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Freedom from shortage: The Indian Express
New Delhi, Aug 10: ON August 15, 1947, India celebrated Independence and the communists, congenital party poopers, immediately proclaimed, ``Yeh azaadi jhooti hai (This is a bogus freedom).`` Their argument was that political freedom had been achieved but economic freedom was far away.
New Delhi, Aug 10: ON August 15, 1947, India celebrated Independence and the communists, congenital party poopers, immediately proclaimed, ‘‘Yeh azaadi jhooti hai (This is a bogus freedom).’’ Their argument was that political freedom had been achieved but economic freedom was far away.
The communists were both right and wrong. Economic freedom had been far from achieved — but their way wasn’t the right way. In the coming decades, through the 1950s and particularly the 1960s, this freedom was emasculated further. Socialism arrogated all economic power to the state; and put the little man on the road to serfdom.
India became the shortage economy. Scarcity, control, permit: these were part of an Indian’s everyday vocabulary. To possess a scooter you had to wait months, maybe years. Alternatively, you had to approach a chief minister for an ‘‘out of turn’’ allotment.
Perhaps you could have asked an NRI cousin to apply under a dollar-payment scheme — and then squared up with him through the hawala route. All this for a scooter.
Today, life is somewhat better. The waiting period for a scooter is down to the time you take to sign your cheque. You don’t have to break foreign exchange laws to change rupees for dollars.
The past 12 years, ever since P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh began to restructure the economy in that hot and tempestuous summer of 1991, have been something of a second freedom movement. The battle is not over. Total independence, as it were, is a distance away; but substantial autonomy has been won.
In business area after business are, industry and industry, the shortage economy has been knocked down. Till even the early 1990s, the telephone, for just so many Indian families, was a cumbersome, black instrument that worked sometimes and functioned as a gigantic paperweight most times. The government-run telephone company’s linesman was a neighbourhood cult figure. Now you probably wouldn’t recognise him.
Not everything has been transformed. As one of the pieces below illustrates, much of basic infrastructure, the nuts and bolts of a modern society — services like 24 hour power and education — remains trapped in the past. Yet anyone, at least anyone in urban India, who insists life hasn’t become that much easier since in the past few years has to be a deep cynic or in deep slumber.
It’s not merely the private telephone-service providers and the easier availability of LPG cylinders that should be welcomed. It is also the fact that with each such step, India has walked further away from feudalism and inched closer to capitalism, to genuine, stakeholder democracy.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that one. Shortage is the natural fount of corruption. When demand for goods or services exceeds supply, distribution is obviously open to manipulation. In the Indian experience, socialism equalled kleptocracy.
No wonder each time a bastion of shortage falls, Indians become a little more free.
In a sense then, every day is Independence Day.
India became the shortage economy. Scarcity, control, permit: these were part of an Indian’s everyday vocabulary. To possess a scooter you had to wait months, maybe years. Alternatively, you had to approach a chief minister for an ‘‘out of turn’’ allotment.
Perhaps you could have asked an NRI cousin to apply under a dollar-payment scheme — and then squared up with him through the hawala route. All this for a scooter.
Today, life is somewhat better. The waiting period for a scooter is down to the time you take to sign your cheque. You don’t have to break foreign exchange laws to change rupees for dollars.
The past 12 years, ever since P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh began to restructure the economy in that hot and tempestuous summer of 1991, have been something of a second freedom movement. The battle is not over. Total independence, as it were, is a distance away; but substantial autonomy has been won.
In business area after business are, industry and industry, the shortage economy has been knocked down. Till even the early 1990s, the telephone, for just so many Indian families, was a cumbersome, black instrument that worked sometimes and functioned as a gigantic paperweight most times. The government-run telephone company’s linesman was a neighbourhood cult figure. Now you probably wouldn’t recognise him.
Not everything has been transformed. As one of the pieces below illustrates, much of basic infrastructure, the nuts and bolts of a modern society — services like 24 hour power and education — remains trapped in the past. Yet anyone, at least anyone in urban India, who insists life hasn’t become that much easier since in the past few years has to be a deep cynic or in deep slumber.
It’s not merely the private telephone-service providers and the easier availability of LPG cylinders that should be welcomed. It is also the fact that with each such step, India has walked further away from feudalism and inched closer to capitalism, to genuine, stakeholder democracy.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that one. Shortage is the natural fount of corruption. When demand for goods or services exceeds supply, distribution is obviously open to manipulation. In the Indian experience, socialism equalled kleptocracy.
No wonder each time a bastion of shortage falls, Indians become a little more free.
In a sense then, every day is Independence Day.