VOX POPULI

by

 Aam Admi

Issue: 154                                               Date:  06.06.2016

Contents:

1.       M J Akbar On The Power of Regret

2.       Banning Diesel Vehicles Capacity 2000cc & Above

3.       Donald Trump On His Way To The Republican Presidential Nomination

4.       GDP In Excess of 7%!

                M J Akbar On The Power of Regret

M J Akbar has written in his column - The Power of Regret –about the greatness of Barrack Obama, the US President, more and to a lesser extent Justine Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister in having the courage and conviction to express regret either verbally or by their initiatives for some of the actions that their countries inflicted against other nations in the past. Obama culminated his visits to Cuba and Vietnam by visiting the Hiroshima war memorial in Japan while Trudeau expressed the regret over the refusal of immigration to Sikhs on the ship Komagata Maru sometime in the early 1900's. The column is well-intended but then the question is why do we always make heroes of people from other countries when we can have our own home-grown heroes. In this context why do we not have PM Narendra Modi expressing his regret over the 2002 Gujarat riots where even the Supreme Court had made a reference that Modi akin to Nero fiddled while the cities of Gujarat burned. Or do we have to wait for the cooling period of 50 years or more to expire as in the above two instances of the  US President and the Canadian Prime Minister. M J Akbar is a reputed and highly regarded journalist, there is clearly no doubt about that but after having joined the BJP, he is seemingly toeing the official line in his utterances and in his columns. This is a tendency on his part to be more aligned to be the mouthpiece of the party and apparently in that process surrender his rational analytical skills.

Banning Diesel Vehicles Capacity 2000cc & Above

Many politicians have commented on the excessive judicial activism by the courts citing among many issues the example of the ban on diesel cars with an engine capacity 2000cc and higher claiming that new diesel engines have a lesser pollution signature than even petrol cars. The problem is that these politicians fail to see beyond the horizon. It is a well-known fact that diesel engines emit more particulate matter which is harmful for people no matter how advanced the engine is. Europe has banned diesel cars a long time ago on this count. In fact in these matters we should learn from countries like Norway who have decided recently to eliminate all cars using fossil fuels including petrol by 2025. In India if you ban the big diesel cars now then you have the opening to ban petrol cars with a bigger pollution footprint than the new diesel cars. With the problem on our roads being too many cars particularly in metropolitan cities which number is fast increasing by the day, the priority is to reduce the number of cars on the roads and also have smaller cars so that we have less traffic congestion. This will hopefully reduce the number of accidents and incidents of road rage that we see on our roads. This approach will also encourage people to use public transport more, like the bus, trams, underground rail networks etc. as relevant to the different cities. In this context the odd-even experiment introduced twice in Delhi lately needs to be commended since the issue is not how much pollution the scheme is reducing but the fact that a certain awareness about pollution is brought home to people, discipline is  enforced on the travelling public and as said earlier, it encourages people to use public transport. What is happening to traffic in the metros that we are seeing now will happen as we go into the future around us in varying degrees and extent where we live in urban surroundings in India. Thus the idea in banning the diesel vehicles is to curb vehicular pollution on a long term basis. Some of the ministers in the BJP government at the Centre have also claimed that banning diesel vehicles will mean production by some of the car manufacturers will stop thus affecting the growth of the auto industry. The minister seems to be a mouthpiece of some of the big foreign car manufacturers who have expressed this opinion like Mercedes Benz who have said that they will have to wind up their operations in India in the event of the ban in diesel cars coming through.  The issue here is that these foreign car manufacturers need to remember that the days when they could dump their outdated and polluting vehicles in India are over. What they cannot sell in Europe or the US or Japan cannot be sold in India. Moreover these big foreign car manufacturers suffer in a major way about their credibility what with Volkswagen which was caught fudging its emission parameters to comply with the US standards. In a similar way many of the other manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, Ford and others for one or the other reason has been calling back cars that they have sold in hundreds of thousand, if not a million numbers on counts of safety, pollution and/or engineering issues. Thus we should act in a manner that is good for India by rational judgment rather than be driven by the agenda of foreign car manufacturers. These are some of the disruptive or ground-breaking decisions that we need to take and say that by 2025 we will have only hybrid or electric vehicles on our roads. This will drastically reduce the number of vehicles on our roads  but at the same time we should boost up public transport so that people can reach their destinations quickly and comfortably.

