherjee’s 2011-12 budget explicit in any way. On the other hand, there are far too many urgent items on his future list. Take for example the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which subsumes all the indirect levies like excise, VAT and local taxes and is expected to give at least a two per cent boost to the GDP. Only the constitutional amendments that are necessary will be tabled in this session of Parliament. Nobody knows when it will be a reality.
Besides, the priorities of the budget are quite opaque. Mukherjee plans to raise Rs 40,000 crore by sale of stake in the Central Public Sector Undertakings, yet not to allow the government share in them to drop below 51 per cent. However, the high moral posturing implicit in it has been thwarted only recently when the chairman of National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO), a CPSU, was arrested for accepting bribe to favour a private company importing coal. It shows that having a government official to lead the PSUs does not necessarily improve its efficiency.
On some other delicate issues, particularly the one involving allowing foreign portfolio investors to invest in SEBI-registered mutual funds, the budget seems too daring. It says such foreign investors must comply with the Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements for the equity schemes. But which Indian agency has the wherewithal to testify to information provided by the Foreign Institutional Investor (FII), and to vouchsafe that it is not black money generated in India that is ‘round tripping’ into the Indian capital market, to flee it the moment there is prospect for a better return somewhere else? It is a particularly sensitive issue in view of the fact that except for the government employees India does not have a pension system worth the name, and the return of provident funds and bank deposits being low, there are many retirees who put their savings in the mutual funds, particularly the part-debt part-equity ones. It is a lifeline for the old people.
But it is the silence of the minister on inflation, deficit and corruption that is eloquent. He has expressed the hope that the average inflation in fiscal 2012 will be less than fiscal 2011, but it is nothing but a clever game of numbers. For headline inflation, the recent shift from computing the rise in wholesale price index to a new basket of consumer prices will expectedly make the 2011-12 price rise appear less menacing. Besides, on the high base of 2010-11, food prices in the following year may not look too jumpy. Nevertheless, what the budget skirts around is the high basic inflation rate, of items other than food articles and oil, which are now going at a worryingly high 5-plus per cent because growth is stifled by shortage of money, which in its turn is caused by government loans crowding out private credit.
There is no clue in the budget as to how would Pranab Mukherjee grease the wheel of the economy with the lubricant of easy capital, so that it can spin again. He says he will bring down fiscal deficit from 5.1 per cent of the gross domestic product as of now to 4.6 per cent a year hence. But there is no plan in his hand, unless it is there up his sleeve, to cut deficit either by reducing expenditure or raising the revenues. On the contrary, the direct and indirect tax revenue he is targeting in 2011-12 is a small, probably symbolic, Rs 200 crore less than that of the previous year.
Nor is there any let-up in the populist cash drainage typical of the UPA regime, either by hiking the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) wages, or lowering the price of food distributed among a nebulously defined population of poor at a rate that qualifies its being defined, as in the Bible, as manna from the skies. On black money too, the budget is economical with words. It says a Group of Ministers has been constituted to suggest ways for curbing corruption. That sounds like a cruel joke, with a former Cabinet minister now in police custody on graft charges. Nobody believes that India’s ministers are quite the right people to find the switch that can turn off the generation of black money, and that of its being parked in tax havens abroad. However, the least that was expected of the minister was to offer a roadmap to bring India several rungs below where it currently stands along the global corruption index.
The silence in the budget on key issues hints that there may be something wrong in the United Progressive Alliance coalition itself. If the leader of the coalition, the Congress, were transparent enough to its partners, it could be more clear-throated on how it would earn money, spend it and catch the wrong-doers.

