Talk Policy

 In my last visit to home this July, a Tehsil town called Chandil in Jharkhand, i was greeted with a sort of dhol and baja in the narrow lane of my house. I was wondering since when did i become this popular. Very soon my fractional moments of glory was busted when i heard the slogans of ' Dhanyawad Hemant sarkar for going back to the old pension scheme'. Perplexed with this, i started to google about the issue matter and very soon i realised that the Jharkhand cabinet on 15th July approved to revert to the Old Pension scheme from the NPS.  For the uninitiated, The old pension scheme (OPS) was an earlier pension scheme where government used to pay pensions to all it's employees based on the last drawn salary (50% of the last drawn salary) followed by indexed dearness relief. This was also a pay as you go scheme where govt made the payment when due without any provision as it is accrued. This was discontinued by the Vajpayee government in Apr 2004 as it was fiscally unsustai...

India is lagging behind for a variety of reasons in export competitiveness of Industrial goods especially at the lower end of the value chain. Some very obvious reasons spoken and written about extensively is the need for factor market reforms in Land, Labor and capital along with a mass scale vacuum cleaning of the regulatory burden. However, high overhead costs especially of electricity tariffs also makes Indian exports heavily uncompetitive.  As per the 2019 World Economic Forum competitive index, India ranks 108th out of 140 economies in quality of electricity supply. The chart below by International Energy Agency does a comparison of Industrial Electricity prices between India and other selected countries from 2005-2018.  Source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/industrial-electricity-prices-in-india-and-selected-countries-2005-2019  As the chart shows, India is almost 60% higher than China and 27% higher than Brazil and much more higher than USA, ...