This refers to the report “Carrying the torch of transformation” (February 4). It is well known that India has a large number of eminent economists like Vijay Kelkar, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, P Chidambaram, C Rangarajan, Y V Reddy, the late Raja Chelliah, Amartya Sen, Raghuram Rajan and so on. It is, however, difficult to understand why this reservoir of eminent economists does not have a solution to India’s problems. Let us, for a moment, forget food inflation, fiscal deficit, food leakages, corruption and so on. India is facing the burning problem of how to make 85 per cent of poverty alleviation funds available to the poor. In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi honestly admitted that only 15 per cent of poverty alleviation funds were reaching the poor. The question is, why are these so-called India’s economists, also Nobel Prize and Padma Vibhushan winners, not offering any solution to this problem? This problem drew the economists’ attention in 1985 and it is 2011 now.
The other economic problem is that of black money. Earlier, our eminent economists used to say high income tax rates (97.4 per cent) were the main reason for the generation of black money in India. Now though the tax rates have been reduced to 30 per cent or zero percentage (for dividend income), the problem of black money persists.
The finance minister admitted in his Budget speech that the public delivery mechanism has failed and he sought solutions, which are not forthcoming. Is India without economists?
S C Aggarwal, New Delhi
