Eco survey ignores middle class in justifying unpopular moves
Kumar Deep Banerjee | February 27, 2013
The eco survey 2012-13 has an interesting space reserved for explaining government's somewhat unpopular moves to restrict cheap access to domestic cylinders and gold as a means to investment.
A graph in chapter one of the survey (see below) concludes that the largest proportion of subsidies for cooking gas cylinders is cornered by the richest in both rural and urban households. Hence, the need to cap the number of cylinders. However, what the survey forgets is that it is the middle class, as suggested by quartile, which forms a bulk of the population. While the survey may be right in terms of the final recipient of the largess as a percentage, squeezing out the middle class may prove to be a game spoiler during elections.
Another touchy issue is gold. The survey highlights how demand for non-jewellery gold vs jewellery has risen continuously from the second quarter of 2009 till third quarter of 2012. What is intriguing is to understand why during the first quarter of the same year, ie, 2009 the demand for gold jewellery suddenly shot up over a 8-year period. The answer may perhaps lie in the first signs of recovery in the economy. GDP for the quarter had been reported at 6.1% and was widely being seen by the media as signs of the government’s stimulus packages showing bearing results.
Ashok Chawla, the then finance secretary (now the CCI chairperson), was confident that the fiscal would close at a GDP growth of 6.5% though finally it closed at a much higher figure of around 7.2%. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had taken on the reins on the ministry on January 24, 2009 and was eager to bring the economy on track only to perhaps derail what he had set out to achieve in his last budget as finance minister in February 2012. The moral of the story is that the government almost gets it right on the growth track if it has the will but the intent is unclear, perhaps war of words between departments follows.
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