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The transformation promised by an embrace of market capitalism

 

11 Mar 2021, 10:22 PM IST

Narain Batra

Privatization could spell major gains for India’s economy but a strategy is needed to get the cooperation of key stakeholders

The recently announced privatization plan will lead to a radical power shift in India and greater decentralization of economic activities, necessitating a new value-generative mechanism for cooperative partnership between the Centre, states and the private sector.

From Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialistic vision of controlling the ‘commanding heights of the economy to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new paradigm of the government not being in the business of owning and running enterprises, India is taking definitive steps towards privatization and a market economy. In 1951, India was overwhelmingly an agrarian economy; there were only five public sector enterprises (PSEs), and the Centre’s role in establishing an industrial base was a necessity.

Today, there are 348 PSEs with a total investment of over ₹16.4 trillion and more than a million employees, according to the Department of Public Enterprises. Privatizing them would open up space for the private sector to expand and innovate, as well as create huge investment opportunities for Indian and global players. The government, however, announced that four strategic sectors—atomic energy, space and defence; transport and telecom; power, petroleum, coal and other minerals; and banking, insurance and financial services—would still be under state control. Despite the proviso that each strategic sector would have no more than four PSEs, 332 PSEs would still be up for privatization. Shifting over 300 PSEs to the private domain would put India’s private sector through a phase of Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction, leading to product and process innovation that would replace old products and production methods with new. The challenge is how to do it so that processes and outcomes elicit public trust. In the case of Maruti, for example, the devolution process happened so successfully that today it is one of the world’s most competitive automakers.

If India were an authoritarian state like China, it would have been easy to say, to borrow a trope from Star Trek, that “resistance is futile". But as we see in the farmer protest against the government’s efforts to improve the farm economy through exposure to market forces, and the romancing of farmers by pop culture and youth activist icons such as Rihanna and Greta Thunberg, it is unthinkable that such a significant transfer of economic power from the state to private equity-holders would go unchallenged. Last December, attacks by farm protesters on Reliance Jio’s telecom towers in Punjab showed how deep the resistance is to India’s rising marketplace and manufacturing culture. This needs to be overcome.

Since the country’s privatization process cannot be a turnkey project and would take a number of years to accomplish, the government would need to adopt a two-pronged strategy.

First, the government should launch a massive public relations campaign to explain, educate and persuade people how the privatization of PSEs would have a multiplier effect on India’s job market by creating thousands of small and medium enterprises needed as part of new supply chains to feed the expanding private sector.

A regular broadcast, like Modi’s Mann ki Baat on radio, if done by noteworthy and trustworthy public intellectuals and believers in free enterprise, aimed at explaining how privatization and wealth creation would lift all boats, would go a long way in public persuasion. There’s a widespread suspicion of business people in India as tax dodgers and greedy profiteers. The business community must step forward and create a positive image through transparency in its hiring and business practices.

Second, in order to accomplish the task successfully, the government must adopt pragmatic approaches. Divesting such large and diverse categories of PSEs is a complex undertaking that necessitates approaching each unit with open-mindedness and flexibility while focusing on the desired outcomes. What worked in the past, as in the case of Maruti’s disinvestment, may or may not work for other PSEs, depending on the expectations of stakeholders.

Most importantly, if the ultimate goal of the Modi government is to enable the rise of India as a manufacturing power under its Atmanirbhar agenda of self-reliance, without which the country wouldn’t have a seat at the global table, new mechanisms for cooperation between the Centre, states and private players is absolutely vital.

Narain Batra is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University, Vermont and author of the forthcoming book, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi’

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INDIA TRIES A MOONSHOT

NOV. 30, 2016, 7:00 PM BY COMMENTARY 1 COMMENT

https://vtdigger.org/2016/11/30/narain-d-batra-india-tries-moonshot/

Digital India has been called a moonshot project that draws together the best human and private-public capital to achieve a goal that was previously thought to be impossible: Total transformation of society.

Digital India, based on Aadhaar, focuses on three fundamental areas: access to digital infrastructure as a utility, services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens through access to information. With more than a billion UIDs and growing, Aadhaar is the world’s largest database.

