India’s soft power

Posted: 2008-08-10 00:41:29+05:30 IST
Updated: Aug 10, 2008 at 0041 hrs IST

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: Suhel Seth

Managing Partner, Counselage

Every year I make the annual pilgrimage to Stanford University to what must unarguably be the finest repository of academia combined with key Indian policy-makers. Seated at the Annual India Conference hosted by SCID (Stanford Center for International Development), I marvelled at the amazing vistas that we covered over a two-day period. From remarkable presentations by Anjini Kochar on the education system in India and what perhaps needs to be done there, to the study of savings and banking in India by Rakesh Mohan, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India to the incisive comments by N K Singh, the freshly minted Rajya Sabha member of Parliament from Bihar, the whole conference was awash with some key insights that our policy makers would do well to learn from. The fact that a university on the West Coast in the United States can devote its finest academics to a cause that ideally India should be devoted to is a signal of the stature that India enjoys and the tremendous support that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Kanwal Rekhi are providing to causes such as this.

The sessions included a superb one by Anne Krueger formerly of the International Monetary Fund and the facts that Anne mentioned in her outstanding presentation point to the existing malaise that India faces in her economics at least. There is no question in my mind that we in India are in denial about inflation as we are about growth rates. GDP is quite frankly an irrelevant statistic when you actually see the plight of so many Indians and the fact that even after four years of this present government we have neither a plan for infrastructure nor for food security is indicative of how mixed up the government is over key issues. Rajesh Mohan privately admitted that oil and fertiliser subsidies would create long-term damage to the economic fabric of India and I was delighted to hear N Vaghul (Chairman of ICICI) take on Rakesh Mohan when he began extolling the virtues of the public sector banks saying they were globally on par with the best of the best. And Vaghul makes a critical point: with all the farmer loan waivers, the government has further undermined both the liberal economic landscape and the independence of the banking system and the fact that the Reserve Bank of India sits hawkishly on every file...