See: Let us be amazed instead of shocked when the PM stimulus package is developed

Shock and amazement. Inspiration and invitation to imagine and dream. Aspirations for an India that shapes the world. Underestimation and subliminal messages. All the rhetorical devices of an effective politician were present in the Prime Minister’s speech to the nation at 8 pm on Tuesday. What was missing was any tangible announcement of concrete relief for the mass of humanity suffering from fleeing lost work, hardship, and callous abandonment in their workplace, to the scant but safe haven of a distant home. There was also a lack of clarity on relief for the six small, medium, and large businesses struggling to survive without work or income.

A spur of Rs 20 lakh crore is surprisingly large. At the first blush. But it includes the liquidity measures announced by the RBI previously, and could be announced later. That is an immediate disappointment. Because all of the RBI’s efforts to bring several lakh crore rupees into the hands of the banks, in the hope that the banks would lend the money to troubled companies, it had come to nothing. Before the RBI’s Extraordinary Liquidity Measures, Long-Term Benchmark Repo Operations, banks used to deposit Rs 2.86 lakh crore per day in the RBI. After the RBI created these additional liquidity windows, banks began depositing, on average, Rs 7 lakh crore with the RBI under its reverse repo window.

State Bank of India offers a 2.75% interest rate on your savings bank account. Take money from the man in the street at 2.75% and put it in the RBI at 3.75% without any risk. Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram. So what happens if the money doesn’t get to the industry?

Will the economy win with such liquidity measures? No, unless the RBI finds a way to buy bonds directly or through a special purpose vehicle from the companies.

Self-reliance was another topic in the prime minister’s speech, fortified with emotional appeals for the local vocal championship. Self-sufficiency sounds like a virtue. But it turned out to be a vice that produced poor quality products at higher prices that could not be sold anywhere in the world, except to long-suffering Indian consumers who had no access to better and less expensive products produced abroad. . Hopefully, the government is not planning to increase tariffs and import restrictions to boost locals and lay the groundwork for a repeated dose of self-harm.

Encouraging, Prime Minister Modi spoke of India seeking self-reliance in a globalized world, seeking to benefit the world. Logically speaking, India can benefit the world either because it buys from it or because it sells to it or both. The prime minister had been praised, in the recent past, by a sitting Supreme Court judge for thinking globally and acting locally. That the final policy, when detailed, lives up to the high judicial expectations without raising the price of worldly things that are imported from the lower-cost economies, for the sublime pleasure of buying local produce and hearing the ringing of happiness as a local producer. laughs all the way to the bank.

The Prime Minister is right when he says that India can lead the world. The largest population of youth who can receive training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is present in India. If your creativity and passion can be unleashed and fueled by large amounts of capital, India can be a center for research and development and new technologies, as well as high-value services. But the prime minister’s example of the Indians who fixed the problem of the year 2000 was a bit painful.

Indian IT companies used the Y2K problem to intervene in the outsourcing business. In the early days of computing, before standardization became the standard, many lines of computer code dealing with dates designated the year with just two digits, rather than four. For them, when the year moved to 2000, instead of 1999 being succeeded by 2000, 00 would follow 99. They feared that this could throw entire systems out of place, unless all dates were changed, line by line. , at four. digital year format. Indian IT did not offer technological magic, but large volumes of labor to scan millions of lines of code and make the correction. Thereafter, of course, they graduated for more complex tasks. But to suggest fixing the Y2K problem as an Indian brand of excellence for solving global problems is, well, recognizing the dignity of manual labor and also confusing “Jai Kisan!” With Norman Borlaug.

A climactic demonstration of the art of the euphemism appears in the statement that the coronavirus will be with us for many years and that we have to learn to get on with our lives. Hey, we had closed the city to chase and catch Jack the Ripper, but he gave us the slip. Don’t worry, just watch out for the friendly ripper under your bed, in the back seat of the car, or in that dark corner. Be vigilant. Enjoy it: It will be an exciting time for someone tonight, wouldn’t you like to be in someone’s place?

But the Prime Minister is right. We have to live with the Corona virus, but with a widely expanded and improved health system that can treat victims. Hopefully the stimulus package provides the beginnings, at least, of such an expanded health infrastructure.