Aadhaar has captured the imagination of the people of India. Besides the government, private enterprises, including some places of worship, have begun to use Aadhaar to prevent fraud and facilitate transactions. For example, a Hindu temple in Almora, Uttarkhand, makes Aadhaar cards mandatory for getting married. Temple priest Hari Vinod Pant told The Times of India, “There have been instances when couples who came to the temple were found to be underage and it turned out they had eloped to get married. There have also been cases of Nepalese underage girls coming here to get married. So the temple committee took the decision of checking Aadhaar cards before agreeing to conduct the wedding.”

Indian Railways, one of the world’s largest railroad networks, a transport system that carries more than 22 million passengers a day, is planning to link subsidized concessional tickets for senior citizens and the underprivileged with Aadhaar to prevent fraud. But Digital India means much more: all railway structures and operations must be totally digitized and automated to eliminate deadly train derailments, such as the one that happened to Indore-Patna Express that killed scores of passengers. 

In a major reshaping of the public health system, Aadhaar numbers will be used as unique patient identifiers in a new electronic health records system. National identification numbers will be generated and assigned to all health facilities, beginning with public health facilities.

To encourage the use of Aadhaar, the Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to ensure that all new transactional cards, effective from Jan. 1, 2017, are also enabled to process payment using Aadhaar-based biometric authentication.

Under the financial inclusion scheme, Jan Dhan, any Indian older than 10 years who does not have a bank account can now open one in their name with an opening deposit of zero in any registered bank. Demonetization has awakened the mostly dormant Jan Dhan. Bill Gates of Microsoft is not the only foreign observer who believes that India will “move away from a shadow economy to an even more transparent economy.” The whole world is watching.

There have been concerns about the misuse of biometric data. Aadhaar uses the highest available public key cryptography with built-in tools to prevent meddling. Just like the U.S. military, Aadhaar uses layers of firewalls for data protection. Besides, Aadhaar databases are segregated. Segregation adds to security.

Entrepreneurs regard India’s digital venture as an extremely bold initiative. Jack Hidary, a senior adviser at Google X Labs, speaking at EmTech 2016: The Digital Future, called India as a moonshot nation that is “going through a radical transformation the like of that we have never seen.” A moonshot, he said, is an initiative that aims to achieve a goal that was previously thought to be impossible because it attracts the best human capital and finance from long-term investors.

Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirit, said at the conference, “India is entering a phase of innovation that is substantially different from what we have seen until now.” Aadhaar, he stated, will create other digital possibilities such as “the presence-less layer, which means I can open a bank account and establish who I am without doing in-person verification.” Aadhaar will enable millions of people to use their e-signs for paperless transactions. Aadhaar has made possible the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a debit card system that is a less expensive alternative to MasterCard and Visa.

With 650 million smartphone users, it is expected that within a year, mobile cash will become all pervasive in India, especially when the “digital consent” becomes an operational and integral part of the cashless payment system. As reported in LiveMint, Mr. Sharma said, “We are data poor right now, but we are putting in place a new system to managing digital consent, so nobody can aggregate data about you without a digital permission token from you. This is going to be the largest country-scale system in the world — a techno-legal solution… a very modern approach, which is a techno-legal sort of solution to manage privacy.”

While the government uses Aadhaar to ensure the delivery of benefits and services to residents, albeit with a special focus on the underprivileged, business enterprises are developing Aadhaar-based apps for the nation’s burgeoning e-commerce. That is drawing Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others to collaborate and compete with Indian enterprises to reach rural India. Consider this: in 2014 Jeff Bezos of Amazon invested $2 billion, and in June 2016 he pledged another $3 billion, to build a logistics network to cover the entire country to have a major stake in the online market expected to grow to $110 billion in the coming decade, according a Wall Street Journal report.

Google and Tata Trusts have trained thousands of female trainers and sent them to rural India on motorbikes to help rural women to learn the use of smartphones and tablets for building their small home-based businesses.

Women in India lag far behind men on social media, e-commerce and mobile connectivity. Parents discourage girls from having smartphones. They fear that young girls might go astray or do something that might shame the family. For their own self-interest, it is important for IT companies, therefore, to educate people and remove their fear of smartphones, especially by women so that they can fully participate in opportunities created by Digital India. Once men see that women are using smartphones for socially useful purposes, their hostility will diminish. That is the hope for Digital India: Give every woman a smartphone and see India transform.

