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Not so simple!

Why life is not all about yes and no in India During my market research days, I used to work on global surveys, where the same questions had to be asked across countries and the answers compared. Implicit in this was the assumption that as long as the questions were identical, the answers were comparable. However this was usually quite far from the truth, as all of us with common sense can well imagine. “Can’t say” in India was not “don’t know” as elsewhere, because it was often “won’t say”. “Are you vegetarian or not”, was not so simple because I could be vegetarian only at home or only on Tuesdays. A standard international price testing question was to ask people, “if the price of Brand B went up by Rs x, which brand would you switch to?” This data was then subjected to some rigorous maths to predict what […]

Piercing the Veil of Illusion

It is time to let social scientists take the floor to understand the many maladies afflicting India India has a deeply entrenched knowledge caste system. ‘Science’ is superior to ‘arts’, ‘quantitative’ better than ‘qualitative’; oncology and computer science will benefit the country more than sociology or psychology. Economics is superior to other ‘arts’ because it is quantitative. Consequently even the most pressing problems of national character and society and polity are sought to be solved by technofixes or higher GDP growth rate or understood by some set of quantitative indicators like vote shares or infrastructure outlay or poverty statistics using different measures. Seriously addressing such problems, however, requires rising above the caste system and getting social science disciplines to urgently work on them, or else they will rot the foundations of the country. We need them to urgently put into the public discourse a deep understanding of the real nature […]

The Winning Poll Platform

Needed A More Honest Vocabulary!

Are we getting trapped by our own spin doctoring? The television footage from Davos showed Indian leaders talking of the steady onward march of the Indian economy, with healthy investment and household consumption growth. Meanwhile back home, corporate bankers were privately foreseeing tough times ahead, because the ‘mood’ (spin word for confidence?) of Indian large corporates was not upbeat. Reasons given were the usual suspects of political and policy uncertainty, bad governance and corruption, food inflation, high interest rates etc. But FII analysts are beginning to ask some very hard questions indeed. One set of questions is around why Indian companies are choosing to invest overseas rather than in India; did they not believe in the India story? The politically correct – and truthful – answer is that India Inc. must have a global footprint too, and if this is a time offering an opportunity to do so, then why […]

Growth and Inequality

Inclusive growth is when more and more Indians benefit from the growth of the economy, by way of better incomes and a better quality of life. Has this happened so far? The answer is yes, it has happened to a certain extent, but has not happened enough. To say that there has been no “trickle down” at all to the common man, of the benefits of economic growth is belied by all available statistics of income and consumption. Practically, everyone is earning more today than they were the previous year or the year before that, or even the generation before that. Yes, those who were at the top half of the income ladder to begin with, have had their incomes grow much more than those who were in the bottom half. But the rising tide has lifted the average income of the bottom 25% of Indians also. But this unfortunately […]