Too much securirty for Politicians and VIPs

It was recently reported in the "Times of India" and the "Indian express" that out of the 60,000 police personnel in Delhi about 10,000 were in charge of looking after designated VIP's and their security. The number of VIP's designated by Delhi are 400, which seems to be an unbelievably high figure. These 400 people are excluding the prime minister and all the other important ministers. If the above information is correct, we need to ask ourselves why 1/6th of the police force of a certain town is in charge of looking after 0.0000286(I have actually calculated that, given that Delhi's population is close to 14000000 source: wikipidea) of the population. Agreed that these 400 people are important for the nation and they are playing an important role in maintaining political stability (God knows whether they really are???) but still that does not justify these figures. If we calculate per person security then 10000/400=25.

Do we live in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Taliban that every time a VIP leaves his home he needs 25 people to surround him, and this is just the security, Im not including the attendants and private attendants and god knows how many more. This kind of supreme royal treatment given to VIP's is not only absurd but it also is a waste of the tax payer’s money. The role of the police force according to Police Act 1861 is "the prevention and detection of crime, prevention as an objective precedes detection" Now this is with reference to the entire nation, or an entire state and all the people of that land, it is not with reference to a few VIPs and MP's. Perhaps its time to rethink on these issues and formulate a realistic and fair policy with regards to VIPs security and let us not forget that in a democracy the most important person is the common man, the ordinary people who vote and who's welfare has to be ensured by any government, hence the common man is the real VERY IMPORTANT PERSON (VIP!!)

The Universe and parallel universes...........

The Universe

I have been reading Stephen Hawkings book “Universe in a nutshell”, its an awesome book which can be read by anybody even those who don’t have a background in physics or mathematics. This book is not a sequel to his earlier book “A brief history of time”, infact Dr Hawking received a lot of letters from people saying that ‘Brief History of time’ was little to complex for an ordinary person to understand and that is why lot of people started reading the book but couldn’t reach the last chapters which were very exciting. Hence in his new book he has adopted a different pattern, after reading the first few pages of the introduction and a few basic concepts like ‘space time’, ‘anthropic principle’ you can proceed to any chapter and fully understand it. Dr Hawkings sense of humor is simply delightful, whilst explaining the most complex concepts like the cosmological constant a mathematical tool created by Einstein, Dr Hawking can come up with a superb piece of Humor. Anyways I still haven’t understood a hell lot of things, and may be I won’t be able to even in the future, but its amazing knowing about the universe, its origin and fate.

There is an interesting point which was taken up by Immanuel Kant with regards to the origin of the universe. Kant says that if the universe had a definite beginning why was there an infinite wait before the beginning? And in case the universe had existed forever which was suggested by Newton, then why hadn’t all those things happened that were supposed to happen, as in the universe should have reached a stage of thermal equilibrium and history should have been over by now. This is one of the contradictions. The second aspect which is of much recent origin is that of String theory which is stills a developing mathematical model, this theory suggests that our universe is just a part of another larger large universe and this universe contains many smaller universes like ours. It’s like a loaf of bread, in which our universe is like one slice and the other slices right next to us are the parallel universes. Every event in the universe is parallel claims this theory but the physical outcome varies. This almost sounds like something from a science fiction book, but the example which I read was that suppose you are quickly passing a signal and a car comes towards you in top speed, you quickly step aside and are relieved. But this theory suggests that somewhere in some other universe one person is hit by that car in that universe, in some other universe maybe a person even died, and maybe in some other universe the person was partially hurt. Sounds crazy I know! But this theory and claim cannot be completely dismissed say physicist from around the world. http://youtube.com/watch?v=2_vpEyE6rug this is a documentary on parallel universes by BBC, its awesome!

Union Budget and the common man

I recently read a quote about the union budget, “The common man can’t understand the union budget, and the union budget can’t understand the common man!!” Although our current finance minister would like to contest the second part of the phrase, there is still no doubt that the common man can’t understand the budget. First of all the budget is prepared in complete isolation and secrecy. It is kept a big secret until ‘budget day’ for mysterious reasons. When every issue of national importance is discussed in a transparent and open manner in the parliament, why should the budget be an exception? Why is it that the finance minister straight away comes to parliament and reads out his speech and how he and his assistants have planned things for the entire year. The point that Im pressing here is that of transparency in the budget making process.

Now let us see why the common man can’t understand the budget or why is it that he is not much interested in it, which in my view is the real reason behind his not understanding it. It is lack of interest not intellect which determines this.

When Nani Palkhivala eminent jurist and economist delivered a lecture on the budget in brebourne stadium in Bombay, thousands of people used to come to attend the program, and were interested in knowing what is in store for them in this budget. Palkhivala could actually make a dry and boring subject like the budget interesting and enjoyable and moreover could simplify it from the technical economic language, which drove people to listen to him. His budget speeches finally ended in 1994.

