They were spooked by the passage of the Food Security Bill by the Lok Sabha the previous day.
This, they fear, will throw this year’s fiscal deficit out of gear. Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s assertion the next day that the deficit would not exceed the target did little to allay their fears.
Actually, that sinking feeling had started to set in the previous day when Sonia Gandhi, the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance, was speaking in favour of the Bill in the Lok Sabha.
“Some people ask whether we have enough resources to successfully implement this Bill. But it is not a question of how we find the means to implement the Bill; we have to find the way,” she said.
“The question is not whether we can do it or not, but we have to do it.”
What does inexpensive grain mean to the farmers?
“We have always given prominence to farmers and agriculture,” she said.
“We have given top-most priority to their issues and will continue to do so.”
Can the leaky public distribution system, or PDS, deliver the subsidised grain to two-thirds of the population?
Wasn’t it Rajiv Gandhi, her husband, who had famously said that out of every rupee that the government spends only 15 paise reach the intended beneficiaries?
“There are leakages in PDS and this has to be plugged.
“We want to reform PDS so that its benefits reach maximum people and this is one of the main focuses in the food security Bill,” Ms Gandhi added.
The import is clear: if there is a problem, fix it; but roll out the programme quickly.
The demerits of the Bill and its adverse impact on the economy have been discussed elsewhere.
The point to note is that none of it has moved the person who holds the most powerful office in the country.
Does it matter if the investment climate worsens in the process?
Ratan Tata wasn’t exaggerating when he said that India had “lost the confidence of the world”.
The fact is the First Family still swears by the socialist template written by Jawaharlal Nehru several decades ago.
In Nehru’s world, if bloodsucking zamindars were bad news for the country, industrialists were worse. His run-ins with businessmen were numerous.
M J Akbar, in his book Nehru: The Making of India, recounts the bad blood between Nehru and Ghanshyam Das Birla.
Normally restrained in his comment, Birla would once in a while let off steam.
“In London, Nehru was making speeches that Russia was India’s best friend and Japan a weakening power.
“I don’t know about Russia, but I definitely know that Japan is not a weakening power,” he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in 1936. J R D Tata too did not approve of Nehru’s economic policies.
Nehru once told Tata that
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