Professors are flummoxed. But we know.

Graduates of IITs, which are elite institutions of India, are looking at other countries for jobs because getting visas to the US has become difficult since Donald Trump was elected president. Sadly, other countries are also erecting hurdles to Indians working in their countries, while asking for a reduction of taxes on imports of goods from these countries. But why should our best engineers want to flee abroad when the economy is expected to grow at over 8% per year for the next 15 years. High growth will apparently be facilitated by changing start of the financial year from 1 April to 1 January because this will coincide with the harvest. Financial year of a lot of countries, including Canada and China, do coincide with the calendar year, but the financial year of the US runs from 1 October to 30 September. India has 2 cropping seasons, kharif and rabi. The kharif crop is based on the southwest monsoon, which comes on 1 June, and is harvested in October- November. The rabi crop is sown in winter and is harvested in March-April. So 1 January is neither nor there. Anyway, if the economy is set to grow at a scorching 8% our engineers should find fantastic job opportunities in India, so why this desire to work anywhere, except in India? Trouble is, how we calculate our GDP is uncertain, explained Professors A Banerjee and E Duflo. For instance, GDP growth was calculated at 4.7% in 2013-14, but suddenly jumped to 6.9% when the present government came to power, to be corrected to 6.5% later. The number of billionaires is rising and the stock market is booming because taxes have been reduced, wrote Prof R Kumar. Indian companies are soon going to face ruin because they are not keeping pace with the disruptive changes of technology, wrote Prof V Wadhwa. Those who started companies are reluctant to give up control to professionals who have succeeded elsewhere. That maybe because our business leaders are used to making easy money from control of natural resources, in partnership with politicians, and are not really interested in the hard work of growing a business. Businesses are built with money borrowed from banks, especially public sector banks, with no intention of repaying the loans. Bad loans now amount to over Rs 8 trillion, but could be more. No one knows the exact figure but about Rs 4 trillion is estimated to be in offshore accounts. About 22% of real estate in central London was bought by Indians last year. Along with that, wealth of some politicians have gone up by over 500% in one term. Others are probably more proficient in hiding their wealth. Political parties received over Rs 200 billion in undocumented donations. We could have told Thomas Piketty.