Everyone thought that things were getting back to normal. The vaccination was being given to healthcare professionals, senior citizens to above 45 years of age. The case load seemed to be under manageable levels. Some of the elites of the west and our own were praying that India must suffer Covid so that their credentials for making issue of bad governance by Modi would become reality. People be damned because getting back credential and power of narrative is more important. It seems that the gods have answered their prayer calls and India has been back to square one with the Covid cases reaching over 1.2 lakhs per day.
But this time, various states are much better prepared to handle the virus and its effects. But some states are playing with fire and are not able to control the spread of the virus and have helped god in his ways of answering the elite. Maharashtra leads the pack and then there will be all others. There seems to be a total absence of governance and the state seems to be on a free fall with courts indulging in weird public harassment with equally weird application of rule of law. Being weird was never a difficult to many creatures of constitution.
During the first wave, the governments were clueless about the type of response needed, treatment procedures, death rates and the management of pandemic. Hence lockdown of the nation was the only alternative available to the state. Shut everything down to prevent the spread and live another day to tell the story. The mantra worked very successfully and the government had ramped up the infrastructure to a very good extent and the Covid pandemic seemed to be under control
Barring a few sectors of the economy, all others have faced tremendous losses and got pushed into a financial crisis. Many companies will never like to keep cash and burn it to survive. The companies exist to continuously increase their revenue to meet the expenditure just like our nation maintains a CAD and is able to manage itself by having better growth rate. The government must realize that the manner in which several states were in a hurry to open liquor shops for their survival, many business establishments have to think about their survival and then only the survival of the employees could be considered.
With a pseudo-identification of the poor people and a socialistic nation the financial support will be gobbled up by the alleged small set of people who have allegedly deposited 80,000 crores in their Jan Dhan accounts. Just wondering how much of this money is withdrawn to overcome the crises. I believe this amount would have only increased because of the generosity of the socialistic state. One must wonder the other part of the financial system, the individuals who have taken loans to run businesses.
The revenue dropped by more than 50% for many businesses except for a few, the GST collections would never tell a true picture of the economy. Just like a person will appear fine on the outside but could die any moment, so are the different indices that represent the state of the economy. The pain of the individual will be known only at the individual level and that of businesses nobody would like to bother because for the Indian state, the businessmen are all deemed to be rich and greedy who would not support their employees like the way government supports its employees, with taxpayer funds.
Many businesses have taken a severe beating and the money circulation has not yet reached normalcy levels. With the GST collections reaching record levels, this will further lead to blabber mouth economists to claim things are back to normal when in reality the economy is in severe shock. But people will always find ways to exist and the role of government must be that of an enabler. India had always been lacking in small and medium scale business establishments/industries and the pandemic has been a great opportunity to push people to start their own businesses but the governmental support to many small business establishments scares many from entering. A number of people have taken up odd jobs, tuitions, cooking, goods delivery, small businesses and other related jobs which are low paying but for the sake of survival there is no other option. The role of the government could have been better had it made only tax compliance as compulsory and rest all other compliances as void until the pandemic is fully under control.
The humungous compliances are basically global solutions to failure to implement rule of law at the local level and the innovative interpretations by the compliance officials. Each requirement of a compliance is a wasteful expenditure for the business establishment and the government does not gain anything except that the bribes obtained may not available if the compliances are removed. There many options to speed up the economy. The easiest ways are solving the property disputes which stops crores of rupees worth of financial transactions. A simple property dispute takes years and the cost overruns are a loss to the economy. Instead of acting on itself to improve the efficiency of the fragile economy, the government is adding taxes to ensure its survival.
Two recent cases of bribe collections, one from Maharashtra where in one police officer is collecting 100 crores and another one probably in West Bengal where one official had collected 150 crores. The government must be mocking at the hapless citizens thinking why the business people are complaining when the collections (both official and unofficial) are reaching pre-Covid levels. The citizens of India must be appreciated for maintaining their sanity and have followed the Covid guidelines to the best possible extent and have done their part to tide over the first wave. Now it is the turn of the government to tighten up its buckles and deliver on the governance to tide over the pandemic. The Covid is here to stay and stopping businesses and harassing people is not the only way because people will find it difficult to survive but government survives.
Author: Vijendra Bhat can be reached on Twitter
Twitter: @SPHEREHEADSAYS