                    Donald Trump On His Way To The Republican Presidential Nomination

It seems that Donald Trump getting the nomination of the GOP for the US Presidential election of 2016 is a foregone certainty. With his reaching the magical delegate figure the Republican Party will find it difficult to refuse him the nomination or pursue the plan they were privately mulling sometime back to put up an official party nominee at the GOP Convention and refuse Donald Trump the nomination.  With Donald Trump closing in on Hilary Clinton in the opinion polls, which some agencies have stated is too close to call now, refusal of the nomination by the Republican Party becomes all the more difficult since they would be perceived as going against the pulse of the people and after all, the Republican party like it or not can claim the Presidency is theirs if Donald Trump happens to win. Thus you may say that the GOP is caught between the devil and the deep sea. But the situation that the world finds itself in  looking into the US is that they have gone back in time by about a decade and a half when George Bush was campaigning for his first term as President. George Bush had at that time the same kind of campaign howlers in terms of his complete lack of awareness of foreign policy, history as well as geography of the world. But then one has to admit that Donald Trump is more outrageous than even George Bush. If George Bush then beat the Democratic nominee, Al Gore by a very thin margin mostly because of the ‘stub’ count in Florida where his brother Jeb Bush was Governor, we may have Donald Trump still making it to the Presidency. If that happens it will be a disaster since then the US & the world will have to seriously introspect that in the 15 odd years since George Bush was made President of the United States of America whether the US has gone forward, remained at the same level or gone back as a country. But all said and done, the US Presidential elections always brings out the true America the way it is, absolutely open with no cover-ups and also without any apologies.

                        GDP In Excess of 7%!

The figures published by the government state that in the last quarter – Jan – March 2016, the Indian GDP grew by 7.9% which brought up the annual GDP growth figure to 7.6%. This growth figure set off the usual celebratory noises by the Centre that it was the highest growth shown by any country around the world and that we even beat China. However, we need to be careful with these figures since the manufacturing index has been down, agricultural growth has been negative and the latest figures show that services growth in the Indian economy has fallen for the first time in a decade. Thus when the main contributors to the economy have been sluggish, one cannot understand how the GDP reaches the commanding heights of 7.6%. If this growth is because of the change of indices that the government  adopted for reporting, then we need to recognize reality and calibrate our expectations accordingly. But if this growth is being shown by means of juggling the figures just so that the Modi government is seen in a good light then there is something seriously wrong somewhere. And the earlier we correct it will be better. It is said that the Oil Marketing Cos. (OMC) who get the LPG subsidy are adding back that to their revenue figures running into lakhs of crores which added to the GDP can show the growth. Similarly there are other instances where subsidies are being added back to show turnover or some such. This kind of sharp juggling of figures without actual matching output of goods will project a wrong picture of the Indian economy. The other question is that if the economy was really growing at a clip of 7% why would Cos. like Flipkart and L&T Infotech not adhere to honouring the appointments orders they had issued to IIM graduates in the first case and in the case of L&T cancel confirmation letters for jobs given to some 150 graduates from engineering colleges. This happened over the last fortnight. This goes to show that the Central government is not projecting things properly and continuing to live in the false promise of tom-toming scheme names like Make In India or Start-Up India in the manner of event management exercises. If Start-Up India was working then would so many start-up Cos. also apart from the above named back out of their promise of jobs given on assured contract letters to our youth graduating from engineering and management colleges like even the IIT’s and IIM’s. IIT’s have recently stated that they are black-listing some 6 start-up Cos. from their placement programs for not maintaining their promise to recruit graduates. So please let us see the reality as it is.

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