Giving agriculture due importance

The New Indian Express First Published : 02 Mar 2011 11:37:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 01 Mar 2011 11:55:57 PM IST
A separate budget for agriculture is one way of emphasising a sector that even today provides a living to a majority of Indians. Against this background, Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa’s decision last Thursday to present one is a welcome move. The budget draws attention to the so-called backbone of the Indian economy which seems to be suffering from osteoporosis. By this one act Yeddyurappa has shown his commitment to the farm sector.
Agriculture has got a 52 per cent increase in total allocations over last year, from around Rs 11,000 crore to Rs 18,000 crore. In comparison, the total budget is up by 21.7 per cent to Rs 85,319 crore. This is not just manipulation of numbers. There is a clear indication that the chief minister had done a thorough exercise in preparing the agriculture budget. For instance, he has announced the Rs 1000 crore Suvarna Bhoomi scheme to help 10 lakh drought-affected poor farmer families. He has doubled the allocation to Rs 200 crore for organic farming. He plans to expand his pilot project of rejuvenation and reclamation of agricultural land through the Bhoo Chethana scheme to the entire state, hoping to improve farm productivity by 35 per cent. A sum of Rs 125 crore is earmarked for biofuel development and the revolving fund to help farmers avoid distress sale goes up to Rs 1,000 crore. The crown undoubtedly is agricultural loans of up to Rs 3 lakh at 1 per cent interest rate through the cooperative sector.
Encouraged by the success of the global investors’ meet, Yeddyurappa now plans a similar meet for agribusiness investors to attract more investments in the farm and allied sectors. The allocation for irrigation is doubled to Rs 7,800 crore and 2011-2020 declared as the irrigation decade in the hope of attracting at least Rs 50,000 crore in investment for that sector alone.
Rural India is plagued by serious problems — migration due to urbanisation, increasing average age in the villages, non-availability of infrastructure to protect farm produce, steep fluctuations in the prices of foodgrains and other agricultural produce. All this has led to deep insecurities and even greater migration in a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. Governments need to act quickly to ensure a balance between rural and urban India. There is an urgent need to instil confidence among people in the villages. A separate agriculture budget is one such step and Yeddyurappa should be commended for his decision.

A budget for the voters

The New Indian Express First Published : 02 Mar 2011 11:36:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 01 Mar 2011 11:50:52 PM IST
Altruism was far from Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s mind when he announced a series of concessions in his budget speech. In fact, they were targeted at voters in the five states going to polls in a few months. Elections in Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry are crucial for the Congress. Any failure to retain or wrest these states would have disastrous consequences for the party’s prospects in the 2014 general elections. It is for this reason that he has, by and large, refrained from making a bid to generate additional resources by way of new taxes. Pranab knew that the best way to win the sympathy of voters in these states is to cater to the needs of important opinion-makers in the rural areas.
The lollipops offered to senior citizens, farmers, anganwadi staff and workers in the unorganised sector should be seen as his attempt to build new vote-banks. The doubling of wages for the anganwadi staff, increased old-age pension, liberalisation of the post-retirement scheme for workers in private companies and allocation of Rs 3,000 crore for the revival of cooperative textile mills are bound to benefit a large number of people. Though the benefits of the huge allocation for the agriculture sector may not percolate down to the farmers in the next few months, Pranab is shrewd enough to realise that the announcement would make a beneficial impact on them.
Though he has not announced any new aam aadmi schemes, larger funds have been earmarked for them like the rural job guarantee scheme. What’s more, the announcement that a law to ensure food security would be enacted this year is aimed at mollycoddling those who have been groaning under the weight of increased food prices. The calculation that the rural population would be able to reap the benefits of many of the concessions like, for instance, on fertiliser and the setting up of cold storages by the time the next general elections take place is clearly discernible in the budget. This should be seen against the backdrop of the widely-held belief that it was the employment guarantee scheme that helped the UPA return to power in 2009. However election-oriented the budget is, there is no guarantee that the voters would be swayed by it. Far more important for them is good governance on which count the UPA government has clearly failed.

