Blog Posts by Mohit Satyanand

"The flood of liquidity is going abroad and causing problems all over the world", said Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist last week. Does that include India?

Our Finance Minister seems to think not, but the Reserve Bank of India does. Nice. While they're sorting that one out, we can take time off to backtrack to where the current financial crisis began, namely in the US.

To try and sort its banks out after the financial meltdown, the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to virtually zero. This cheap money allowed the banks free access to funds, which they could use to strengthen their balance sheets, which had been socked by the 2007-08 crisis.

The policy hope was that these funds would encourage US banks to make loans, and kickstart the US economy. It didn't happen, because US households had also stretched themselves with housing and other loans during the boom years; to compensate, over the last couple of years, they have increased their savings rate, setting off a

Within days of taking charge as our Minister for Human Resources Development (HRD) in 2009, Kapil Sibal pronounced his 3 over-arching goals for Indian education - access, equity (inclusion) and excellence.

Ninety-six percent of Indian children of school-going age are already enrolled in schools, so it would appear that access is not the major problem facing our schooling system. Most would assert that excellence is, especially in schools run by the various avatars of our government. Certainly, an increasing number of parents believe this, and across rural India, 22% of parents pay to send their children to private schools, rather than avail of the free schooling offered to them by the government.

The Right To Education (RTE) implicitly acknowledges that private schools deliver better education to their students, by requiring that 25% of their intake of students be from poorer sections of society. This provision speaks to the politically attractive 'equity' platform of

Two weeks after her son's 'warrior' speech in Niyamgiri, Sonia Gandhi called for protection of farmers' land rights. Rahul's helicopter visit to Orissa was designed to embarrass the Patnaik government after Vedanta's mining activities were declared illegal; Soniaji's declaration came after UP farmers violently protested against the low prices being paid to them by Mayawati's government.

And, just to make sure you got the point she was making, Soniaji's PR machinery trotted out figures of how the "present Congress government" in Haryana was being much more generous in its acquisition of farmer's land. Actually, the figures don't support her: according to Ajit Singh, RKD leader who also jumped into the fray, UP farmers in NOIDA were paid Rs. 800 per sq. meter for land acquired to build the Taj Expressway; figures from Haryana show that its government agencies have paid an average of Rs. 569 per sq. m. for land they have acquired across the state since 2005.

Coincidentally, the price now

Legendary songster Bob Dylan sang these words in 'Slow Train Coming', in 1979. Over a quarter of a century later, in 2006, Indian economist Arvind Virmani concluded pretty much the same thing in a paper he wrote for the Planning Commission.

Though not quite as lyrical as Dylan's words, Dr. Virmani's several pages of facts, figures, and analysis allow one conclusion to ring out clearly - our current food and fertiliser subsidies are doing a horrible job of serving the poor. If we wound up these two subsidies, and gave the same amount of money away every year, it would be enough, not just to tackle their hunger, but to lift all the poor in the country above the poverty line. If we added to this governmental expenditure on welfare programs under the heads 'Rural Development', 'Welfare of SC, ST and OBCs', and 'Social Security and Welfare', there would be

India is scarcely famous for a clean public life: on a scale that runs from 0, for highly corrupt, to 10, for highly clean, Transparency International ranks India at 2.9, along with Mali, Moldova, and Tanzania, and just a little smarter at generating slush funds than Rwanda, the Dominican Republic, and Mongolia.

Given this perception, I find it quite bemusing that the press has been able to generate so much outrage over the allegations of corruption in our staging of the Commonwealth Games. One would have to be pretty naive to believe that the grandest carnival ever staged by the Indian Government would not be engineered such that many individuals got rich quick, or richer quicker, as the case may be.

Every year, Income tax disputes run into tens of thousands of crores, defence contracts worth billions of dollars are awarded, and real estate transactions worth hundreds of thousands of crores need to be entered into the registers of our sub-registrars. Does any Indian adult really

For six years she was out in the cold, while those awful pretenders ran riot over the Republic her line had ruled so long. But she used those six years years well, thinking carefully about the role of a Monarch in a modern, democratic Republic.

Since her triumphant return to the throne of Mithica, the Queen had eschewed the pomp and show that is her right, largely secluding herself in her low, white palace on People's Place. Nevertheless, she has closely monitored the functioning of her Cabinet, and listened carefully to Intelligence Reports about those who would usurp her power. But the Palace Guard has its limitations, and an earlier Queen was nearly ruined by being told only what the Guard thought the Palace wanted to hear.

Those in power know how completely power corrupts; so the Queen of Mithica knew she must establish a path into the hearts and minds of her people that steered clear of the corridors of elected power, and the chambers of selected privilege. And so, into her

The water table in north-western India is falling at an alarming rate. The reason is politics. Bad politics. And the bad pricing that follows from it.

Am I sure it isn't because of global warming, or climate change? Well, I can't say I'm sure, because I'm not a climatologist, but here are the words of Matt Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA, the US space agency that mapped Indian water tables: "We looked at the rainfall record and during this decade, it's relatively steady -- there have been some up and down years but generally there's no drought situation, there's no major trend in rainfall. [...] We would expect the groundwater level to stay where it is unless there is an excessive stress due to people pumping too much water."

And why were people pumping too much water? As an economist, I would suspect it had to do with the fact that the electricity for pumping was either free, as in Punjab, or hugely subsidised, as in most states of the country. And, with electricity being supplied by

How can land on one side of a road be ten times as expensive as land on the other? It's not easy to accomplish this, but with the right mix of land-use laws and poor policing, it can be done.

On one side of the Mehrauli- Badarpur (MB) Road, in south Delhi, is Saket, an upper-class colony of single homes, low-rise apartment blocks, and Delhi's first multiplex, PVR Saket. My real estate broker tells me that residential land in Saket is simply not available at prices below Rs.3 to 3.5 lakhs a square yard.

On the other side of MB Road is Sainik Farms, home to many of Delhi's rich and famous, where land - according to the same broker - costs between Rs. 30,000 and Rs. 50,000 a square yard. The thing is, "Sainik Farms is an entirely unauthorised colony, built in violation of building norms", to quote Minister of State for Urban Development, Saugata Roy.

Developed in 1960 as a cooperative for defence personnel, Sainik Farms has now become a symbol of the Delhi government's inability to