Remember Make in India? On 13 Feb 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared: “we want the share of manufacturing in our GDP to go up to 25% in the near future.” The programme's stated goal was to hit this target by 2022 and to generate 100 million manufacturing jobs in India. So where do we …
Former Power Minister Piyush Goyal had this very original thought about the Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY), a scheme to reform India's state-owned electricity distribution companies (discoms). https://twitter.com/piyushgoyal/status/711795244392579073 It’s worth reading his exact words: Never before in the history of India has such a comprehensive power sector reform, which has the potential to completely transform …
In a 31 Mar 2018 Indian Express op-ed, PM advisor Surjit Bhalla accused critics of the government of purveying “fake news” in an effort to create a “political atmosphere helpful to the (weak) challenger”. He contended that “liberal elites” are trying to “change people’s perceptions”, and quoted Joseph Goebbels: “if you incessantly repeat a lie, …
Continue reading When the facts fail you, start tossing Nazi references
Despite the frenzy of distractions since, by now you have likely heard the news that demonetisation failed. As NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain put it in Truth vs Hype, the news sent the government into “a spiral of deflection, of moving goalposts and of swamping us with cherry-picked data”. He's being very polite, avoiding the accurate and …
In a Forbes magazine article that caused a happy stir in right-wing social media, Harry G. Broadman argued that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “governing prowess” had “boosted India’s GDP growth” and “produced sizeable increases of inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI)”. He stated that the reforms implemented by Modi in his first three years were …
An Economic Times (ET) report on 26 Apr credited the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh (UP) for a dramatic turnaround in the state’s electricity situation. The news report claimed that UP had “shed blackouts within a month of the BJP taking over the reins, moving from perennially running short of electricity …
Continue reading Spinning an electricity turnaround in Uttar Pradesh
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is proud of the government’s scheme to distribute millions of low-cost, energy efficient LED bulbs. And why not: Modi told the Lok Sabha on 7 Feb that the distribution of 21 crore LED bulbs had helped households save ₹11,000 crore in electricity bills. Even the name bears his unmistakable imprint: “Unnat …
Continue reading Why you shouldn’t be bedazzled by Modi’s LED claims
A look at "Make in India", published as an oped in the Hindustan Times: How does one judge Make in India? Recent news that foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing to defence in 2016-17 was an absurd trickle of ₹61,000 (or perhaps $61,000, the Ministry of Defence didn’t specify) seems to have not caused much of …
In case you’re wondering where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promised “Acche Din” went, the answer is getting clearer. As part of the Uttar Pradesh campaign, BJP-affiliated social media has been spreading clips of a 16 Sep TV appearance by party president Amit Shah, where he directly answers this question. So let’s examine the six claims that Shah, …
For a government so devoted to rankings and ratings, India dropping 20 places to 143 in the 2017 Index of Economic Freedom must have been a bummer. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi felt it worthwhile to approvingly cite India’s 19-place improvement in the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index, surely such a dramatic fall in economic freedom …
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