Unjust, inequitable, morally wrong

S Gurumurthy First Published : 02 Mar 2011 12:31:00 AM ISTLast Updated : 02 Mar 2011 12:47:25 AM IST
“I have spent more, yet, I have brought down the fiscal deficit for 2010-11 from 5.5 per cent to 5.1 per cent,” claims Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. The amount of fiscal deficit has actually gone up by Rs 20,000 crore. How then could the percentage of fiscal deficit come down? It defies the logic of numbers. Yet, none of the commentators in awe of his miracle asked the FM how he achieved the miracle. It was not his feat. The runaway inflation did the trick, not the finance minister.
In his budget speech for 2010-11, the FM had fixed the fiscal deficit of Rs 3.81 lakh-crore at 5.5 per cent of the GDP of Rs 69.35 lakh-crore estimated by the CSP at current prices for 2010-11. But thanks to the hyperinflation that hit the people of India, the GDP at current prices — also called nominal GDP — rose from the estimated Rs 69.35 lakh-crore to Rs 78.78 lakh-crore in 2010-11. The rise of Rs 9.57 lakh-crore was pure inflation. As a percentage of the new, inflated nominal GDP figure of Rs 78.78 lakh-crore, the fiscal deficit of Rs 4 lakh-crore came down to 5.1 per cent. Had inflation not escalated the estimated GDP of Rs 69.35 lakh-crore, the fiscal deficit would have risen to 5.8 per cent, not fallen from 5.5 per cent. The Medium Term Fiscal Policy Statement annexed to the budget obliquely admits this fact. It says that “higher nominal growth in GDP” — which is just inflation — has helped in reducing the fiscal deficit.
The gap between real and nominal GDP is inflation. Year after year, from 2005-6, this inflationary gap between the real and nominal GDP has been incrementally enlarging. In 2005-6 the gap was 9.4 per cent; in 2006-7, it rose to 16.9 per cent; in 2007-8, it enlarged to 21.8 per cent; in 2008-9 it topped 31.3 per cent; and in 2010-11, the gap became all-time high at 38 per cent, equal to Rs 30 lakh-crore. Imagine, the gap between the real and nominal GDP for 2010-11 had not risen over the percentage of the gap in 2005-6, the fiscal deficit for 2010-11 would have been as high as 21 per cent! And had it been the same as in 2009-10, the fiscal deficit for 2010-11 would have been 7.5 per cent. When inflation is high the GDP-fiscal deficit ratio becomes almost meaningless. So much for the reduction in fiscal deficit acclaimed as “fiscal consolidation”, “safe play” and “cutting spend”.
Curiously, inflation escalated the nominal GDP year-after-year from 2005-6, but surprisingly, not particularly the indirect tax revenues proportionately. This makes the comparison of nominal GDP with fiscal deficit misleading. It also takes us to the confession of the finance minister that he has not mobilised revenue in this budget. The media has eulogised the FM for sparing the corporates from higher dose of tax, and still managing the deficit. The truth is that UPA has altogether stopped taxing the corporates and other tax worthy. The excise revenue as a percentage of the real GDP is now almost half of what it was in 2005-6; in terms of nominal GDP even less. According to the Economic Survey 2010-11, the ratio of excise revenue to GDP has come down from 3 per cent in 2005-6 to 1.7 per cent in 2010-11 and customs from 1.8 per cent to 1.5 per cent. On the basis of the excise-customs to GDP ratio of 2005-6, the government has under-levied excise by Rs 1,00,000 crore and customs duty by Rs 43,000 crore in 2010-11, totalling to Rs 1,43,000 crore. The under levy of excise started in 2006-7 at Rs 13,000 crore, rose to Rs 63,000 crore in 2008-9 when the stimulus was introduced, and to Rs 81,000 crore in 2009-10. Even if the fiscal stimulus — calculated with 2007-8 as the base — of Rs 59,000 crore in excise and in customs of Rs 41,000 crore are deducted, the under levy is still Rs 43,000 crore. It means that the UPA government has simply refused to levy the legitimate tax. But, despite huge tax cuts, inflation is hitting the roof. Yet on the fear and threat that withdrawal of stimulus would intensify inflation the stimulus continues. Is it justified?
It is not that corporates are in distress; in fact, never were they. An analysis of the profits of corporates given in the statements of revenue foregone attached to annual budgets shows that corporates have been making huge profits. The companies surveyed posted a profit before tax of Rs 4.08 lakh-crore in 2005-6; Rs 7.11 lakh-crore in 2007-8; Rs 6.68 lakh-crore in 2008-9 (global meltdown year) and Rs 8.24 lakh-crore in 2009-10. Most of the super profits in 2009-10 — rise of 23.35 per cent in just one year — is clearly the stimulus cuts not passed on to the public. The super profits clearly make the continuance of stimulus unjust. The story doesn’t end here. Thanks to exemptions, corporates have paid far less than the statutory rates of excise, customs and income taxes. Taxes thus foregone by the government have been rising from year to year from 2005-6 — from 50 per cent of the tax collected in that year to 72 per cent of the tax collected in 2010-11. For the year 2010-11, the tax giveaways, including excise-customs waivers of Rs 3.62 lakh-crore, totalled Rs 5.12 lakh-crore. The stimulus cut of Rs 1 lakh-crore, and under-levy of Rs 43,000 crore are on top of the tax foregone. More, the big corporates manage to pay less than the small ones. If they pay as much, the extra tax realised for 2010-11 could have been Rs 14,470 crore.
Contrast the giveaways of several lakh of crores with the admission in the Economic Survey that capital formation in agricultural sector, which employs 58 per cent of Indian people, has, from 2005-6, stagnated around 7.5 per cent of the total capital formed in the economy. The survey says that huge investment is needed to make agriculture viable and sustainable. A fraction of the giveaways to the corporates could save Indian agriculture from stress. No seer is needed to say that the budget could not be more unjust, inequitable, and morally wrong. And yet this budget is branded as an aam aadmi budget.
The finance minister could not have trivialised the issue of black money abroad more. He has just repeated in his budget speech what he told the media on January 25, 2011. He has just pontificated on corruption. His written brief on the implementation of programmes he had announced in the previous budget shows that out of 66 programmes only 25 have been completed, many of them paper work. Yet the media discourse has hardly noticed these critical issues.
There are positives, but the hidden vices in the budget make them cosmetic. Any way the positives have been highlighted so disproportionately that it is waste of media space to repeat them here. On a lighter note: the entry of onion in the budget speech has raised its importance to that of infrastructure!
(The writer is a well-known commentator on political and economic issues.
E-mail: guru@gurumurthy.net)