COMPLICATED PROBLEMS

Can cyber diplomacy replace traditional diplomats and help us get a handle on the world’s most complicated problems?

August 27, 2016, 2:00 AM IST Narain D Batra in TOI Edit Page | Edit Page, Tech, World | TOI

Social media has become diplomacy’s second self, “a significant other”, according to a recent report by Burson-Marsteller, a global PR company. Social media, Twitter in particular, has become a diplomatic weathervane as well as a research kit to analyse global trends.

Today social media, according to the report, has become the first and foremost thought of world leaders, governments, diplomats, and civil society groups. Savvy diplomats feel that social media provides them with a platform for unrestricted communication with targeted groups.

Can cyber diplomacy replace the role of traditional diplomats? What do diplomats do? They do public diplomacy, of which cyber diplomacy is a newer version, to create goodwill and shape the international political and social environment. They do network building for information gathering and create country specific knowledge to advance trade and economic interests.

Most of all they confront and try to solve what is called “wicked problems”. The wicked problem concept comes from management science and was first systematically developed by C West Churchman, Horst Rittel, Melvin Webber and others in the late 70s and early 80s. Since then the concept has been applied in many fields including diplomacy.

A wicked problem is difficult to solve or unsolvable because of its complexities, because of its co-dependence on other problems, because of unknown factors impacting it, so that when you try to solve it, other problems emerge and the problem becomes more complicated. Some wicked problems are unsolvable, but what is unsolvable today might find a solution in the future.

Consider this: On the night of April 14-15, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from a government secondary school in Nigeria. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign launched on Twitter and Facebook afterwards went viral. It compelled world leaders to confront the problem. But as of today it has not gotten most of the schoolgirls back.

It’s a wicked problem because Boko Haram does not care for social media. It’s networked with other Islamic militant organisations such as al-Qaida and ISIS that have been relentlessly carrying out terrorist attacks including San Bernadino, Orlando, Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, Bangladesh and a most sacred mosque in Saudi Arabia. And there’ll be more to come.

Vietnam War was a wicked problem because so many stakeholders, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China and the US, apart from blood-soaked Vietnam itself, were involved. Television brought the war to our living rooms and made it more complicated. Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger conducted tough diplomatic negotiations to end one of the most tragic and unwinnable wars in history.

Diplomacy is hard work. But today US-Vietnam public diplomacy is very effective. You can see its effect in trade relations, and Vietnam’s proposed membership in Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Iran was a most wicked problem. Behind the diplomatic faces of John Kerry and Iran’s Javed Zarif, there were hosts of nuclear experts, who worked day and night to break the logjam. Has the problem been solved? Israel and Arab countries as well as many Americans are not so sure.

Cyber diplomacy might have played some role in persuading doubting Americans that the nuclear deal is worth a try and if Iran backed out, sanctions will be re-imposed. Recently it was announced that Iran would buy 100 planes from Boeing. Price tag: $25 billion or so. Perhaps this is the time for Boeing corporate diplomats to take over.

Climate change is an extremely wicked problem. The Paris Agreement, which was adopted last December and signed by 177 nations and will begin in 2020, is not a solution. It is only an intervention. Cyber diplomacy by governments and civil society organisations could certainly keep alive awareness of the problem; but the problem is so wicked that it will require a transformative, technology based, sustainability revolution to make Beijing and New Delhi breathable again.

Cyber diplomacy can be used effectively to build up Asian public opinion to keep China from asserting exclusive control over the South China Sea in the light of the Hague International tribunal ruling rejecting China’s claim. But cyber diplomacy will not be enough. Whatever US and Asian governments, civil society organisations and global corporations do, their actions must be wedded to clear strategic objectives of keeping the South China Sea free and open as is the Indian Ocean.

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/can-cyber-diplomacy-replace-traditional-diplomats-and-help-us-get-a-handle-on-the-worlds-most-complicated-problems/http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/can-cyber-diplomacy-replace-traditional-diplomats-and-help-us-get-a-handle-on-the-worlds-most-complicated-problems/

Theatre of the absurd

Narain D Batra

| 19 June, 2016

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has created a mesmerising political “theatre of the absurd” that has produced a mass following and further polarised a deeply divided America. A paranoid American President with racist animus and religious bigotry can be more dangerous to the world than Islamic State militants. You can drone a militant to oblivion, whether he is in the badlands of Pakistan, Yemen, or Syria. But neither the US Congress nor the Judiciary, co-equals in power, can do much to control an unprincipled, whimsical man, who, once into the White House, becomes the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world. The checks-and-balances system does not always work

Trump’s irrational rhetorical exuberance, outrageous stage performance, aggravating “truthiness” and the use of personal insults as a political weapon about his myriad fallen Republican opponents have made them look silly.

