How sad we cannot even afford liquid tranquilizers.

Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 saying that his dream was to make India a $20 trillion economy, "economists lauded his ambition" even though they did not think it would be possible, wrote Pramit Bhattacharya. After winning by a massive margin in this year's general election "Modi came up with a much more modest target: a $5 trillion economy by 2024 (only slightly higher than where the International Monetary Fund , or IMF, expected India to be at that point). This time, economists do not believe him. The problem is the contradiction between improving the economy and increasing vote share of Modi's party the BJP. "The party raised its vote share across rich and poor constituencies but gains were higher in the poorer constituencies, data shows." This was done by continuing with "the welfare schemes of the earlier era" and also by adding more new ones. This resulted in enormous pressure on Indians to pay more taxes so that founder of Cafe Coffee Day VG Siddhartha committed suicide alleging harassment by tax officials in his final letter. When businessmen go to the income tax department "they are told they better pay up. The officers say they have a target to achieve," wrote TVM Pai. To that Modi responded that the government has "compulsorily retired a number of tax officials, and will not tolerate this behavior". As usual, this was completely false because the officers were suspected of not collecting enough taxes in lieu of bribes. In other words they were sacked for not resorting to tax terrorism. Taxes account for more than half of what we pay at the pump. "The dependence on cesses and surcharges, which aren't shared with the states, went up for the same reason." Even so the government is resorting to 'creative' accounting to hide the fiscal deficit. "Despite the pantomime optimism that government functionaries and the media have to display, it is becoming impossible to disguise the sense of doom surrounding the Indian economy," wrote PB Mehta. "Privately, almost no one believes our growth is more than two to three percent." "Part of the problem with the Indian economy is that no one knows what to believe." Even the IMF cast doubts on our fiscal numbers. Incendiary stuff. Bank lending has fallen to a 25-year low, presumably because of falling investment. A committee headed by PJ Nayak had recommended that banks should be removed from "ministerial control while allowing bankers to lend more freely" but banks were kept under government control to force them to implement zero balance accounts under the Jan Dhan Yojana scheme. Things are so bad that people cannot even afford liquid tranquilizers to reduce stress. Sad Indians.