Today there are many people who deliver a similar lecture on the budget, lawyers, Charted Accountants, tax consultants; financial experts all express their opinions and views about the budget and its implications for the various segments of the population. But these people cater to a very niche audience. These are lectures where, businessmen, management experts, industrialists go and attend. It is difficult to find the common man here, who once sat in brebourne stadium and intently listened. After interest comes knowledge of economics or atleast elementary economics.

Arindham Chaudhuri says “Economics is complex, mathematised, pseudo intellectual, quite unfit for the common man, around whom economics should actually revolve”. Reading and understanding the budget definitely requires good understanding of simple macro economics nothing more. And finally comes the role of the media in spreading the analysis of the budget far and wide. The print media does a very good job in analyzing the budget. ‘The Times Of India’ made a good presentation of the budget, simplified most of the provisions, especially the ones related to income tax and other taxes. They even showed how various sectors are affected by the budget. But the problem is with the electronic media. On the day of the budget, I saw 4 programs on television, on CNN IBN, TIMES NOW, NDTV and CNBC. All these programs were good but the problem is that they were only and only in English, the Hindi news channels dint seem to cover the budget as extensively as the English channels did. This straightaway means that only the English speaking urban people will be able to understand what the panelists are saying. The panel members were almost the same in all the programs.

Economics is actually a subject which concerns the common man the most. But despite that economics is far far away from the common man, why? Why should economics be confined to intellectual discussions and debates. Economics as a subject can be simplified so that everybody understands it, even those who have not formally learnt it and perhaps (I hope) even those who have not had much of education, because one cannot deny that it is equally important them as well.

Inflation, government and the people

The current phase of inflation seems to have undone much of the good that the UPA government created for itself through a “revolutionary budget” as Sonia Gandhi put it. The ‘Times of India’ describes this whole process as ‘pollonomics’. The government obviously wanted to showcase itself as a magnanimous organizing body which was compassionate enough to call of all the money which was due from the farmers, which was actually anyway lost, but calling it of at the most propitious time when elections are due would have resulted in electoral and political gain for the government. But now all that ‘good work’ (of a few weeks!!) may not ultimately give the government the edge that it needed for the next election. The BJP and CPI (M) are already threatening a nation wide agitation in second week of April if prices are not under control by then.

Whether the government will still win the election or not is a different matter, let us look at the phenomena of inflation that we are facing at the moment. First of all it is a global phenomenon; there is a jump in the food prices in the world market. Let us compare our inflation rate with the country we always like getting compared with for every reason, China. Currently China is growing at 11.4% and the inflation has hit a 12 year high of 8.7%, now that’s something to scream about, “inflation nearing 9%” almost sounds like “I have put on 20 kgs in one month and I have to lose the same in 15 days!” There is no doubt that bringing down the inflation rate from such a high rate not only takes a little time but it also affects the growth rate. We have already seen a drop in our economic growth rate to 8.7% from the high of 9.4% in 2007. Basically there is a clash between these two objectives of growth and maintaining price stability, but with both these figures going to their worse end we might have to face stagflation. Stagflation was a term employed by the supply side economists in the 70s, to describe the then existing economic crisis, and moreover they(supply side economists) held that these crisis had resulted because of neglecting aggregate supply in the economy and only focusing and framing demand managed polices which were advocated by Keynes. However, stagflation is not a properly defined term in economics, we know that when there is negative growth in two quarters continuously it is called recession, but there is no so such barometer which you plan plug in an economy and determine whether stagflation exists or not.

Now let’s look at the measures taken by the government to tackle the problem of inflation. First and foremost it must be mentioned that this problem will not be short-lived, as the latest report of the Asian Development Bank says that inflation will be a regular problem with the Asian countries. But the government undoubtedly has to do something for two reasons:

a) To ensure the welfare of the people

b) To win the next election (I can’t stop talking about it!)

So lets see what the government has done, first it has banned the exports of various commodities including rice, next it has abolished import duties to increase imports and increase supply of goods in the domestic market, then it has banned forward trading and recently it was reported that it is also taking measures to control prices of cement along with food articles by importing cement from Pakistan at Rs150-175 for a bag of 50 kg (it is sold at 225-240 in the northern states). Now all of these measures consist the supply side polices, along with that there are some monetary and fiscal polices also that he government might undertake, like increasing interest rates (it’s actually done by the RBI) tight money supply to prevent demand pull inflation and appropriate fiscal management. Apart from this the government also considers increasing food subsidies to bring about temporary stability in prices. However, while all these policies are being implement it is interesting to note that currently many countries are facing the problem of inflation, therefore they are also implementing similar such policies if not identical, what happens then?? If our government decides to ban exports and abolish import duties to increase supply, it can happen that other countries are doing a similar thing; Saudi Arabia is already implementing these policies. So how then does the government proceed with this problem? Im not saying this is happening per se at the moment, but currently with many countries facing a similar problem this is a theoretical possibility.

It is needless to say that the above policies will affect growth and in turn the stock market but this is inevitable, controlling inflation at the moment is of utmost importance, all the national newspapers can wait for a few months to write their favorite headline “Growth back on track” and “Sensex like never before”.