Big donors include the super rich such as New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, Florida shopping magnate Mel Sembler, Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks and casino billionaire Sheldon Anderson, among others. This is an amazing metamorphosis of public opinion in favour of Trump, the man who claims to be the only person who can save America.

For some Americans, “Make America Great Again” is a powerful call for nation rebuilding, as has been the Islamic militants cry of “Allahu Akbar” for returning to the glory of the Prophet Mohammed.

From the very beginning, Trump barged onto television screens like the rhinoceros in Eugene Ionesco’s play; and, gradually, even the most conservative thinker of the Reagan Republican tradition, almost everyone, is becoming a Trump believer.

 Governor Nikki Haley (of Indian origin), Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Senator John McCain (whom Trump called a non-heroic Vietnam Prisoner of War hero), and Peter King of Long Island, who called Trump an ignoramus, have found enough rationale to support the nominee. Senator Marco Rubio, who roared like a lion and belittled everything about Trump, is scampering like a mouse to be on the man’s right side, while House speaker Paul Ryan held back from his support of Trump. In the play Rhinoceros, the protagonist, Berenger, is the sole person left who refuses to join the mass conversion to Rhinoceroses (the Nazis). But Ryan is no Berenger and has bowed and succumbed to the rising power of Trump. Politics before principles!

The herding of the people into a Trump mass following, as happened in Ionesco’s play, is almost complete. It is not something unprecedented. It happened during the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin ruled the Russian mind; and the rise of Nazism in Europe; and not long ago, when we were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. We wanted to believe in the “truthiness” of the moment as persuasively presented by General Colin Powell, US Secretary of State under President George W Bush.

Today, some Americans want to believe that the Trump Wall, for which Mexico will be forced to pay if Trump becomes President, will save them from the Mexican hordes, rapists, and drug dealer; China will be rolled back and jobs will return to America; and Islamic militants will be obliterated.

Trump’s misogyny and indulgence for women (he owned Miss Universe and Miss USA Pageants, which he sold in 2015) have been no different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. The body-builder movie actor, “Kaalifornia Terminator Governator”, in a budget session in the California legislature on 17 July 2014, derided his opponents, “If they don’t have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers...’ if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men.” Despite being married to a celebrity Kennedy woman, Maria Shriver, it took him years before the non-girlie man had the guts to admit that he had fathered a child with Mildred Patricia Baena, his Mexican-American housekeeper. In 2005 he suggested that California seal its borders with Mexico. Trump’s Mexican Wall is the rebirth of Schwarzenegger’s bizarre idea.

Donald Trump is the latter-day version of Arnold Schwarzenegger and is much more seductive and dangerous. Few politicians have used the English language as a weapon for the total destruction of enemies as Trump has done. Like a master propagandist, he uses language that is memorable and subversive. Like a negative adman, he keeps up the jingle of insults: crooked Hillary; little Marco Rubio; Cruz, “the worst liar, crazy or very dishonest. Perhaps all three”.

He addresses his audience in a conversational tone; and, then suddenly bursts into a thunderclap, rebuking his opponents. His condemnation of Muslims has been so intense and effective that many Americans are rattled by the proposed resettlement of Syrian refugees in their towns. And CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who rushed to air the documentary, “Why do they hate us?” did not help much to reduce the prevailing negative sentiments against Muslims, whom Trump wants to bar from entering the USA.

Like Schwarzenegger, Trump, despite his transgressions, is a charming public man. But Schwarzenegger’s shenanigans were limited to California. Trump will occupy the world stage if he becomes President. Can Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, annihilate Trump’s theatre of the absurd that has become so meaningful to so many Americans? Can the world afford a maverick in the White House?

The writer, author of the First Freedoms And America’s Culture Of Innovation, is a professor at Norwich University.

 http://www.thestatesman.com/news/supplements/theatre-of-the-absurd/149211.html#IkSKT4Fbd0KdqpjH.99