~ EMS Namboodiripad, Communists, Adani and Gujarat ~ One of the critical problems in Indian journalism is that most people who write on business have no understanding of politics, and most journalists who write on politics have no clue about business. This means the political journalists have either Lutyens Delhi or, say, Uttar Pradesh, in mind when they snigger that business journalists dont get real India. The business journalists usually think south Mumbai or America or China and lament that politics is holding India back. This creates a complete lack of comprehension that the two are interlinked. For instance, look at this business of the Adani Group getting land in Gujarat for a very small amount of money. Some masterpieces have written that this is supposedly like Singur and Nandigram, and/or supposedly this is massive corruption. That is ridiculous. A lot of the land that the Adanis got desperately needed development and was not being used (largely) for any other purpose. It was crying out for state incentives for industry to be set up there. Such incentives are given keeping in mind the risk in developing new or in industry parlance greenfield projects. This is totally valid in the case of the Adani Group because they were setting up a private port, a sector which barely had any examples in independent India to know whether it would succeed or fail. There are lot of such examples in other parts of India but since our Communist friends like to keep pointing to this example in Gujarat, let us take one example from their own territory. Read historian Ramachandra Guhas book India After Gandhi - pages 288, 289 and 290. Soon after he became chief minister of Kerala, the great Communist leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad invited the then biggest business house, the Birlas, to build a rayon factory in Mavoor. Guha points out: The entrepreneurs were assured subsidised supplies of bamboo - to be gifted to the Birlas at one rupee per tonne, when the prevailing market price was perhaps a thousand times as much. This kind of government support to build enterprises and aid risk taking has been done across India, indeed across the world. To suggest that in every case - unless substantiated with proof of kickbacks or destroying the environment or hurting local populations, which is what happened in Singur and Nandigram, is silly and extremely detrimental to the growth and prosperity that India needs. Indias needs more entrepreneurship, a creation of an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurs, and less meaningless posturing.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 08:13:07 +0000
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