Dr. Manmohan Singh continues his sermons to the nation

This time the Prime Minister calls for pay cuts to the corporates. This is in continuation of his tradition of mouthing platitudes & delivering little, as witnessed in the 4 years of his premiership. One can’t help but think of him as clueless.

Dr. Singh forgets that corporates get paid more because they deliver more. Besides it’s not the government that pays them. Folks in the corporate sector get paid based on their performance, hard work & results delivered, something that’s totally lacking in the government. It’s a universal rule; you get paid more, if you perform better. People doing better should be appropriately rewarded so they are motivated to continue their high performance rather than chiding them for doing so.

This latest advice from Dr. Singh is little more than rhetoric & completely lacking in serious thought. The Prime Minister continues to fall for the ‘socialist’ & ‘inclusive’ trap. The corporates & the private industry doing better financially are actually better for the nation. But the Prime Minister doesn’t agree. He seems intent on dragging the nation back to the ‘Nehruvian’ rate of growth. The economic growth that India has been witnessing has been on account of the corporations doing better. This in result creates direct & indirect employment. This can be seen in places like Bangalore, among others, where the software export boom has created a large number of jobs for our engineers. This employment allows them to earn more as compared to the public sector. Higher incomes result in greater spending boosting the local economy, which in turn results in indirect employment. The boom in transport, catering, communications, entertainment, real estate etc. is a result of flourishing businesses.

All the growth in the private companies is on account of them being productive & merit based, not because of reservations & entitlements or ‘socialist’ & ‘inclusive’ policies. All the wealth generated is on account of the hard work put in by the private sector employees; again something that is lacking in the government agencies. Dr. Singh also forgets one important thing, if the corporates & the employees in the private sector are earning more; they are also contributing more to taxes.

The economic liberalization of India was the brain child of the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, easily one of the best Prime Ministers India ever had. Dr. Singh seems to have been wrongly credited for what was Mr. Rao’s brainchild. If Dr. Singh is serious about India’s economic growth & wants India to be a global leader, he should eschew rhetoric & reward merit.