Until last year, Air India was a chronically underperforming public-owned airline. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has often said that the government has no business being in business. Yet after eight and a half years of his tenure, Air India is one of only two enterprises that have been successfully privatized.
Given the high share of its young population, India has a huge potential that is being wasted due to the inability of its policymakers to set the right policies. Potentially, many workers in the population can support the non-workers—the young and the elderly—and the economy can grow faster.
This column argues that for India to continue to sustain the position it has occupied for some years as the largest recipient of gross inward remittance flows, it would be necessary to aim Indian diplomacy toward expanding greater global economic and education space for Indians.
Whichever way one looks at it, the promise by select state governments and political parties to return to the Old Pension System for Government employees is a freebie of the kind that Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to as Revadi. It is not affordable. It is not targeted at the deserving. It is not productive. It creates a terrible precedent. It ought to carry the following “health” warnings: disastrous for state finances, additional liabilities for future taxpayers and detrimental to the economic well-being of the majority.