Some thoughts on India's development processes while celebrating 70 years of independence.
The single most important thing we can do to make India better is to stop assessing it's development metrics as a monolith. With respect to economics, human development, industrialization, health and sanitation, education, employment etc, our variances are very vast! We should stop looking at indices like national GDP growth rate, IIP, gross food grain production, overall budget of healthcare etc. Not to forget the single most useless number, national consumer price index (CPI), that is being used as an inflation monitor by RBI. These numbers hold little value when variances are so large.
The 4 slabs of GST rates is not just an outcome of political shadow boxing, but ground realities of the vast systemic economic differences that exist in our country. We ought to go down to district or panchayat level indicators & indices with respect to healthcare, inflation, education, GDP, sanitation, unemployment figures to understand local effects. We ought to analyze the demography through the prism of class, income and economic condition and study the indices of each segment separately not just geographically.
The number of people who get missed by margins of error in even state based indices could run into millions, offset by few high value data points. E.g., A flash transporters strike may not affect a well stocked reliance fresh store that has good food storage facilities but will affect the street vendors in the same area. This in turn affects the corresponding consumer class in that area.
So, let's hope that our macro policy makers and people in general move beyond single point measures to more sensible ways of measuring national development indicators that takes into account the diverse variances of the country.
The single most important thing we can do to make India better is to stop assessing it's development metrics as a monolith. With respect to economics, human development, industrialization, health and sanitation, education, employment etc, our variances are very vast! We should stop looking at indices like national GDP growth rate, IIP, gross food grain production, overall budget of healthcare etc. Not to forget the single most useless number, national consumer price index (CPI), that is being used as an inflation monitor by RBI. These numbers hold little value when variances are so large.
The 4 slabs of GST rates is not just an outcome of political shadow boxing, but ground realities of the vast systemic economic differences that exist in our country. We ought to go down to district or panchayat level indicators & indices with respect to healthcare, inflation, education, GDP, sanitation, unemployment figures to understand local effects. We ought to analyze the demography through the prism of class, income and economic condition and study the indices of each segment separately not just geographically.
The number of people who get missed by margins of error in even state based indices could run into millions, offset by few high value data points. E.g., A flash transporters strike may not affect a well stocked reliance fresh store that has good food storage facilities but will affect the street vendors in the same area. This in turn affects the corresponding consumer class in that area.
So, let's hope that our macro policy makers and people in general move beyond single point measures to more sensible ways of measuring national development indicators that takes into account the diverse variances of the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment