December 16, 2024 07:57 IST
First published: Dec 16, 2024 at 07:57 IST
The most interesting part of Amar Singh’s 44-year-old diary, Reversing the Gaze, is his honest reflection on the irony of being an Indian serving in the British Army. The irony of trying to increase employee wages without employer productivity – spurred by overselling of fiscal and monetary policy – is evident as job inflows since 1991 have not reduced the stock of agricultural employment, despite government spending increasing by about Rs 1 lakh crore in 1991. 100 lakh crore up to Rs. As our wage challenges shift from long-term (long-term) to acute (immediate), a policy view of employers’ daily lives shifts from a bird’s-eye view of policy to pay private, productive, formal non-agricultural jobs. Digitizing, decriminalizing and rationalizing regulatory cholesterol for high wages.
Many of our wage challenges stem from global changes in the world of work; Construction creates fewer jobs per rupee of investment than before, the trade political backlash points to rising tariffs on exports, and the outlook for multi-decade global growth is weakened by aging and indebted rich countries. Modern states must redistribute – especially if companies make high profits – but rich country governments face a backlash due to the liberalizing of unelected power in universities, journalism and central banks (the US Fed’s balance sheet grew from $1 trillion to a peak of $9 trillion. Quantitative convenience that was never invented). Argentine President Javier Maile says “my contempt for the state is infinite”, and US President-elect Trump has made an unrealistic promise to cut $2 trillion in federal spending. China’s recent Party Plenum aims to return to the evaluation of bureaucrats by successfully cultivating private enterprises and protect firms from “arbitrary action, multiple inspections and selective law enforcement”. One representative also suggested that the Chinese government’s actions should be similar to ding xin wan, which means “chill pills”.
India’s wage challenges are different, so let’s use the lenses of science (understanding our world), engineering (applying scientific understanding to real-world problems), and ethics (deciding which problems to focus on) as suggested by the excellent new book Accelerating India’s Development. : A State-led Roadmap for Effective Governance by Economist Karthik Muralidharan. A perceptive lens shows that there are not poor people but people in poor places; Your salary depends on your state (Karnataka and UP have the same GDP with five times the population difference), your city (if everyone in India lived in Bangalore, India’s GDP would be higher than China), your region (if everyone in India worked in software, India’s GDP per capita would be higher than England), your firm (if every Indian firm was as productive as TCS, India’s GDP per capita would be higher than Germany), and your skills (wages for security guards (which doubles as a polite and efficient office receptionist). It suggests that our agenda should include urbanization, factories, financialization, formalization and human capital.
An “engineering” lens finds that agriculture is self-exploitation rather than self-employment, moving jobs to poor states is more complex than employing people, an average car in Bangalore travels at walking speed (8 km/h), software jobs will remain. A rounding error in our labor force (currently 0.9 percent) even if they double as expected, and skills now upgrade more than preparation and maintenance. Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman suggested that we instinctively step on the accelerator to go faster but let off the brakes produces better results. Moving the scene from birds to insects, three vectors are identified around the regulatory cholesterol; Rationalization, Digitization and Criminalization.
The rational vector is difficult because it is now equated with civil service reform – our 25 million civil servants have moved from steel frames to steel cages – because of a world of ideas like forbidden until allowed and guilty until innocent. The digitization vector includes adding compliance to our unique digital public infrastructure through the National Open Compliance Grid (NOCG) to enable paperless, presence-less, and cashless employer compliance. The recent announcements about Unique Enterprise Number (PAN 2.0) and Enterprise DigiLocker have laid a strong foundation for NOCG.
The criminalization vector should learn from Public Trust 1.0 (only 50 central government employer prison provisions removed) whose modest results stemmed from the flawed methodology of telling bureaucrats to cut down the trees they were sitting on. Public Trust 2.0 must eliminate and reverse everything that does not meet five clear criteria for prison: involve physical harm to other people, involve deliberate fraud of stakeholders (employees, creditors, shareholders, government), involve outsiders to society. so large that the violator cannot compensate, such as public order, national integrity, property trust rights, etc., there are no prison provisions in the general clauses that define the crime too broadly or do not specify the crime, and delays and false filings, procedural violations, miscalculations , and no jail provisions related to false patterns. These five standards will eliminate almost half of the 5,000 plus central government prison provisions and create a template for the 20,000 plus state government prison provisions.
Our regulatory cholesterol discredits, mistrusts and discourages entrepreneurs. The change will enable better teamwork (between government, the private sector and civil society), policy risk-taking (more non-agricultural work will enable labor law reforms and the transfer of agricultural prices and subsidies to state governments), and will stimulate long-term Thinking (a 25-year plan is not 25 1-year plans). Wages increase through the smooth combustion of alignment between ideas and execution. The Greek historian Thucydides believed that any army with too much of a gap between its thinkers and its doers would fight by fools and think by cowards.
India’s low wages are a major challenge but a worm’s eye view of the daily lives of employers identifies policy steps for high productivity employers. These steps will enable entrepreneurs to follow the commandment of poet Faraz – Shikwa-e-Julmat-e-Shab se to kahi behtar tha ki apne hise ki sham jala dete – Instead of lamenting in the darkness of the night, it is better to light a candle for one’s share.
The author is at Teamlease Services
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