Free sex? Or free speech?

S Gurumurthy
First Published : 03 Apr 2010 11:17:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 03 Apr 2010 12:33:57 AM IST

Supreme Court legalises premarital sex”. “Live in relationships and premarital sex are fine: SC”; “Premarital sex is okay, says Supreme Court”; “Sexual revolution as Supreme Court sanctions co-habitation”. This was how leading newspapers had headlined what three judges of the Supreme Court orally had said in the court on March 23, when they dismissed the Special Leave Petition filed by a famous cinema actress from Tamil Nadu to quash the prosecutions against her for her remarks on pre-marital sex. Famous in Tamil Nadu, she had become world famous after she touched the global subject of premarital sex.

Two things must register first. One, oral remarks of judges need not form part of the judgement of the court. Lawyers cannot cite newspaper reports as precedents in courts later. It is only what the judges say in a written judgement that becomes the law of the land. What the judgement of the court is on a petition filed by the Tamil actress is not known as yet. But the newspapers had made out that a judgment okaying pre-marital sex has been delivered by the Supreme Court! Live in partners beware! It is only an oral remark by the judges; it carries no value in law. Read the judgement when it comes to know whether the judges had said in the judgement what they had orally said in the court before celebrating. Two, the issue in the petition of the actress is not whether premarital sex is right or wrong, but, whether she has offended any law by saying that pre-marital sex is okay. The issue she had raised was about the right to free expression, and not the right to free sex. How the judges, as reported, spoke on a subject which could not be an issue in the petition is not clear. Even if the judges wrote an order to the effect on an issue not before the court that would be regarded as obiter dicta (a non-binding opinion). But the actress herself does not seem to be confused by newspaper reports. She seems to know clearly what she had gone to the highest court for — to assert her right to express her opinion on premarital sex. Feeling vindicated she says, “Supreme Court’s direction clearly shows freedom of speech does exist in India”. So much for the spate of reports that the Supreme Court has okayed pre-marital sex.

The next, and the most important, question is whether the Supreme Court, which can at best say that pre-marital sex is unobjectionable, has the authority to make it acceptable. Many unobjectionable things in law are unacceptable in the society. All that the Supreme Court can do is to ask, as it has: “when two adult people want to live together, what is the offence? Does it amount to an offence? Living together is not an offence. It cannot be an offence”. It is again part of the oral exchange between the judges and the counsel arguing against the actress. See what the counsel arguing that the actress should be punished for advocating premarital sex had told the court according to media reports. “The argument of the counsel was that her comments allegedly endorsing pre-marital sex would adversely affect the minds of young people leading to decay in moral values and country’s ethos”. But see what the judges had asked him in response, according to the media. “Please tell us what is the offence and under which section. Living together is a right to life”, implicitly referring to Article 21 that makes right to life and liberty a fundamental right.

