India Growth Story?

The recent IIP numbers are in the downward trend. Analyst are citing these are temporary set backs, comparison to high base numbers (IIP data) from last year, and global slow down.

Crude has touched $135 and Indian basket is around $122. With OIL marketing companies making a loss of Rs16/- and Rs27/- per liter of petrol and diesel and Rs320/- (approx) per LPG cylinder, I wonder if there is any more stem left! BPCL and HPCL are talking of quota set of each individual oil distributor based on the sales last year.

There was a BRIC report sometime back, now people are talking about report by a Goldman Sachs analyst who predicted that crude will touch $200.

Government is doing well by artificially controlling the prices but this is not a permanent measure, they should be doing (I hope) more than this. They should explore various methods of transferring the crude burden partly to consumers who can afford it and at the same time not impacting the inflation. They have to selectively subsidize the core functions of economy from the crude burden but leave the affluent class (and the emerging middle class) to pay for their petrol bill. By core functions I mean transportation of industrial goods, power generations etc.

Rupee surged to all time high of around 39.5 w.r.t $ and it is back to 43.5, thanks to high crude import bill.

Indian agriculture growth statistics are not exciting, this coupled with shrinking land under irrigation, dismal condition of Indian farmers and unpredictable nature of monsoon only indicate that situation is going to get worse.

Though it is projected that the wheat production is set to increase but I am not really sure it would be able to satisfy the ever increasing need of growing economy. And what about wheat production for coming years! Do we have plan for that in the pipeline or we are just relying on the monsoons of those respective years.

Not only agriculture, other building blocks of economy, capital goods, power sector, inland transport and ports & harbor infrastructure, all of these need significant investments, I wonder how government will fund these requirements.

Recently there was a news that Thailand was planning a cartel of ‘Rice Exporting Nations’ and there was a huge cry among the international community. I feel the way OPEC is able to monopolize the Crude market; the day is not far where the other commodity producing nation will form the other sorts of cartel and the world will again move back to the barter system.

P.P.

Remember the term!!! What comes to your mind when you read this title?

This was very prevalent term in my childhood days. I have sympathy to this term that has lost its existence in the rapidly growing Indian economy. The changes in Indian lifestyle may not have been really significant but when it comes to this technology, it has been drastic. I am trying to steal some time before I start discussing about the term, just trying to give you sometime to start thinking in back of your mind about this term. If you are able to recollect, it’s great and if not, then this will provide more impact to the next paragraph where I have given some sort of tribute to this ‘not so frequently’ used term nowadays, and I have complete sympathy for it.

It used to be an acronym for non-personal phone number. The local language full-form used to be “Padosi Phone”. Now you realize how abandoned this term has become. With the increasing number of mobile phone connections day-by-day, still reducing tariffs and increasing competition in the market, everyone has a mobile, India is set to takeover US in terms of mobile phone subscribers. Needless to say there is no need for this term anymore in Indian scenario. May be the term is still in use in distant places/village but with the rapid “celluraization” of Indian villages, I really do not think it will be able to sustain itself in the running language. It is one of the endangered non living species that is set to extinct as one of side effects of human technological growth.