Praxeology: My Reflexions on India

Indian currency rupee is depreciating quickly against the US dollar recently. It has lost 14% of its purchasing power against US dollar since the beginning of May, 2013. It is one of the worst performing currency in Asia. It hit its lowest level of 65.56 rupee/dollar last week. All the efforts of the Indian central bank RBI is failing in stemming the fall of rupee in the Forex market. Why the rupee is depreciation against US dollar and other currencies like Euro and British pound? What is the root cause of this devaluation? I analyze these questions in my economic report below. In nutshell, Indian government and RBI's loose monetary policy is to blame for this fall in rupee's value.   

The frequent question which people ask me whenever I talk about free markets and a totally free society without a presence of the State is, can we humans organize our societies without the help of the State aka government? Few go as far as saying, that without the State life itself is impossible! Some of the questions people ask are fairly typical Statist responses e.g., who will build the roads in the absence of the State or who will run the schools, hospitals, gardens etc., or who will provide protection - police as well as national defense etc. In my past write-ups I have already tackled the issues of privatized roads and highways, privatized national as well as local defense, privatized schooling etc. Not only this, many people ask me to show them some real life examples of some Stateless societies. Today I want to tackle this issue of living or historical examples of such Stateless societies. People will be surprised to know that in our own backyard, i.e., in Indian neighborhood...

Yesterday the Surat City Citizen Council organized a lecture by Lord Bhikhu Parekh on The Future of Democracy in India in the Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry auditorium here in my hometown Surat. Since Lord Parekh is a big name amongst the Indian intellectuals - he is a member of the UK parliament house of lords , a Professor emeritus of Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster and Hull, a Padma Bhusan, and, importantly, a member of Overseas Indians' Global Advisory Council which advises prime minister Manmohan Singh - I went to hear him. Below I briefly summarize his lecture with my critical remarks. Prof. Parekh's lecture was music to my ears, at least till the time he discussed his solutions. Prof. Parekh blasted the Indian democratic system and counted many of its flaws like no deliberations in policy making (e.g., dysfunctional parliamentary system where politicians don't discuss anything and pass important bills), government officia...

Recently Nobel prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen created lot of flurry by saying, that he does not want Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as his prime minister or India's prime minister. In the economic academia world the debate is on-going between two rival camps about how to make the Indian economy and society progress. Amartya Sen is on one side of this debate and Columbia economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagaria are on the other side. Sen's growth model gives priority to social sectors of education and health, whereas Bhagwati and Panagaria are for more economic growth first. Here I want to show you that both Sen and Bhagwati-Panagaria are wrong. Indians neither need the Sen model nor the Bhagwati Model. What Indians need is total freedom from the parasitic State aka the government, which none of the above mentioned models are promising or even talking about. Let's briefly take a look at both Sen and Bhagwati model. Sen's ideas re his social en...

In India, few days back in Chappara village of Bihar 23 children died after eating poisonous mid-day meal food in their government primary school. The Indian government launched the Mid-Day Meal scheme in 1995 ( the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE) ) and one of the stated objectives of this scheme is to, improving nutritional levels among children ! What a wonderful way of improving nutritional levels of children. Only government officials have the chutzpa to call their scheme a nutrition scheme which feeds poison to children and kills them. This incident got lot of reporting and attention simply because of the large number of deaths. Government primary schools everyday provide such stale and spoiled food to children in mid-day meals. I am myself a victim of this scheme so I know it very well (I was a Surat municipal school board student up to standard 3, and I have myself seen lizards and cockroaches in my mid-day meal). During my M.Phil. resea...

Road Accidents in India According to the available data on road accident deaths, India is on number one spot in the world . Surely this is no reason for celebration of being number one in terms of dead people on Indian roads. Every year more than 1 lakh people die on Indian roads and highways e.g., in 2011, according to the report of Ministry of Road Transport and Highway , Government of India (see here ) , there were total 4.98 lakh road accidents out of which 1.42 lakh were fatal. This surely is a huge waste of human lives; a big tragedy about which no one is talking or seriously thinking. Even the most contentious issue of Kashmir, where in two decades of freedom fight 47,000 lives were lost , pale in comparison to lakhs of annual accident deaths on public roads. Newspaper and mainstream media TV channels scream on top of their voice for non-existent threats like Bird or Swine Flu, which kills few hundred people every year, but they remain silent on the ever so pres...

Beginning with this article on the question of whether we need national armies and its national defense or not, I am going to explore the world of private alternatives of the so-called public goods like national defense, roads and highways, education, health etc., etc. Some of my readers are demanding that with the criticism of the present Statist system, I also discuss its (private) alternatives. I am already discussing the alternative system of free market capitalism in most of my posts, and with these series of small articles, I will expand the discussion to other more difficult areas. Difficult because most people have never seen a free market private sector working in these areas, and their narrow perspective and imagination holds them back from envisioning such system today. In the outset of this writing, let me tell you all, that not only the private alternatives of all the economic goods which the government provides [sic] are available, but they are, as expected, much more eff...