The Government has recently hiked the Diesel price by Rs 5. And now,
"Raise diesel price by Rs 4 a litre, govt panel tells Centre: India should try to completely deregulate diesel prices by the start of financial year 2014/15 as part of a strategy to cut its ballooning fiscal deficit, a government panel report made public on Friday said. The report, submitted to the government on September 3, before a hike in prices of diesel in mid-September, also recommended increasing the price of fuel by 4 rupees a litre. It also suggested cooking gas prices should be raised by 50 rupees per 14.2 kilogram cylinder"
Till the last hike, the reason given for hike of petroleum products was the high oil prices, that leads to a foreign exchange outflow. Now Government is very quiet about this, because the Crude oil price is less than $ 90 per barrel. If rise in Crude prices is an attributable reason for hike in Petroleum products price, then the corollary should be true. The oil companies have always parrotted that market price should define the price of petroleum products, and as such should we not be reducing the prices rather than increasing it?
Our Government is flat broke. It gave concessions worth $ 1 Trillion to the Big Industries during the recession in 2008-2009. And has continued to refuse taxing the rich. Wasteful schemes like NREGA and many others, initiated by Sonia Gandhi and her irresponsible leftist 'advisors' in the National Advisory Committee has destroyed the Country's finance. Government wants the common man to tighten his belt, while refusing to even make a token effort on its part or the industrialist's part to do so. The highly subsidised industrialists have siphoned off profits made in India to invest outside the country.
The FDI in retail, civil aviation followed by Insurance and Pension will not help Westerners as many thought. The Western companies and countries are broke themselves. They dont have money to pay their debts, forget about investing in India. What will happen is the Black Money stashed outside the country will find its way back to the country as FDI, FII through the opening up of the economy, and this will lead to higher inflation.
We have never seen a Government that is as apathetic to its people as the current one- and that includes the ones led by Indira Gandhi, and later by VP Singh et al. And this is saying a lot. It takes special skills to damage an economy to crumbs in 8 years, as Manmohan Singh has done. He can get his second Ph.D writing a thesis about how he did it.
But when the Country is run by a school drop out dumbo like Sonia Gandhi and a guy with a brain the size of a peanut - Rahul Gandhi, ably supported by downright idiots like Montek Singh Ahluwalia and a team of World Bank (which itself is in doldrums) experienced 'economists' who doesnt know Trivandrum from Aizwal, what else can you expect?
When Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa and wanted to join the freedom struggle, the great Balagangadhara Tilak asked him to travel across India to understand the problems faced by the countrymen across the length and breadth of the country. Gandhi was wise enough to follow the advice, and the rest is history.
If you look at the decision makers, Sonia Gandhi, Radhul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Subbarao, Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ambika Soni, Pranab Mukherjee (till recently) and of course the NAC members, one thing common is that not one of them have any experience at grassroot politics nor do they have any contact with the common man. They just sit in their ivory towers and churn out western theory based text bookish solutions that is far away from the ground reality.
Only when our country is ruled by grassroot politicians, will we have an empathetic government. Till then, we are condemned to suffer.
