Apropos T N Ninan’s article “Do-gooder economics and the Lokpal” (January 7), the author’s silence on private sector corruption at the top speaks volumes. Maybe the author can explain why any government intervention at the bottom of the pyramid is invariably labelled as “market distortion” or “fiscal adventurism”, while government intervention at the top in the form of sops to India Inc is always a “fiscal stimulus”.
As a mere consumer of media content, and not an economist, it strikes me as extremely discordant that if subsidies on grain and fuel and poverty alleviation programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are a source of corruption, handouts to private corporations through euphemisms like corporate debt restructuring (CDRs) by banks (paid from savings of tax payers) have not been considered so. In the first six months of the current fiscal, the total value of CDR referrals was Rs 34,500 crore, the highest in the last eight years. What’s more, India Inc wants another Rs 28,900 crore through fresh CDRs.
If bleeding heart socialists got it wrong earlier, bleeding heart reformers are getting it all wrong now. The Annas and rabble-rousers of his ilk have neither the ideology nor the training to offer credible solutions to all that ails inequitable Indian society. It was, therefore, natural that street politics became fashionable bytes in 2011 since there was precious little by way of thoughts on equitable and distributive economic justice.
Bleeding heart reformers’ opposition to government intervention for the economically-distressed has been that the poor need not be given a fish but taught to fish. But, ironically, in the case of handouts for private business defaulters, government interventions are bailouts to tide over adverse business cycles.
Ajoy K Das Kolkata
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