Better to tell the truth from the safety of the US.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not "a great believer in privatization" but he has not done anything to strengthen the public sector, wrote R Jagannathan. Instead, "the public sector has been used to milk it of resources for budgetary, social and political needs, not strengthened". For example, "the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) was asked to pay cash to buy a majority stake in Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL), Power Finance Corporation for Rural Electrification Corporation, and Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) for IDBI Bank". "A cashless share swap" would have been better" but the government pocketed the money, "to maintain a mythical fiscal deficit target of 3.4%". Strange that he was defending Modi just last month when he wrote, "Why critics of Modinomics are more wrong than right." And he defended the complex Goods and Services Tax with its multiple rates though he conceded that "people are reluctant to pay taxes when they do not know whom they help", as opposed to Scandinavian countries where people are happy to pay high rates of income tax because social services are for everyone, while in India subsidies are targeted to sections of society. Couple of days back the former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian published a paper which seeks to prove that the growth rate of India's GDP is overestimated by 2.5%, and so we are growing at 4.5% and not 7%. This is when he is safely back in the US where he lives. Naturally, the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council trashed this study after the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation said, "The GDP estimates released by the ministry are based on accepted procedures, methodologies and available data and objectively measure the contribution of various sectors of the economy." Why do we need a minister when statistics is a branch of mathematics? The leaked unemployment rate of 6.1% made no difference to Modi's victory in the recent general elections because "the flip side of unemployment rate is employment rate, which stood at a hefty 94%", wrote Prof A Panagariya, who is also safely back in the US. But what kind of employment? Out of a total of 131 million workers, 111 million are in unincorporated enterprises, which means the informal sector, and of these 62% are own-account enterprises (OAEs), which means daily laborers and roadside vendors. Since these people constitute the 'vote bank', "politicians champion the cause of these very activities". Since people do not own their properties in India they cannot borrow against them, wrote Sengupta and Katragadda. "The net result is that only about 3% of all private and public land in India is leveraged for capital. Contrast this with the US, where conclusive title and clear boundaries allow 40% leverage-- unlocking over $15 trillion of low cost capital -- leading to its unarguable position as the world's largest economy." "Confidence in India's economy continues to be shaky -- and a few more quarters of bad indicators will erode it completely," wrote M Sharma on Bloomberg. Maybe even earlier.