Thursday, July 10, 2014

A noisy media is the best hiding place.

Seems that the Prime Minister is going to visit Brazil with a stopover in Germany. Last month he visited Bhutan. No big deal. He is not just a new prime minister he has never held a ministerial post in the central government so he has to talk to world leaders personally to formulate his foreign policy. The previous Prime Minister spent Rs 6.50 billion of taxpayer money on 70 foreign trips, 28 of those when the parliament was in session. We have not been told how many times Dr Singh took along his family with him. The big deal is that Mr Modi is taking very few journalists with him, only a few from the official organisations, as he did on his trip to Bhutan. Dr Singh used to take over 30 journalists with him every time. That explains why the English press was consistently highly critical of Mr Modi while making excuses for the crimes committed by the Congress coalition. We only hear about the ones that run into trillions of rupees because there are so many.
The Comptroller and Auditor General has reported that the Congress government in Delhi has not provided any of the basic services that cost Rs 30 billion. No wonder the previous Chief Minister is refusing to resign her post as Governor of Kerala. But why are our politicians so contemptuous about our welfare? Because they are still using laws enacted by the British to loot India. It seems that our life insurance industry is still regulated by the Insurance Act of 1938, which reads," No insurer shall invest or keep invested any part of his controlled fund otherwise than in any of the following approved investments, namely: (a) approved securities; (b) securities of, or guaranteed as to principal and interest by, the Government of the Untied Kingdom..." An amendment in 1999 removed the reference to the Government of the United Kingdom but the Act has stayed essentially the same which means that our life insurance money is used to finance wasteful government spending. Rs 5.1 trillion is in central government securities, around Rs 10 trillion in ' state government and approved investments ' another Rs 2 trillion in ' other securities '. The total investment is Rs 17.44 trillion. So the government used our life insurance money to plug its budget deficit incurred by expenditure over which we have no control. In 2012 the Congress forced Life Insurance Corporation of India to buy shares in various Public Sector companies for Rs 164 billion. Agents are paid 40% of the premium for the first year to encourage them to sell policies to the gullible. Bribe the freeloading journalists by taking them on foreign trips at taxpayer expense and they will create enough noise to confuse the people. After all they share in the booty.

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