Business to the Buddha

Tag: Food Security

  • Keynes







    I enjoyed learning economics in my MBA, thanks to Prof Mankad for teaching Macroeconomics as a well narrated story of History of the world. He taught it so brilliantly that we all used to sit, go through the roller coasters up and down the history lane by-lanes and learn the development in economics and policy making.

    Being an average engineer, I too was unaware (still am) about economics before taking the course with Prof Mankad. This was the class where I came to know about John Manyard Keynes and keynesianism. I buy into his theory of Govt intervention (which wont go down well with many capitalists); however the way I have seen recent past is – challenges and largely corruption in implementation. In India, Govt has launched Food Security, Employment schemes – seems good as Keynes suggested, but the money is not reaching the right place.

    Well, I thought to write on Keynes because something moved me deeply in Prof Mankad’s class. That statement itched profoundly, whenever I thought about future that sentence resounded. Prof Mankad talked about Great Depression in his lectures. He introduced us to the Keynes and his idea, opposition to his idea and so on. In the lecture Prof Mankad said – what Keynes was – “in the long run we are all dead”.

    This statement is right however we can think on this two ways –

    1. (bad one) Anyway I will die one day – why worry, indulge and enjoy. [may be Tarun Tejpal (recent Tehelka sexual harassment case) and many others think this way]

    2. (Good intentions) Yes, if I am going to die, everyone dies, so what is the purpose of my being here? Am I like any other animal or plant, or I have some brain, who gave it to me? And so on…

    So, if …in the long run we are all dead… why all this drama (delusion)? in Hindi – यह प्रपंच क्यों?

  • Inclusive growth







    We’ve seen that socialism had it’s problem, capitalism is no less culprit. I’ve been thinking about both together and have written about it. Regularly I asked this questions of how to two of my MBA professors – Prof Harkant Mankad and Prof Arun Ramanathan. Prof Ramanathan suggested me to read functioning of Nordic countries – heavy tax but less social security. Once I shared this logic –

    Socialism & CapitalismIf we look at both simultaneously we see some good and some not so good practices. Socialism had social benefit at center but execution sucked. On the other hand capitalism has profit at center and execution is better, and also capitalism largely never considered social good as one of the concerns.

    The very bird-eye-view (yes MBAs use this kind of jargon) solution could be – What is we bring social benefit and profit together at center and use execution efficiencies of capitalism around? The profit does not necessarily become – extracting whatever available consumer surplus is there with consumer. Take an example of social entrepreneurship, that is one good approach. Here, I do not intend to say every business should be like that. Also, yesterday I tweeted and updated on LinkedIn – If you want to be social entrepreneur, remember funder of social enterprise has impact in mind+heart & investing in head, so impact weighs higher! those kind of initiative can help in inclusive growth.

    I see that PPP – Public Private Partnership – can also be great boon for inclusive growth. However, greed has created more problem in the Indian context than giving us Inclusive Growth.

    Take an example of MNREGA, it has been failing, benefits are not reaching where they should. How can political parties be kept away from execution? Politicians asking for bribe in such cases is nothing but extortion. How about giving the executioner tax benefits to get involved in it and ask for accountability? Audit Done periodically by people (an independent body monitoring). The people affected and benefited can vote for continuation or stopping that company from involvement. So this can be kind of election on performance of NREGA.

    What I think is – people want a respectable life and not bread thrown at them condescendingly. Inclusive growth is possible when we think more like a combination of socialistic -capitalistic society.

    This way we’d be capitalist but in a socialist manner where besides profit, social uplifting would be a core of philosophy and growth.