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Yoginder K Alagh
I was told last month that we are reforming the sugar industry, and our description of the sugar cobweb in the early 1980s in APC and BICP reports was appreciated. A rainfall failure year, however, is not quite the ideal backdrop for successful reform.
There were outliers like Arvind Virmani and your columnist who have been arguing from the mid-nineties that India has been growing at a respectable rate from the eighties, but even in the first part of this decade the country was seen globally as a basket case.
Slowly but surely, the elephant is catching on. We have to do this right for land is being gobbled up by the sharks.
It is an interesting idea to have a public-civil society-private initiative on preparing development policy and a plan for a special region.
Among eminent Indians who have raised real security issues in a simple and direct manner this decade, Admiral Sureesh Mehta now stands out. What really puts him in the hall of fame is that he didn’t make his remarks at some marginal memorial event.
At one level, there is the obvious effect of rainfall failure, at another level, there is political jockeying. As P Sainath said, everyone loves a drought.
The past year was terrible for the global economy and indeed the Indian economy. But now, for agriculture the good news is that investment by the Union Government has been kept up.
When the Met forecast was 96% of the Long Period Average with a variation of 5%±, we asked you not to worry but cautioned that in some fortnights and some regions there could be problems around this average.
In a recent meeting the finance minister declared the government’s intention to move over to accrual accounting as quickly as possible. Some progress has been made and a rough time table is ready.