By their oral remarks, the judges seem to have impliedly made it clear that the court is not concerned with “moral values” or “country’s ethos” which seemed to be the anxiety of the arguing counsel. But what the court seems to be unconcerned is unfortunately what the society is not only concerned with, but apparently lives by and even lives on. Laws or constitutions do not — in fact cannot — form societies. On the contrary, they may deform them in the name of reforming them, as it has happened now in much of the West, with consequences that are becoming unmanageable. Take the case of the US, which until a year ago, was the unfailing benchmark for our intellectuals and institutions including, in some cases, courts.

The 2002 National Survey of Family Growth in US found that more than half of all women aged 15 to 44 had lived with an unmarried partner. The result is that today, in the US, the number of single parent households is in excess of 50 per cent and more than four-fifths of them are fatherless and mother-led. This resulted in a research book titled Fatherless America in late 1990s. The proportion of children living with a never-married parent rose to 42 per cent in 2001, from four per cent in 1960. But, the growth in live-in relations in the US has less to do with the rights of the individuals as is normally thought here. It has more to do with the decline of traditional marriages and the rise of contractual marriages imposing huge cost of divorce. More than half the first marriages in US end in divorce! Couples in the US with the tenacity to try a second one, found that more than two-thirds of the second ended in divorce!! If still some further energy were left to have a go at the third, three-fourth of that too ended in divorce!!! The decline of weddings is the beginning of unwed lifestyle, not the other way round. All this started in the US with the kind of views — which the Tamil actress had expressed and the Supreme Court did not find unobjectionable — becoming fashionable in US in 1970s and turning socially legitimate later. This erosion was first seen, therefore dismissed — as it is happening here now — as just a moral and cultural issue which was not worth in modern times. But it has now become a huge economic issue in US with uncared for elders, under-cared children, unsupported unhealthy, plummeting savings, bankrupt households, soaring state subsidies, social and health security bill threatening nation’s solvency — all transforming the US from being the biggest lender to the world in 1980s to becoming the greatest borrower from the world today, besides topping in crime rate and jailed population in the world. The global meltdown is not just the US economic meltdown; it is equally a US social and moral meltdown.

If this had not happened in traditional Asian societies, it is because they have struggled to maintain values that nourished relations and families and respected the society. Therefore, the question is not what is not bad, as the judges have asked, but what is good, which they have left unasked.

(To be concluded)

(Reductio ad absurdum will return next week)

More power to the collider

The New Indian Express
First Published : 03 Apr 2010 11:00:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 03 Apr 2010 12:35:04 AM IST

The long wait is almost over. The God particle lurks in the wings and may soon hog centrestage. On Tuesday, the cheers from CERN, whose Large Hadron Collider is finally pumping the expected wattages, were heard across the world as dewy eyed physicists celebrated the start of a new chapter in the story of elementary particles. And this one may turn out to be the most exciting, given a small, unnoticed caveat. There is, it seems, a chance that the God particle may be the last thing anyone will ever find because then we will cease to be.

Still, that is no reason not to celebrate a signal achievement. When the LHC smashed subatomic particles together at near-light speeds, it created, on an infinitesimal scale, versions of what George Gamow in a memorable understatement called a “hot, big bang,” which scientists believe created the universe. When fully operative, LHC will accelerate particles to 99.99 per cent of the speed of light (186,200 miles a second). At that speed and those energies physicists will observe what the universe may have been like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. In other words, the LHC provides a ride on a ray to the remotest past, to a time when time nearly wasn’t. That would be irresistible to the meekest romantic, and in this at least, scientists are nothing if not romantics. Their search for meaning is very different from the mystic’s quest for oneness, but it is no less pure, no less essential.

Still, there are sceptics, in hordes. What’s the use of it, they ask. And the cost, they groan. It’s true that the LHC cost $10-15 billion, and it will cost more to keep going, but just for comparison the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost trillions of dollars. This is about the search for a theory of everything, from subatomic to super-galactic, and a few billions is a small price. But as they search for the Higgs Boson, among other things, scientists might reflect that every time they thought they had found the grail, new unknowns opened up, a virtual infinity of them, like ‘islands’ in a Mandelbrot set. Perhaps this is folded into the structure of the universe itself, as Uncertainty Principle suggests. But that is another story. Right now, let us cry ‘more power to your collider’ as CERN charges into the future (or the past) in the quest for understanding.