| India's unceremonious exit from the ICC World Cup has expectedly led to the airing of a wide range of views, including some hitherto blasphemous ones that now raise questions such as whether India needs to devote so much attention to a single sport; do these Indian paper tigers""notwithstanding the high-decibel pseudo-patriotic advertising campaigns from cola and credit card companies""deserve so much public adulation; and should Indian businesses really risk damaging their brand equity, not to mention their balance sheets on a sport that (in India) in recent years has come to be associated more with businessmen and politicians controlling its obscenely rich board and hidden-in-the-wood match-fixers and assorted mafiosi controlling the outcome of the matches themselves. Without trying to rationalise or patronise, I tend to agree with those who see a silver lining behind the events of the last ten days and feel that finally some attention of the public and the moneyed sponsors would be given to more "democratic" sports such as soccer, hockey and basketball, and more "individual excellence" sports such as tennis, cycling, and track & field events. |
| In the same vein of expressing more contrarian views, I would like to take up two major ones and a minor one. The minor ones relates to the justification of the "sport" of betting itself. If newspaper reports are to be taken at face value, the cricket World Cup alone generates betting transactions running into tens of thousands of crores. Why should the government not legalise betting, paving the way for its corporatisation, rather than letting it be managed by the underworld and other scum of society? If horse racing and state lotteries can be allowed to flourish, why not betting? Besides making this activity open to public scrutiny, it would also generate substantial revenue for the government of India (or the state governments), which can be used""if the government desires""to improve the physical infrastructure of our sporting facilities, among others. |
| Now the two more serious ones. The first one has been prompted by the recent turmoil at Singur, where Tata Motors is planning to establish its much-publicised, much-awaited "Rs 1 lakh" car plant. Without going into the details of the controversy, I wonder if India really needs such a car. As we all know, the state of road infrastructure in the top 30-40 cities of India is in a shambles. The top 12 cities have traffic congestion (and air pollution) beyond acceptable limits. Thanks to utter lack of vision and lack of competence of our (government) urban town planners, there is no provision for car parking either on residential premises or in public spaces. It may seem like a noble mission to empower middle- and lower-middle-class Indian households by giving them the dream to own a car, but in my view, the same middle- and lower-middle-class homes do not have enough private space to park even a motor cycle. Where would they park their dream cars when at home or at work or out on leisure? What would happen to the overall oil import bill of the nation? Should the state governments not be burning midnight oil to establish viable public transport systems in their major urban centres on a war footing, and then levy higher taxes on privately-owned vehicles, like in Singapore or even London, where there is an increasing incidence of congestion surcharge? |
| The second one, and perhaps even more serious, is our obsession with focusing on the export of all and sundry goods and services. In a situation where our population continues to grow alarmingly, where the ground and other water resources are being rapidly depleted year after year, where there is so much pressure for land for alternative uses such as industrial manufacturing and the creation of new cities to reduce some pressure on the existing ones, and where there is an urgent need to improve the qualitative and quantitative intake of food for the billion plus population, why should the government continue to have export promotion agencies and incentives for food products including cereals, fruit, vegetables, and other sundry items? Theoretically, food exports give better realisation to the Indian farmer but in reality, the beneficiaries are largely merchant exporters and not the actual farmer. Hence, why should we not plan for some import of food products, especially from countries that heavily subsidise (using their own taxpayers' money), to take care of some of our needs and in fact consciously restrict exports of such products? At the same time, we should also very rationally be looking at substituting highly water-intensive crops such as rice and sugarcane (which can be partially imported) with crops (such as vegetables and fruits) that are more essential for balancing the nutritional needs while also transparently using some of the agricultural land in close proximity of major urban centres for enhancing the urban and industrial infrastructure. The scale and growth pattern of our economy assure that finding foreign exchange for such imports will not be a constraint. |
| Can we have a debate on these issues as well, once we have conducted all the post-mortems of the performance of our so-called "Team India"? |
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
