The Indian budget every year has always been an eagerly awaited event. For many decades, the best minds in economics, finance, tax, business and industry throng the media house to analyze the provisions shared by the Financial Minister.
Sometimes major events completely disconnected may be data points for the plans of the different powers around the world. The challenge is to discern what purpose they serve? More critically, what are we moving towards?
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
Remember Mohammad Bin Tughlaq? The wise fool, who came up with currency long back, and suddenly everyone was minting money because he didn’t use the right material.
Well, until 2009, India hadn’t come out of this Tughlaqian mindset!
Those Re 1 coins, which were rather huge, served a special purpose – not just of giving alms to beggars. They were being smuggled to Bangladesh and melted into safety blades and were worth Rs 5! Such was the arbitrage opportunity for the Bangladeshis (sad, the Indians couldn’t think of it!) that the coins in India started vanishing as the safety blades started taking shape in that poverty stricken country.
Finally the Government had to change the size and the content of the coin to hit at this trade, which had embarrassingly left India without at Re 1 coins out there! Mr R Gandhi chief general manager of currency management of RBI explained:
“For many years we were concerned about the practice. Last year we began changing the metallic content of the coins. The new cupronickel and lighter ferritic stainless steel coins are not lucrative for melting now. For the past many months we have not received any report hinting at or speaking of melting of our coins.”
Good we finally got it right! It surely makes sense to make a coin such that it is worth less or at most equal to its own worth! It is downright stupid to make a coin that is worth more melted than its original state.
The Indian budget every year has always been an eagerly awaited event. For many decades, the best minds in economics, finance, tax, business and industry throng the media house to analyze the provisions shared by the Financial Minister.
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
This visit of India left me with many questions. Many observations and inputs from different people and sections. Food for thought that I have tried to contemplate on and make sense of. Sharing all that with you.
When you analyze the last 60 years of the economic miracles of Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia versus the continued impoverished Indian economy, you get very interesting lessons. Can Indians have the wherewithal in them to do in one generation so that the coming generations may rise?
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