How Singh Blew India’s Moment

If ever there has been a BIASED article on the current stae of affiairs in India - well this article does take the cake. I am not an ardent fan of the congress party BUT i have a grudging admiration at the way Singh has handled doestic affairs in a complex stratified country with issues that have no parallels in the world. Arm chair philophists and writiers can easily throw accusations in the wind but under the circumstances Singh has done an admirable job. I have watched India over the last few decades and a leader of Singh's calibre unfortunately has never surfaced - most of them have worked with naroow self interests that nver kept the country ahead of their / party's aspirtatiosn. I do agree that the communist party (who I suspect work for China to undermine India's progress) has been most instrumental in the downfall of the country. I am however not convinced about all the examples of inflation, high food costs etc being blamed on Singh - which country can the author confirm has been isolated from these global trends due to their leaders acrtion. I await this detaisl in anticpation

While I fully agree to the observations made by the author about the failures of Dr. Singh's government in capitalizing on the boom in India, I do not understand the common thinking, including in this article, that reforms in banking, insurance and pension sector means privatization. Before concluding that since the government controls most of the assets in this sector, the reforms have not taken place, the author should have examined the major improvements that have happened in reduction of red tape in these sectors, improved customer service, openness of government owned banks and insurance companies to develop and provide products that match the private sector offerings, performance-driven management systems, automation and technology adoption making transaction processing much faster etc. In fact, a yet poor country like India (as it comes out in the article too) cannot afford to have private sector play with pension funds and then get into a mess with the market making common men penniless. We are seeing such possibilities in probably the most privatized economy of the US. In a totally reverse move to privatization, the US government had to bail out two mortgage funding companies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, almost nationalizing it.

The reforms do not become good just because reforms are implemented faster and they are mostly through privatization. The economy of India has shown resilience against international and Asian crisis most of the time in last two decades because of the slow and cautious approach that successive governments have taken in implementing reforms in various sectors.This is probably the best way for India to move further on reforms

Manmohan Singh has proved to be the WORST prime minister India has ever had, bar none. The gap between promise and delivery has never been higher, expectations raised sky high were never met. Ancient Nehru dynasty loyalists like Arjun Singh and that embarassment Natwar Singh were given responsibilities for which they werent prepared...with that weak a leadership, everyone wanted to be first among equals.
The rate at which I am taxed is absurd, considering I never get the infrastructure for my own money, earned by compromising personal life and peace of mind. The private sector - the only true meritorious institution left in the country after Arjun Singh took his axe through the IIT/ IIMs - is threatened with reservation, without ANY effort to raise primary education levels for the so-called 'lower castes'. And all this from an ECONOMIST????? I mean, cool Singh's kids are all in the US, settled and enjoying the fruits of said country. That's why he can go about finishing India.

The article's analysis was spot-on. Manmohan's government needed to break from the past. Saddling themselves with a crippling alliance with the communists has really hurt them. The only way to ensure pervasive growth is by enabling the manufacturing sector to grow, which will only happen with labor law reform and a repeal of the strangulating small sector reservations. With so much of the government's energies mis-invested in maintaining a bureaucratic stranglehold on the economy, little is left for infrastructure, education or administrative improvements. Countries cannot live in stasis - they either go up or down. By pushing the pause button on reforms, the Congress has tried to cruise on the power unleashed by the liberalization of the 90s. That can go only so far.