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For India, which has seen the regional interests dominating over the Federal concerns and people lost their trust on the government, the worst is behind and from this year the country would see a turn around the graph moving upward, said Vinod Rai, former Comptroller and Auditor General of India.
Speaking in the Annual Convention 2014 of Madras Management Association (MMA) in Chennai, he said, “I am very happy and very bullish on the fact that India, the worse is behind us and we are soon going to be on a path of recovery.”
Elaborating on the comment, he said that he has great trust in the younger elements in India, the Gen Next. “The Gen Next across locations, across societies, across professions have demonstrated that they feel enough is enough. They feel that they need to play the game by the rules of the game. They do not want to take shortcuts. They do not want to jump the queue,” he said.
"From this churning, we will emerge much stronger, because I see calender 2014, the turn around graph will start moving upwards. May be, we don't see a dramatic turnaround in this particular year itself, but very soon, it will be a discernible movement upwards - very significant, steady and consistent over the years. Each of the sectors will trust amongst each other," he said.
He added, “Today, economic growth, or rapid economic growth is no longer an option for India. Its a necessity, because there is far too much a stake and far too many people in this country, if we do not make that economic growth and make it inclusive.”
The younger generation has came up seeking probity, morality, ethics and transparency on which they are going to built the country, in the aspects of politics and business.
Six to seven years after the Millenium, the political economy of the country started to take a beating, coalitions became tenures, there were tensions within the government itself and there were turf issues emerging. Regional interests emerging. Turf issues of the kind if a particular coalition partner handle a particular portfolio, they said everybody else lay off. Whether it was the TMC handling the Railways, the DMK handling Telecom or the NCP handling Civil Aviation, it was there turf. They said everybody lay off, nobody else will touch anything in it.
He said that the Prime Minister could not sign the Teesta water-sharing agreement and attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Sri Lanka because the regional interest dominated over the Federal concerns.
Similarly, in business, when the foreign countries were ready to invest in India, the investment did come from abroad, but unfortunately there was some element of these getting diverted by processes which were not very transparent, to certain development partners, certain operators or certain developers who did not necessarily had the domain knowledge.
“Classic example is a large company like Telenor tying up with a real estate company located in Delhi for a Telecom business. It (the following crisis) was bound to happen that these companies did not have the domain knowledge, they could not make the licenses work, financially they were not strong. Inevitably they were financially over leveraged and we saw the classic kind of problems that we see now, which means huge non-performing assets, all of them in corporate debt restructuring and classic situation which I mentioned, trade imbalance, current account deficit, decline in manufacturing and supply side problems and we have this situation which the country is facing some time in 2011-12 leading to 2013,” he said.
He added that in business, people in their age of 40 plus or minus feels that what has been done, which means jumping the queue and taking short cuts, should not be there any more. And they feel that even their own senior members, their own family who have done that have made a mistake and that is very encouraging.
In politics also, people who think, or who were sitting in drawing rooms indulging in intellectual debates, not coming out for the electoral foray are descending on the streets and winning the contests to ensure that element of probity or morality enter politics also, which is encouraging, he said.
