Abundance of scarcity

I was watching NDTV after a long time no no…TV after a long time. Also, NDTV has not been my favorite for a couple of years now. Anna movement gave chance to every news channel, however, only Times Now could make it to my consideration set. So, by chance I was watching NDTV. Well to be precise, I was not watching; by chance NDTV was on and we were talking about something. I gave it a heed because the news was about increase in petrol price in India. Some experts were talking and one said – “India has grown, we are producing more grain, (Precisely, the number thrown was about 250 units to 270 units). So when we are growing, with growth if inflation is high it is fine!…”. The argument was largely – we are growing and so is inflation thus it is fine if petrol price is also increasing.

I started thinking, if we are producing more than why people die of hunger? If we are growing then why still we are not satisfied? If India of today is better than India of 90s, 80s or 70s why we are still struggling with roads with potholes (even in Mumbai), load shedding (for non-Indians load shedding means power cut in different location because of scarcity of power) and other problems. We are producing more, in fact the argument was we are producing more than we consume.

We can see that we have enough and more mediums for entertainment (I was watching TV and thats why this came in mind first), enough food (as per the expert invited by NDTV). Surprisingly we do have enough and more Money – in Swiss bank accounts in Indian context and in developed economies hefty bailouts. Still there is inflation, there are economic issues.

Largely, the basic problem is greed. Because of greed we see scarcity of many things. In fact after reading an MBA case we felt that Diamonds are not rare as we believe. In other words, we are in a world with abundant supplies of required things however we create scarcity of other things (and of the basic necessities). Greed for growth, money and possession. Effectively, we need few things which are in abundance but we live in artificially created scarcity of those. Because of greed abundance becomes scarcity and we live in the world of abundance of scarcity.